The Trouble with Tomboys

Eleven chapters into Game of Thrones now.  It's actually turning out to be quite tolerable.  I've only cursed at it twice since my last rant.

I did get to Arya, though.  The tomboy princess.  Which has sparked another rant.

Arya, you see, is terrible at embroidery, and all girly things. She is not conventionally pretty.  She is good at riding and math, and wants to learn to use a sword. 

Arya is a strongfemalecharacter written by a straightwhiteman.

I am not saying that straight white men cannot write strong female characters - case in point Joss Whedon.  But there are a few things to keep in mind when writing them.

1.  Don't define them solely by their femininity

Arya's main defining characteristic is that she is a girl who likes boy things.  This is the same problem I have with crossdressing - the strongfemalecharacter is strong because she takes on a masculine role.  That is not feminism.  All that does is reinforce gender binaries and male supremacy.

2.  Don't ignore her femininity

The fact that Arya has to be bad at embroidery to be good with a sword (presumeably) bothers me.  I crochet.  I also fence.  You can have both!  This goes back to the binary - because Arya likes boy things, she can't like girl things.  I am also irked by the fact that no writer has ever had the balls to go ahead and make the princess a transman.  Or at least a dyke.  Something other than falling prey to compulsory heterosexuality.

Okay, yes, Arya lives in a patriarchal medieval society, and I think she ends up in an arranged marriage later, so I'm going to set her aside for a moment and look at other tomboy princesses.

1.  Eilonwy, from the Prydain Chronicles, by Lloyd Alexander

Eilonwy is also better at swordplay than embroidery - at least, she has more fun with it.  She is not played off as a master swordswoman, though; she just likes adventuring.  And she's fun.  She's the sharp-tongued, practical wit, who comes up with weird analogies for everything.  Arya is a girl who likes boy things.  See the difference? 

In the end, though, Eilonwy marries Taran out of literary convention. 

2.  Suzy Turquoise Blue, from The Keys to the Kingdom, by Garth Nix

Suzy's also kind of an Eilonwy.  Not a princess, though.  More practical than witty, and wonderfully irreverent.  She is not girly, but not because she is masculine.  She just is.

And actually, she doesn't hook up with anyone.  Then again, she's like ten, and it's a kids book.

3.  Elayne, from The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan

I could also have gone with Egwene, but I'm trying to stick with the princess theme.  She becomes a badass mother (no, literally), queen, and mage.  All perfectly within her reach as a princess, without crossdressing or being "masculine."  Though she does start swearing like a soldier to get man-cred.

Sort averts CH?  There's some polyamory going on.

4.  Isodel, from Year of the Griffin, by Diana Wynne Jones

I'm reaching a little with this one.  Isodel is conventionally pretty and unconventionally badass.  I mean, she rides a dragon.  Not as part of a scheme to save the world, he just kind of fell platonically in love with her.  Everyone kind of falls in love with her.

She falls in love at first sight with Emperor Titus.  It's Jones, so it's sort of a parody. All of her romantic subplots go like, pretty much.  No fuss, no bother.

5.  Millie, from The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne Jones

Technically a priestess/goddess rather than a princess.  Very powerful enchantress.  Decides to escape oppressive temple life to become a British schoolgirl. Can you get much girlier than that?

Marries Christopher when they are much older.

6.  Everyone with a vagina (and then some!) in The Last Rune, by Mark Anthony

Seriously.  There are two queens in book one, neither of which rule over a matriarchy (I think it's insulting to say that the only way a woman can rule is if the ruler has to be a woman).  Plus, the main female lead gets mistaken for a duchess, and is bad at embroidery because she is from the modern world where people don't do that anymore, not because she rejects feminine things; and her best friend is a baroness who practically runs a castle as part of her gender role, helps the heros save the world a million times, and eventually becomes a queen in her own right.  Not to mention that there are female VILLAINS.  I mean, how awesome is it that you have so many strong female characters that you don't worry that having female villains is going to put a negative portrayal of women in your book?

Aryn, the baroness, has to marry a prince to become queen, but it is also clear that he had to marry her for the populace to accept him as king, and the Final Battle is coming so they need a strong leader NOW.  They don't love each other, but it's implied they learn to like each other.

