Movie du soir
Aug. 10th, 2007 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trixtahWell, I just got to see Itty Bitty Titty Committee. It's a "look at grassroots-style feminist groups and the feisty young women who run them."
It follows a bunch of lesbo-anarcho-feminists in a group who run around shagging each other and carrying out "actions". I would probably have loved it 15 years ago, and it's kind of cute and amusing with the mild piss-takes of earnest queer/feminist politics. But it felt incredibly dated. Well, ok, there is a t/g character, and they have a website and mini camcorder. But they are listening to riot grrl punk (does anyone who wasn't around at the time actually buy Sleater-Kinney nowadays?), buying and making zines, reading 70's and 80's rad fem works, and not looking at anyone's website except their own. Oh, and they text each other as well. But does anyone have a standalone answer machine that's not their mobi's voicemail these days?
Really, it added up to adolescent dyke drama, lots of outmoded politics and passé music to me. The director, Jamie Babbit, is nearly my age, and I liked But I'm a Cheerleader. The humour about the "scene" was very reminiscent of that movie. But something supposedly situated today should actually be situated in the present. Or, if she had made the movie about the Queer Nation days of the early 90s, it would have been fine.
The cast were good, and quite a lot of the stuff portrayed was excruciatingly familiar. Maybe that's part of the reason I really felt like Jenny Shimizu's grumpy eye-rolling character throughout - been there, done that, and I don't need to relive it again (what was done at the time politically was valuable in many respects, and the whole ACT-UP/QN thing was very energising, but strategies and politics evolve, even if many of the issues haven't). And the interpersonal fuckups were too horribly real - amusing at times, but also cringeworthy. God, maybe I am getting middle-aged. Unfortunately, Jamie Babbit's attempt to shoehorn nostalgia into a modern setting didn't really work for me.
6½ out of 10, for the sharply-observed characters and interpersonal stuff, even if I thought throughout, "Thank god I'm no longer 19!!" And, actually, the portrayal of the political shenanigans too, even if it is 15 years late. But I had to subtract 2 points for outdatedness and at least half for the movie name: "...an on-campus group called the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, whose focus is to empower women who suffer from D-cup envy." Obviously I've been a little too subsumed in some of those retro values when I find it not at all amusing from the viewpoint of someone suffering from less-than-D-cup envy. Or maybe real feminists really do have small tits. (I know, I know... it made me grumpy, as I say).
It follows a bunch of lesbo-anarcho-feminists in a group who run around shagging each other and carrying out "actions". I would probably have loved it 15 years ago, and it's kind of cute and amusing with the mild piss-takes of earnest queer/feminist politics. But it felt incredibly dated. Well, ok, there is a t/g character, and they have a website and mini camcorder. But they are listening to riot grrl punk (does anyone who wasn't around at the time actually buy Sleater-Kinney nowadays?), buying and making zines, reading 70's and 80's rad fem works, and not looking at anyone's website except their own. Oh, and they text each other as well. But does anyone have a standalone answer machine that's not their mobi's voicemail these days?
Really, it added up to adolescent dyke drama, lots of outmoded politics and passé music to me. The director, Jamie Babbit, is nearly my age, and I liked But I'm a Cheerleader. The humour about the "scene" was very reminiscent of that movie. But something supposedly situated today should actually be situated in the present. Or, if she had made the movie about the Queer Nation days of the early 90s, it would have been fine.
The cast were good, and quite a lot of the stuff portrayed was excruciatingly familiar. Maybe that's part of the reason I really felt like Jenny Shimizu's grumpy eye-rolling character throughout - been there, done that, and I don't need to relive it again (what was done at the time politically was valuable in many respects, and the whole ACT-UP/QN thing was very energising, but strategies and politics evolve, even if many of the issues haven't). And the interpersonal fuckups were too horribly real - amusing at times, but also cringeworthy. God, maybe I am getting middle-aged. Unfortunately, Jamie Babbit's attempt to shoehorn nostalgia into a modern setting didn't really work for me.
6½ out of 10, for the sharply-observed characters and interpersonal stuff, even if I thought throughout, "Thank god I'm no longer 19!!" And, actually, the portrayal of the political shenanigans too, even if it is 15 years late. But I had to subtract 2 points for outdatedness and at least half for the movie name: "...an on-campus group called the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, whose focus is to empower women who suffer from D-cup envy." Obviously I've been a little too subsumed in some of those retro values when I find it not at all amusing from the viewpoint of someone suffering from less-than-D-cup envy. Or maybe real feminists really do have small tits. (I know, I know... it made me grumpy, as I say).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-11 10:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-12 10:20 am (UTC)That interview with Ashley Crawford is interesting, and I can certainly relate to some of the thought processes that went into it. It's interesting that I found myself reacting to this comment, though:
I was ambivalent at the start — some of the androgenic effects took me a long time to feel at peace with. But at the same time there was an attraction to the idea of looking less feminine because I knew that having such feminine body often made people treat me in a way I didn’t want to be treated. I think that many people have rather low expectations of what girls and women can achieve in certain areas of life, and that sort of attitude has always been very frustrating for me to confront.
Now, I don't believe it's the major reason for Ash's body mod decisions. I personally am fine when people want to mod their bodies to fit their self-identity better or even, actually, just for the hell of it. But I find myself uncomfortable with that kind of reactive thinking being even a small part of the consideration framework. Although maybe I'm just being obtuse - part of the point of being t/g and going through treatment is being able to present to the world as the gender you feel yourself to be.
As an adolescent I used to fantasise about striding around en bloke, and not having to worry about being a gurl... and bought into feminism as a way of letting go of that victim image. Also in my fantasies, I wanted to swap back to being a female - my gender ID seems pretty fixed. I'm lucky enough that I don't have to modify anything physically to not be subject to straight (male) expectations. Other than my own performative utterance of my gender, of course! Heh.
But at the same time, being beyond gender is a cool ideal. However, I don't know if gender is a concept that can be totally done away with. I seem to have more sympathy with the idea that gender can be divorced from the body's morphology, and also the concept of multiple genders. Of course, once you start creating multiple instances of something, you then have to categorise them and slot things into the categories. Perhaps going "beyond" gender would allow a kind of fuzziness to evolve around the concept - people might be able to engage in what we currently consider to be gendered behaviours, but without being locked into a complete behaviour set, or the expectation of having the "appropriate" physical morphology for behaviour X. Hm, interesting food for thought.