Category Archives: Movies + TV

by | January 14, 2015 · 9:00 am

The Feminist Bachelor Recap, Episode 2: Sexy Virgins & Strong Single Moms

Our future husband wears his hoodie zipped just slightly above half-way up at all times.

This week’s episode kicked off with Kimberly, the woman who was rejected at last week’s Rose Ceremony but stuck around to talk with Chris just cause she’s sure she’s that special. We know that she isn’t, and that Chris doesn’t like when girls have brown hair. “Ick,” he says when he sees brunettes, and closes his eyes and grimaces. (Just kidding, Chris actually has said at several points, “brunette, blonde, I don’t care—it’s all about the connection.” Wow you guys, can you say FEMINIST?!) Chris worries about what kind of message it will send to the other women if he lets I’m Sure I’m Special Kimberly stay another rose ceremony cycle, but his BFF Chris Harrison assures him: “this is your life; there are no rules.” And so he lets Kim stay, to the horror of the other women.

We learn that Farmer Chris is staying in a house right down the driveway from where the ladiesssszzzz are lodging, and Host Chris basically encourages the womyn to break into Farmer Chris’s house by repeatedly saying “Chris lives right there” and “there are no rules.” Two gals do break in later in the episode; they like look at Farmer Chris’s motorcycle and it’s really boring. The only interesting part is that the girls are both wearing bikinis, and for some reason one of their lower halves keeps getting blocked out by one of those black censor bars because apparently her swimsuit does not cover her ass nor her vulva. Continue reading →

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by | January 9, 2015 · 11:30 am

The Feminist Bachelor Recap, Episode 1: My Inner Drunk Girl

Let the journey to find love begin.

On Monday night, Bachelor Chris Soules began his season-long swim into a pool of conventionally pretty, ultra-traditional women competing for his hand in marriage. As a feminist, I’m horrified by The Bachelor. I’m also deeply excited to watch every single minute of it.

First of all, I want to address what I think it means to write a feminist take on The Bachelor—if I was doing a truly non-lazy and incisive feminist response to the show, I would talk about larger problems with how gender, race, class and more are portrayed in reality TV, and about media, and like, capitalism. The fact that the show’s politics are incredibly not-progressive to an almost unbelievable degree and that it promotes a totally archaic view of gender norms, and depicts a world that’s virtually absent of people who aren’t straight and white and cis. It is so dumb and bad, you guys. Truly. I’ll touch on all of these ideas here, but I also can’t deny that I’m basically deeply committed to watching every episode of this terrible show, for pretty un-feminist reasons. These are:

Reason 1: In 2008, Erica DiSimone, a Girl Who Went to My High School, was on The Bachelor. And so I watched. And because each season’s Bachelor or Bachelorette is a well-loved rejected suitor from the previous season, I became hooked for SEVEN YEARS. Continue reading →

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by | January 7, 2015 · 10:51 am

We Out (T)here: Afrofuturism in the Age of Non-Indictments

“African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees…Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture — and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future — might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism.” – Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0”

Still from Frances Bodomo's "Afronauts"

Still from Frances Bodomo’s “Afronauts”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future. What will I do, who will I be, how will I love, will everything be okay. I’ve been thinking about the planet and how it is not doing very well. I am thinking about marches and earthquakes and The Book of Revelation. I am thinking a lot about death. I am starting to understand I’m not welcome. In my ear I hear Sun Ra whisper “space is the place.” In my other ear I hear Kanye say “we wasn’t supposed to make it past twenty-five.” This is what Black American women are wondering: What’s up to us?
 Continue reading →

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by | December 8, 2014 · 9:00 am

I’m Moving Out of Shondaland

Shondaland

It used to be a kind of utopia. A weekly meeting of all my favorite Blackgirls, indulging and over-indulging on wine and takeout, listening to records, talking about life and love, and hollering at the TV as Kerry Washington stunted in a flawless white coat and stomped delicately on the heads of every white man in the White House.