7.  Rapunzel from Tangled

Yeah, it's a movie.  It's also past midnight and I did not start out intending to make a top ten list.  I think I'll cut it at eight.  But she's a flippin' Disney princess - girly girl icon.  But she has personality beyond her gender, and she is interesting and fun.  Also, remember what I said about female villains?

So she marries a prince in the end.  It's a Disney movie.  And they actually had good chemistry, as opposed to, say, Arial, who never actually talked to her prince. 

8.  Tek, from the Firebringer Trilogy, by Meredith Ann Pierce

Yeah, I'm really tired now.  Tek's a unicorn princess.  Actually, she's not actually a princess, but she marries a prince.  And then she finds out she's actually the king's daughter, and they have an incest scare, but then it turns out the prince isn't the king's son (sorry, spoiler).  She's a badass warrior, kind of Nala-like in that she can kick the prince's ass (hmm, Nala's another good one), but unicorn society doesn't exactly have gender roles, so in-universe, her warrior skills have nothing to do with her female-ness.  Out of 'verse, however, they give her traditionally masculine characteristics, while the prince is the more "feminine" sensitive peacemaker type.  But it's not over-the-top, and I like her.

Like I said, marries the prince.  CompHet.  It's not a married-ever-after, though; it happens at the beginning of book 2.  So they have an actual relationship as a married couple.

I need to stop now before I stop making sense.  Basically, Arya bugs me because she is flat, and Martin doesn't know how to write women.  The End.

Feminist Fantasy: Alanna vs. Indigo

The other day I was in a used bookstore and I ran into Nocturne: Book Four of Indigo, by Louise Cooper (1990).  Now, I've been spending the past several years off and on perusing secondhand bookstores for the Indigo series - I've only been able to get book 3 at a library.  I picked the first one up on a whim at a used book store, and took about a year to get around to reading it.  It was kind of like what happened a couple weeks ago when I woke up in the middle of the night needing to read some trashy B-fantasy.  And I had Indigo on hand.  And about a chapter in, I realized my mistake.  This was not trashy at all.

The story starts with a princess who pulls a Pandora ("What's in this box that no one's ever, ever supposed to open?") and releases seven demons into the world, and condemns her boyfriend to eternal torment (or until the demons are destroyed) in the process.  She is given one chance to redeem herself - the goddess grants her immortality, so she has all the time in the world to destroy the demons. 

What I really love about the series is that it flips the traditional fairy-tale narrative on its head - the princess goes out and has adventures while the prince just sits in his tower.  It's one of the few books I know of that has a strong female protagonist who is not involved in a love triangle.  And the mutant wolf.  Gotta love the mutant wolf.

There is more than one kind of feminist literature, however.  When most people think of feminist fantasy, they think of Tamora Pierce (Actually, they probably think Katniss or Hermione, but for now we're going to pretend I'm right, 'kay?).  Pierce's characters are always defying the patriarchy and breaking gender roles and confusing misogynists and saving the world blah blah blah.

I was big into Tamora Pierce back in middle school/high school, having started with the Circle of Magic quartet in elementary school from the book orders, moving on to The Immortals because the first book had ponies on the cover (Yeah.  So?) and deciding to round out my repertoire with the author's first work, the Alanna books (Song of the Lioness, whatever).

Alanna is a princess (well, the daughter of a duke or a lord or something) who decides to switch places with her twin brother, disguising herself as a boy to go to knight school while he goes to magic school and becomes evil and gay. 

Contrasting approaches to feminism in the abovementioned works:

1.  The Strong Female Protagonist
Crossdressing.  Girl dressing as boy still gives power to masculinity.  Granted, she "comes out" as a woman in later books, and Pierce has a later series of an openly female knight, but crossdressing princesses still sends the message of "How does a woman get power in society?  Become a man!" 

Second point on the crossdressing note...it's just too damn convenient that she has a twin brother that she can switch places with.  Too-convenient things in novels just bug me.  And attributing it to divine intervention is cheating.

Indigo is a woman and it's not a big deal.  It's fantasy, after all, so the pseudo-medieval world does not have to be a rabid patriarchy if you don't want it to be.  Her gender is very rarely brought up.  She becomes a strong female character by being strong and female, rather than strong despite being female.  And yes, this route completely ignore relevant questions of gender roles, but it is still refreshing to have a woman character who is not defined by her woman-ness.

