Artwork exploring female tears, the romance plot, and the fantasy of reality in the Bachelor franchise.
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The Whole Package, 2016, Fabric, thread, packing peanuts, 35 x 29 x 6″
Please Accept My Rose, 2016, Fabric, thread, dye, gesso, polyfil, 19 x 21 x 14″
Filed under Art + Comics, Movies + TV
I always saw myself in John Hughes’ films, even if he couldn’t see me in them.
I don’t say this lightly. Hughes’ body of work is consistently characterized as the pithy zenith of coming-of-age movies, enduring due to his representation of real teenagers with typical problems. Yet people of color were either absent or horrifically stereotypically represented in his films. How American. In Hughes’ iconic film about the joy of young white mischief, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the only POC are:
1) Two garage hands who take the Ferrari for a joy ride, which is exactly what Ferris & co. have done but somehow the narrative holds them as more criminal.
2) The Asian chief of police (legit a rare and brief non-pejorative caricature—and he’s a COP which is like “oh hey assimilate and enforce the police state and you’re cleared for representation kthxbye”).
3) An entire cadre of black people who magically appear and do a “Thriller”-esque choreographed scene during the parade sequence. Continue reading
Filed under Movies + TV, Photos
One of the most enjoyable, personal, and feminist books I’ve read this summer had to be Hadley Freeman’s 80s film exploration Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies (and Why We Don’t Learn Them From Movies Any More). Not only is this a book that examines in detail some of the greatest films of (dare I say?) all-time such as The Princess Bride, Coming to America, Pretty in Pink, and Ghostbusters; the real draw of the collection is Freeman herself. Reading this book is like having a way cooler older sister watching the film right alongside you, pointing out the lessons you would have overlooked while simply laughing at the classic John Hughes wit. It’s hard to finish the book without feeling like Freeman is that cool upperclassmen in school that for some inexplicable reason, has taken you under her wing as friend, and a girl like me couldn’t waste the chance to extend that feeling into an interview. Read on to see some of the questions I couldn’t help but ask her about the book, feminists in film, and of course, Ghostbusters:
Kati Heng: As I read the book, I kept thinking that the subtitle very easily could have been “What 80s Movies Taught Us About Feminism and Why We Don’t Learn That Stuff from Movies Anymore,” or something catchier. Did you ever consider releasing this book in a more upfront feminist version?
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Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews, Movies + TV
I thought about staying a virgin until marriage when I was thirteen years old because I started attending a Baptist church with my best friend. She was almost two years older than me so, I figured she was wiser and she seemed very certain about remaining chaste. Sexuality, in general, was very confusing for me. For one, I didn’t want to think about sexuality. I felt trapped in a body that was not growing into itself, I felt ashamed to be in my body because of the trauma encrypted into my body at the hands of a grown man when I was a child. I was afraid that being touched meant giving away a part of myself that I could never get back. Being a virgin and “saving yourself” was a conversation I heard in church a lot. It was always about being pure for your future husband and once he gave you a diamond ring and proposed, on your wedding night, you could give him your version of a diamond ring. The both of you could stop dry humping in front of God and get to real life intercourse as God applauds at your ability to wait.
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Filed under Movies + TV
Started by comedian Marcia Belsky, the new Tumblr The Headless Women of Hollywood draws attention to the all-too-common practice of featuring fragmented, objectified images of women’s bodies in advertising for movies and TV.
From the Tumblr’s “About” page:
“The head is first and foremost the thinking part of the human body, where our motivations and feelings are located. So, these images we are bombarded with on a daily basis tell us persistently that women’s thoughts, feelings and personal agency either don’t exist or are of no interest.
Further, facial features are the way we recognize other people. It’s the face that makes us individuals. That too is taken away, and we are taught that all women, especially ones that match the ideal, are the same and interchangeable.
We are made numb in pop culture to female bodies remaining background to male-centered action. A right for men to focus on or ignore, but always there if and when he so chooses. And always there explicitly, first and foremost, for his intent.”
Filed under Movies + TV
Filed under Movies + TV
A regular column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.
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Mary Neely is a (now) 25-year-old actress, writer, feminist, filmmaker, and web-series-creator. She can do it all. Based in Los Angeles, her debut short film, “The Dresser” played at film festivals all over the world. Her web series, Wacko Smacko launched last year, and her first feature screenplay, The Dark Room was nominated for an Academy Nicholl Fellowship. I don’t just get immense joy from watching Mary’s work, I also get inspired just thinking about Mary’s work ethic. Talking to her over the phone for this interview, I caught the sort of infectious enthusiasm she has for filmmaking that made me want to jump on a plane and go and work on one of Mary’s films for free. Mary has a vision, but also the guts to set her vision free into the world. I can’t wait to see what she does next and hope you’ll feel compelled to binge-watch her web series after reading this interview.
Cathy de la Cruz: I’m wondering if first you could begin by giving me some background on yourself since I don’t really know that much about you. I’ve seen your work, but I don’t know much about you as a person. I’m interested to hear how you describe yourself i.e., do you describe yourself as an artist or as a comedian or as a filmmaker or as a performer? You do so many things.
Mary Neely: I’m 23, actually 24; I don’t know why I said 23. I feel old, right now. I grew up in Los Angeles, a lot of different parts of L.A. My parents moved around a lot of different neighborhoods, but I was always living in L.A. and I got really really into community theater when I was in elementary school and became obsessed with theater and Broadway and I wanted to move to New York and do acting, like Shakespeare and low-budget plays but I ended up going to UCLA for college and studied acting there.