Of course, she didn’t look like us, with her airbrushed skin and bone-straight perm. Of course, she was in love with one white man, or two, depending on the season. Of course she wasn’t an artist, or an activist, or a progressive. But she was a Black woman on prime time television, she was sexy as hell, and she was smarter than you. We were so damn hungry we forgave her. We forgave the overdone love scenes and the corny banter. We forgave the patriotism, the predictability, the strange treatment of Black men. We are so damn hungry. Continue reading →

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by | November 26, 2014 · 9:01 am

Ghost at the Feast: The Gendered Experience of Fear & Better Living Through Horror Movies

You're Next (2011)

You’re Next (2011)

 

I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies after my assault.

This surprises people, women in particular — horror as a genre is so overrun with male fears and fantasies that it’s almost impossible to separate the human desire to feel fear in a safe, contained environment from allyship with the male fear narrative. They are conflated. Empirically, depending on how broad the range of movies you watch, they can be identical. Because in the same way that a nearly all-male literary canon shapes our personal narratives, male identity also shapes our fears and our perceptions of what should be feared.

I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies after my assault. Not immediately after; immediately after I lied in bed (I always forget the correct verb. Chickens lay. Chickens lay. If I’m scared, then, what do I do?) through the entirety of the L Word and drank too much and went out too much and walked around with my fists clenched and experienced the internet with my internet-fists clenched — everything made me jumpy and defensive and my base anxiety level was basically terrible. I yelled at a lot of men on Facebook and then hid in my room. Continue reading →

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by | November 10, 2014 · 9:00 am

On Bending the Gaze As Resistance: From Cosby Show to How to Get Away With Murder

When I was five, my father told me that I was Rudy from The Cosby Show. He probably said this as a joke but I took it literally. And since I believed that my father knew absolutely everything, I watched the series in deep connection to this shell of myself. Despite the absence of any memory of being Rudy and the chronological impossibility of me being a child actor on the show (Keshia Knight Pulliam, the actress who plays her, is four years older than me), I was Rudy and Rudy was me. It wasn’t difficult to take on this identity (especially as a child) because I didn’t understand the spurious line between acting and reality. I didn’t quite get television as a constructed space that may or may not represent the lived experiences of actual people. When I saw something scary on television, I was scared because I couldn’t create a division between these worlds—whatever happened on television could potentially happen to me in real life. In my mind I could seamlessly move from my small upstate New York home into a Brooklyn brownstone and family of six. Rudy’s lessons were my lessons, her triumphs and falls were mine too. I remember watching the episode where Rudy gets her period and how I positively inserted myself into the storyline. I saw the possibility of black girlhood (this was one of few places where I saw black children on television at the time) and I saw my period a link in the chain of womanhood. When Rudy got her period, all women got their periods. The shame of this biological happening was erased from my consciousness. I saw that menstruation wasn’t something I had to be silent about or ashamed of.

This interpolation wasn’t just unique to me; my father did this as well. The two of us were watching television one day when he matter-of-factly stated that the news reporter was Haitian. I remember laughing and turning to him to ask, “How do you know?” My father was having his very own Rudy moment. He was inserting his Haitianess into a space that claimed non-race, class or nationality. I still smile when I remember this moment that seems more like a fantastic act of agency than the passive subconscious at work. We were making television productive for us through our gaze. This ocular practicality was a sort of bending of the gaze that served us as two individuals of color watching mainstream television. Continue reading →

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by | November 3, 2014 · 9:00 am

Twin Freaks: Being Both Victim and Protector

[Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for the original Twin Peaks series]

My husband and I just finished watching Twin Peaks, and now my sleep’s gone to shit/the Black Lodge. About a decade ago, I unknowingly watched the final episode, and so I knew that (spoiler alert even though this happened in circa 1991) Agent Cooper would become BOB, and I had no interest in going back to the beginning to watch the unfolding of this tragic trick. Two months ago, frustrated with our dwindling Netflix queue, we decided to check out the first episode. Admittedly, the opening credits sequence is pure sawmill mechanistic glory. But the first ten minutes of Episode One had me severely bummed. It opens with a shot of a wispy-voiced Asian woman applying makeup in the mirror with a look of seductive devastation. Five minutes later, we find the washed-up corpse of a homecoming queen, naked and presumably raped before her murder. These tired tropes again. So tired again.

Twin-Peaks-Mirror Continue reading →

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