2.  Relationship with men
Tamora Pierce may have invented magical birth control.  The purpose of this was so that her characters could experience the sexual liberation that America was having by the 80's.  The books make a big fuss over Alanna's sex life and the double standard regarding women and sexuality.  And there's the love triangle with the prince and the rogue and blah blah blah.

Indigo has a boyfriend in hell. And she's a bit gloomy over missing him, and the fact that he's suffering - who wouldn't be? - but she spends remarkably little time brooding on it.  And she doesn't get tempted into a love triangle with another man (and the fact that she's immortal would make temptation awkward, I imagine).  There's a guy in book 3 who has a thing for her, but she's like "Uhh...no.  It's complicated."  Her love life is so much less important than slaying the demons.

3.  Relationship with gods.
Okay, done with the hard-core feministy stuff.  Moving on to the fantasy stuff. 

Pierce's pantheon are all just so meddlesome.  With Indigo, the god's function is to say "You fucked up.  Go be immortal and fix it."  And that's it.  She's done her part, and stays out of it.  With Alanna, the gods are constantly "Oh hey, go do this."  "Why?"  "I'm a god, don't argue.  Here's a thing to help you." "What's this do?"  "This gets you out of a situation later that the writer can't think of a proper resolution for."

4.  Animal companions
Alanna has a stupid cat that does what now?   It's basically just a mouthpiece for the gods; it's like that owl in the Legend of Zelda games, that shows up and tells you "Don't go to Kakariko village yet.  You have to go to the castle first," even if you know perfectly well you can't move on in the game until you go the castle and get the ocarina, but maybe you just feel like completing the cucco quest to get a bottle first and you don't need a stupid owl telling you not to.  Indigo has a freaking mutant telepathic wolf who has her own tragic backstory, and even though she falls a little flat as a character because she's just the supportive sidekick, she still has more motivation and personality than the stupid kitten who bullies the protagonist with plot advice.

So which do you prefer?  Female protagonists that actively subvert the patriarchy?  Or strong protagonists that just happen to be female?

I apologize if any of the information I gave on any of the books here is inaccurate.  I haven't read Alanna or the early Indigo books in a few years.

I will say I honestly like the later Pierce books a lot more than the early ones.  Maybe I'll do a post on that so you don't think I hate her.  I really don't.

Compulsory Heterosexulity in Fiddler on the Roof

It shows how much queer theory has been stuffed into my brain when I can’t even watch a musical without analyzing it.  That being said, the Rosetown cast did a fantastic job, as always.

The first thing to do with any feminist critique is to measure female presence using the Bechdel test.  “Fiddler,” despite having many important female characters, only barely passes.  At the very end, during the exodus from Anatevka, the Matchmaker stops by Tevye’s house to tell Golde that she is moving to Jerusalem.  Other than that, every single conversation is either with a man or about a man.  Heck, there’s even a musical number about men.

Now let’s go through the daughters, because I’m not quite hard-core enough to go through the entire cast.

At first glance, the play seems pretty feminist-friendly.  After all, the women are defying their father’s wishes in order to do what they want with their lives…regarding the man they marry.  In other words, the women defy a male object by seeking another.

Tzeitel

Tzeitel’s act of defiance is to choose her own lover, the poor tailor, rather than marry the rich butcher her father picked out for her.  How does she go about this?  First she pressures Motel into telling her father.  She can’t do it herself, obviously.  Then, when her father announces her engagement to the butcher, she begs him not to force her, and he, being the benevolent patriarch, gives in.  One has to wonder, though, what would have happened if he had not been so benevolent.  Obviously, it is Tevye’s story of transformation, but if you change the perspective, it becomes a lot darker.
Tzeitel finally convinces her father to let her marry Motel, when Motel finally stands up to Tevye.  His winning line is “Even a poor tailor deserves some happiness,” a line that was fed to him by Tzeitel.  Does she get any credit for it?  Of course not.  A woman’s job is to stand behind her man, to support him in everything he does and do nothing for herself.  But Motel’s so adorkable, we can forgive him.

Hodel

Hodel has a love at first fight kind of relationship with Perchik.  She is certainly witty and clever enough to keep up with him.  No one ever wonders if she could be a student, however.  She can only marry one.  She follows Perchik to Siberia to help him in his work with the Communist party, and this perhaps is a matter that is progressive for the times; she can only leave her hometown with/for a man, but she is leaving town, and of her own free will. 