While I was there I kinda started taking film history classes mainly in Scandinavian film. I got really into Danish films. It kinda became a crazy obsession where I would just be in UCLA’s video archives all the time.
I always primarily thought of myself as an actor and I studied acting and I thought that I would start auditioning as soon as I got out of school, but then I started doing more film stuff with the film students at UCLA and became really obsessed with film in general and I remember having moments on sets where I thought, “Oh, I could like do that person’s job better than them.” So once I got out of school, I was really disappointed in the kinds of roles I was going out for. I just think there’s a huge problem with the kind of roles that are written for women and for me specifically as a young woman–I was just like, “This is just really depressing,” and I wasn’t really excited about anything so I just decided, “You know, I’m just gonna do it myself.”
Filed under Funny Feminism, Interviews, Movies + TV
I am seven years old and one of the kids in class starts singing “Bidi bidi bom bom” and I am ready to sing along because I love this song so much and I want to be Selena so bad. The kid continues singing and then ends the song with “Selena is a dumb dumb.” I turned so fast, gasped, and pointed my finger at the kid. “You cannot talk about her like that. Selena does not deserve your ugly words, pendejo.” I was ready to fight for my queen. I am still seven and it is time to take school photos, I specify to my cousin Omar, “I want my hair to look like Selena’s.” He curled my hair into tight swirls and then put it into a high ponytail and I never felt so beautiful in a school photo before. Anytime Selena’s videos played on TV, I was enchanted. Her energy was magnetic and I loved watching her perform. I am eight years old and I get home from school and turn on the TV. The news reporter is explaining that Selena was pronounced dead in the afternoon. I turned the TV off and stared up at the ceiling in silence for a long time, I didn’t cry, but my head felt light and I couldn’t think about anything else that day. I moved to Colorado that summer to live with my Tía Irma. For the sake of bonding, she used to drive me around in her red Toyota with the radio blasting. We danced and sang as loud as we could in the car. I remember we made it back to the apartment in the evening after a session of karaoke in the car together and Selena’s newest song, “Dreaming of You” vibrated through the speakers. We sat in silence and let Selena finish singing before we got out of the car. Today is the 21st anniversary of her passing and I still think of her often, as a light and as someone who was taken from earth too early (she was 23). Even with her tragic departure, she is still an icon. She radiates power and what it means to be a xingona (a badass).
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Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV, Music + Playlists
During a recent first-time viewing of Romancing the Stone, I found myself transfixed by the opening scene: the protagonist is alone in her work space, deep in the throes of her writing process. As I watched, I wondered—how many similar scenes of women writers at work had filmmakers captured, and what themes could I make out across them? Would I spot my own writing habits at play in their fictionalized ones? I set out to find more of these depictions in movies and TV shows, pressing pause whenever I spotted a lady-identified writer mid-scribe. Behold these ten examples of women writers at work, presented chronologically, spanning 30 years of TV and film.
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Adventure novelist sobs while completing her manuscript in Romancing the Stone [1984]. Visible writerly equipment: oversized plaid nightshirt with sound-canceling headphones, overturned Chinese takeout box, lit tapered candle, typewriter, can of Tab, an empty box of tissues, the silhouette of Texas on a cork board. Not pictured: a cat named Romeo, tiny airplane-style liquor bottles, a post-it note reminding her to buy more tissues. Continue reading
Filed under Movies + TV
I was interviewed as a Boy Meets World superfan in a January 2013 issue of the Canadian magazine Macleans. For the last three years this has been my fun fact whenever I have to introduce myself at a company icebreaker. Apparently there is no bigger fan of Boy Meets World on the Internet.
Boy Meets World, in case you were not a TV-binging latchkey kid in the 1990s, is a sitcom about a boy named Cory who is supposed to be fairly average in every way: average student, average nuclear family with 2.5 kids (literally, he has a brother all the time and a sister only some of the time, due to standard 90s sitcom continuity problems). Notable characters in Cory’s life include Mr. Feeny, the impossibly wise history teacher, who is also his next-door neighbor; best friend Shawn, who is from the Wrong Side of the Tracks and has Tremendously Important Father Issues; and Cory’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Topanga, who started out as a comical weirdo but morphed into a standard Pretty Girl Love Interest, for which I hated her.
It’s not a particularly notable show. Starlee Kine described its comforting blandness on the This American Life episode “Reruns”: “It didn’t even matter that I didn’t watch it as a little kid. I can imagine little kids being in really comfortable, carpeted family rooms and laying with their elbows propped up and watching Boy Meets World and feeling really safe. Because it’s like the safest thing in the world.”
Boy Meets World season one cast. Cory kneels in front, wearing primary colors red and blue to denote him as the hero, and holds the hand of his sometimes-nonexistent little sister, Morgan. Cool big brother Eric leans in from the left, while parents Amy and Alan hug and judge behind. Blazer-wearing history teacher/crotchety neighbor/stalker Mr. Feeny frowns imperiously, while Rebel Friend Shawn smirks and wears a tie-dye T-shirt with sharks on it like a boss. Not pictured: the love of Cory’s life, Topanga. She wasn’t that important in season one.
Filed under Movies + TV