Perchik proposes in the most awkward manner possible, posing an abstract question about the economics of marriage, listing the benefits and bases thereof, to which Hodel keeps adding “And affection.”  Because women are emotional and men are logical. 

When it comes time to break the news to Tevye, who is initially against it, Hodel’s argument is “Papa, please!”  Perchik’s argument is “We’re not asking for your permission.  But we would like your blessing.”  Hodel just goes with it.  If her husband-to-be wants to ditch tradition completely, then so does she.

Chavaleh

Chavaleh commits the greatest transgression of all, running off with a gentile bookworm.  I do like their courtship the best:  “You like books.  I like books.  Here’s a book.  You should read it, and then we can talk about it.”  I feel like that’s going to be me someday.  Anyway.

Chavaleh leaves behind her family, her culture, everything she has ever known, for a man.  Granted, she’s supposed to be like, fifteen. So I’m sure it all makes perfect sense in her mind.  Also, for having maybe five minutes of dialogue, Fyedka has more personality than Edward Cullen.

I should clarify that “compulsory heterosexuality” in Adrienne Rich’s sense is not just a lack of gay characters.  Compulsory heterosexuality is the fairy tale ending, where the men and women are all paired off neatly and no one is supposed to want anything different.  There are no widows, or spinsters, or lesbians.  A woman’s primary relationship is with a man and not a woman  - not her best girl friend or group of friends, not her sister or her mother or what have you.

In “Fiddler,” the one character who escapes compulsory heterosexuality is the matchmaker, ironically, whose function in society is to uphold compulsory heterosexuality.  But I was going to focus on the daughters.

Tevye has five daughters (seven in Rosetown).  Two have fates that are left unknown.  All that we do know is that they move to America, and if Tevye thought he had a hard time holding onto tradition in Anatevka… 

Now, following the logical progression of his daughters’ lives, I have predictions for the last two.  One will remain single.  She’ll go to college and become a lawyer or a business professional.  Or she'll be a crazy artist hippie bum (or whatever the 1905 equivalent is); she’ll do something fulfilling with her life.  And she might go on dates, or have sexual encounters with men, but she won’t settle down and marry one.

The other daughter is going to be a lesbian.

[I checked all the spellings of names on Wikipedia; if I got any wrong I apologize.]

B-Novels of the Eighties

So for some reason last night I was really craving some shoddy B-Fantasy, to the point where I would have been willing to do embarrassing things to get my hands on a Mercedes Lackey...

What's that?  B-Fantasy?  Oh, it's the same concept as B-movies - formulaic, low production value, flat characters - just with fantasy literature.  Basically, what normal people think of when they think of fantasy, with the teenage protagonist who has to save the world from the Dark Lord and runs all over the countryside learning magic and eating stew.  Etc.

Anyway, since all I brought with me to my apartment was some beautiful magic realism and some weird children's genre-benders, I was stuck.  See, books are like food.  Sometimes you want to go out to a fancy restaurant for steak and shrimp alfredo, or whatever you order (that actually sounds really good right now...) and sometimes you just want to heat up some Kraft mac and cheese in the microwave, because that's what you grew up on, and even if as an adult it disgusts you intellectually, and you can't bear to read the list of ingredients, it just tastes so bad, but so good.

But since I didn't have any to read, I started listing and categorizing and researching to try and pin down what makes B-Fantasy B-Fantasy.  Because apparently when I want mindless entertainment, I have to analyze it.

I started doing a little research, and here are my findings thus far.  Mostly is it some half-assed hypotheses and some Wikipedia trawling, but I intend to reasearch the matter further, I really do.

B-Fantasy was inspired by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1954), and augmented by LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy (1968).  From LOTR we get the epic quest, magical macguffin, underdog hero, and Dark Lord.  After Earthsea, the protagonist is allowed to use magic, and magic becomes institutionalized.  However, many other aspects of Eathsea, such as the protagonist aging, did not catch on.  The first Dungeons and Dragons manual was published in 1974, which codified the Fantasyland setting and rules for the narrative.  This I need to look into further, but currently I blame D&D for making every fantasyland need 3races+2 - elf/dwarf/human, and two of the author's own creation; usually one of the extras is evil, and the other is unimportant to the plot.  No one besides Tolkien wrote about the elves until D&D! (needs fact-checking)

1977 saw The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, and also the Star Wars movie.  I try not to mix fantasy and scifi, but Star Wars has the traditional epic narrative wth the whiny hero that all B-Fantasy uses, and is a potential forerunner.  Shannara had 3races+2, and all the trappings of LOTR, except instead of quiet little middle-aged hobbit protagonist, it had a dopey teenage male protagonist, likely in reflection of the anticipated audience.  It is also serialized; while Tolkien stopped with a trilogy, a prequel, and a manual, if Brooks isn't dead then he's still writing to this day.

Now we come to the 80's, which is the birth of B-Fantasy proper.  David Eddings, I kid you not, saw the emerging market and decided to jump on it for the money - literally, created a formula and cranked out books for profit.  He ditched the races (though they still remained prevalent elsewhere), instead creating a multiracial and paradoxically racially uniform world of humans (everyone of every race is the same as each other member of the race), and added meddlesome deities.  Also, the hero is allowed, in fact required, to use magic.  There is also the annoying crossdressing spunky princess love-interest.  Like Leia but less badass.  Oh, and she hooks up with the teenage protagonist.

1983 - Tamora Pierce sees the spunky crossdressing redhead princess and decides that she needs her own story, thus bringing about the start of feminist fantasy that tries too hard. Also the practice of making fantasyland be America with a medieval veneer, though Eddings hinted at that with Sendaria and I can't believe I remember the name of that country.  Hero's homeland, go figure.  Also has institutionalized magic (school of magecraft and blah blah), rather than random wizards who just float around organically to make plot things happen.  Wizards become working-class.

1984, ten years after the first Dungeons and Dragons manual was published, the Dragonlance  series is born.  It was based off of a D&D campaign.  No, honestly, it was.  We have races, we have quests, we have institutionalized magic and meddlesome deities.  For the most part, they do ditch the dopey farmboy, replacing him with the naive warrior, who is supposed to be all troubled and dark, but is really just naive and angsty.  Also, the focus is more on the quest group than any one hero.  It still has very black-and-white morality.

In 1987 Mercedes Lackey published her first book.  So here we have feminist fantasy, and clique fantasy.  I have to backtrack a little for that.  In 1967, Anne McCaffery started the Dragonriders of Pern  series.  So we have a special clique of people with special powers whose job is basically to be heroes.  This solves the problem of how to keep having the same person solve all the problems; it's their job, because they are telepathically linked to a magical critter.  Because that totally makes sense.

Now we come to the 90's, which may be the Golden Age of B-Fantasy.  Most of these series started in the 80's, but gained momentum throughout the decade and eventually came to dominate the 90's.  There was still some very original stuff in the 80's - Kushner's Swordspoint, Diana Wynne Jones's everything, Suzette Hardin Elgin's Ozark Trilogy about a planet that was colonized by the South and people who ride flying Mules (it's good stuff).  In 1990, however, Robert Jordan published the first book in The Wheel of Time.

What did WoT do that other books didn't?  It's basically the same setup as Eddings' Belgariad.  Teenage farmboy whisked away from his home by a wizard, told it is his destiny by birth to save the world from the newly reawakened Dark Lord, oh yeah and he has magic powers.  All I can say is that Jordan made it bigger (800 pages per volume, minimum), he made it better (the world at least makes slightly more sense and is more memorable than Eddings'), and he made it with love.  He kept writing even when he was dying, because he loved those books so damn much.  And I can tell you a hundred things that make the books awful (don't call me on that, please), but I can at least understand why they are so loved.

Lately, however, there has been a mainstream movement away from B-Fantasy.  Conflicts have become less idealistic, between the innocent and the Evil, and more political, between the jaded older warriors and the forces of society - kind of like the teenage hero grew up.  I won't be able to say much about George R. R. Martin, because I haven't been able to get through more than three chapters, but I think he is the key to this movement.  The current generation of writers grew up on B-Fantasy, and are too jaded with it in today's society. 

Other books like David Anthony Durham's Acacia (2007) have similar political orientations - I can't talk much about this one either because I ran into the same problem as Martin, though in Durham's case the last straw was not "I don't know which of these characters I'm supposed to care about" (though there was an element of that) and more "That is the stupidest fencing lesson I have ever read."  Then there are more direct criticisms such as E.E. Knight's Age of Fire series (2002), which is basically what Wicked did to Oz, only to Dragonlance.  Sure, there are still throwbacks like Eragon (2002), but the mainstream voice of fantasy is shifting from a teenage coming-of-age quest to multiperspective stories of human conflict.  Though in fact this sort of storytelling started in the 80's as well, with the Mannerpunk movement started by Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.  It did not gain momentum until just recenty, though.

And of course there are all the little splinter genres like Feminist Fantasy, which I touched on a little, and Queer Fantasy (people say that fantasy is really homophobic, but I think that the fantasyland setting actually makes it easier to include gay characters without stigma; again I point to Swordspoint), and I've already ranted about Dragonrider Fantasy, which is actually a subcategory of Animal Companion Fantasy or perhaps as a genre rather than a device, it would fit better under Heroic Clique Fantasy - you have this world where there is this institution of heroes, be they dragonriders or Jedi or what have you, and every book/trilogy is about a different one whose turn it is to save the kingdom/world/continent.  Then there's the Supernatural Ensemble, which I'm not sure belongs in fantasy proper - technically its roots are in horror.

But right now, I still just want to read a magic pony story.

San Francisco - Day 2

Today was the day I crashed, as I knew I would.  Really, two days on a high is more than enough. 

I saw two films yesterday - though technically one was two separate films because they were both about lesbian feminist activists.  The first one, "Passionate Politics," covered the work of Charlotte Bunch, from her early work with the Civil Rights Movement, to her branching into feminism and starting women's shelters all over the world.  The second film, "A Force of Nature," was a bit more whimsical in its take on Ellen Ratner, showing her constantly trying to kiss bizarre animals (fish, goats, turkeys, you name it.)  The first five minutes were people talking about how terrifying she is and how much they love her; she is an unstoppable force of nature.

The second (or third, depending how you count) film I saw was "My Brother the Devil."  It was the first fiction film I saw at the Castro, and the reason I burned out quite when I did.  First, the accents.  It is a British film about Egyptian immigrants, and to Midwestern ears, that is such a bizarre cockatil of accents I found myself wishing badly for subtitles. 

But really, it was the story that annoyed me.  It was a coming-of-age drama, so I was not too keen on it to begin with, but my group pressured me into it, and it was about siblings.  There aren't very many queer stories with siblings, have you noticed that?  Despite there being a correlation between older brothers and being gay.  I went in at least open to the possibility that it would not suck. 

Maybe it was just cultural differences, but I could not get into the story.  There were a lot of subplots that did not quite seem to connect:  the big brother trying to leave the gang, the little brother trying to follow him into the gang, the big brother realizing he's gay and getting a boyfriend, the little brother getting a girlfriend.  Of them all, the little brother getting a girlfriend was the most superfluous, and I suspect that it was put in there to make the film more palatable to straight audiences.  Actually, the big brother being gay was also kind of a pointless plot point.  The little brother is really upset when he first finds out, but after he gets shot he's okay with it.  It makes no sense.  Or maybe it was explained in the dialogue.  But really, at a queer film festival, you should not say that a character being gay added nothing to the plot.

That's my rant on the first film here that I truly did not like; hopefully there will not be many more.

I was completely burned out after "Devil," and even though I knew it would help if I ate, I did not have the energy to go out and find food.  So when I returned to the condo and found one of my classmates had made huge amounts of pesto pasta, as well as raspberry scones, I just about died of gratitude.  It gave me the strength to power through our storyboard with my group.

For some reason I still can't post pictures, which is inordinately irritating.

Filler Post

My reader has been clamoring for a new post.  Yes, I only have one reader.  I can see how many times my posts have been viewed.  I'm thinking about starting a new blog.  One that has more of a theme, i.e. ranting about books/movies/TV shows and generally being a pretentious hipster.

Am I still a hipster if I admit I am one?  Because I do like some things just because they are obscure.  Granted, you need a critical mass of fandom for it to be fun, but things that everyone likes just aren't the same.  So yeah, I'm a tea-drinking, Mumford and Sons (they're actually on the radio) Frank Turner listening, Galen Beckett reading (I liked him better when he was publishing under Mark Anthony, though I get why he went to a pseudonym), German speaking hipster.

That wasn't what I was going to post about.

Well, it was, I think.  One of the things.  Summer is a time of idleness and reflection, a time of setting goals you never achieve, but at least you have enough time to do them if you wanted to.  Usually.

This summer I am taking two summer classes.  One is an online class about language development and its for my minor.  The other is an upper-level queer theory class that involves two weeks in San Francisco and making a documentary film.  And lots and lots of angry readings about the heteropatriarchy.

(My reader knows this already, but since it's on the internet I feel like I have to make this coherent to the general public.)

This summer I am also living off-campus, on my own (i.e. not under adult supervision, because I am an adult, or so I've been told). 

This summer I need to start seriously looking in to grad school applications.  It's not just a distant dream to get me through a depressed phase - it's my actual future that I hold in my own hands, and I'm terrified I might drop it.

This summer I hope to start an etsy shop and sell crocheted My Little Ponies (no, seriously, those things go for $20-$40, and you know what?  Yarn is cheap) in lieu of getting a real job.

See, my original goal for this summer was to get a real job and my driver's license.  Then San Francisco happened, and I put growing up on hold.

So maybe this post is about growing up, and how it's not happening, only it is happening.  I'm not reaching milestones, but I'm learning more about myself - not changing, but becoming more who I am (coughhipstercough yeah, what of it?it's true).  I'm a hipster.  I'm a brony (that's for another post).  I'm queer not a lesbian, and I don't give a damn about dismantling the heteropatriarchy, I'm going to change the world in my own small way by writing books.  If I ever finish the damn things.  At least I'm writing again.

I stopped writing.  And then I started again.  And then I stopped.  It's like when I used to get depressed (used to?) - so depressed that I felt like I would never be happy again.  I went through so many cycles, eventually I realized that I would always feel happy again.  And I would always feel sad again.  And maybe that was the first step in my growing up and leaving behind the adolescent woes, because once I stopped fearing my depression it had less power over me.  Until extenuating circumstances, but even that passed.

I'm going to stop before this gets any more rambly.

So, my dear reader, I hope this was enough to break the monotony of your North Dakota wasteland for a little while, and I will be sure to keep you posted on my future activities in the blogosphere.

What Should Theater Look Like and What Should Theater Be About?

Above are the two driving questions for my Theater History class that I am currently taking for a fine arts GE.  It's not that bad of a class, even though the professor has a tendency to analyze things for us and not encourage discussion and argument against her; I'm bored, but that's why I crochet.  No, the problem arises when we do three plays in a row about race relations, and that is the sum total of our look at American theater.  See, apparently "being American" means what race you are and how you're being oppressed.

There is a quote from August Wilson which I would like to paraphrase and dispute.  He argued against colorblind casting, claiming that it was devaluing African-American identity, and that instead there should be more plays written by blacks about blacks.  That way, black people would learn to respect their black identity.

While I respect the sentiment, and can agree it was probably appropriate for the times, I would like to bring up one point - namely, myself.  Am I even going to see the German-Chinese lesbian identity validated on the stage or in print?  Probably not.  The bigger question for me, though, is that if I did find a story that was not my own about a German-Chinese lesbian in America, would it mean anything to me?  Would that character really have anything to do with me?  Would this hypothetical character be obsessed with languages?  Would she be a ruthless literary critic?  A laconic feminist?  Would she have struggles with identity and independence that have nothing to do with her race or sexuality?

I don't think so.  I think that I am more than my race, ethnicity, and sexuality.

It bothers me when people try to portray themselves and their characters solely as representations of their race.  Yes, more racial and cultural awareness is good, but the whole purpose of racial inclusion is to show that people who aren't white Christian heterosexual able-bodied males are people too.  That does not happen if your black character is a cardboard cutout of a black person, and not a fully developed person with dark skin and African heritage.

Compare the last two plays we had to read:  "Zoot Suit" and "Cloud Nine."  "Zoot Suit" bored and frustrated me.  It is a whiny minority play, about Mexican-Americans in the 1940's bitching about how they're being oppressed and thrown in jail just because they're Mexican.  There is one line that goes something like "You just don't understand the Chicano people."  To which I reply "No, I don't, because I haven't seen any of your culture or personality, I'm just hearing how you're discriminated against.  I don't understand you any better than I did before."

Now, "Cloud Nine" focuses more on gender and sexuality than race, though there is a small racial component.  What "Cloud Nine" does is crossgender casting - Betty is played by a man, Edward is played by a woman; also, the black servant is played by a white man.  This shows how gender (and race) roles are just that - roles that we play.  It questions the very institutions.  That is so much more interesting and thought-provoking than "Look at us!  We're being oppressed!"  Is it not?