The Most Epic Curtain Call Ever

This is from Takarazuka Revue's production of the Scarlet Pimpernel musical. It's an all-women performance troupe. You can look them up on Wikipedia, but the gender-bending isn't really that fluid - the roles are quite specific, and actresses are assigned male or female roles. Those who get the male roles only play male roles. As you can see, the gender performed is very specific. I'm sure some people find it empowering, but I wonder if it only reinforces the gender binary, but this is a post for another day.

Anyway, this is the curtain call for the Scarlet Pimpernel (I was on a Pimpernel kick recently) and I can't stop going LOL WHUT D: DO I WANT TO KNOW THEIR BUDGET? everytime I see it.



Cripes people, there are SO MANY THINGS I want to say about this curtain call. Like, is all that lavishness necessary? And, where the hell do they get their clothes made? And, what happens after the production is over? And, how many people do they keep in business with the work they do on the set and other tech? And, my god how many birds died for that curtain call? And, DO I WANT TO KNOW THEIR BUDGET?

Feminism and Children: on Raising Children for Abstract Concepts

A while back, a friend of mine suggested that to break the racism cycle so ingrained between generations, perhaps the Malaysian government could give "cash sweeteners when interracial couples marry."

Casting aside the obvious racism of this suggestion - that interracial couples would be valued more than mono-racial couples enough to receive privileges - I'm patently disturbed by the idea that interracial couples, producing interracial children, is going to solve the problem of racism.

I've written before on the problematic term "colourblind", and why discussions on race is still important, even though we know the concept of race to be a social construct. As Third Culture Kids know, navigating between the different cultures and never fitting in just one can be hard, particularly when people want to be territorial and demand that you take a side. I'm sure interracial children have similar problems - balancing between different heritages.

I reacted harshly against this idea, because essentially, it asks people to donate their children to an abstract cause - that of racial/national unity. Children who are, all in all, human beings, and we'll be using them for what are abstract concepts that can be shifted at will. Most people today wrestle with cultural concepts, trying to assimilate, appropriate, or mesh.

Bad enough that parents already pin all sorts of hopes on their children - be successful, be a good daughter, be a good wife, provide for your family, take care of your parents when they are old, become a great what-have-you, get promoted quickly. Be Perfect. Now we have suggestions of pinning hopes of an entire nation's unity - because apparently the adults can't do it themselves? - on them, just because they just so happen to be interracial. Because, you know, navigating between cultures and playing spokespersons come very naturally to interracial children!

No, not a burden at all. /sarcasm

Transgender Day of Remembrance

 Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. It is the day to memorialize the people who had died as a result of anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. It's a day to remember people who have been killed quietly, targeted easily due to the transphobic nature of today's society that still refuses to acknowledge the humanity of people who transition from one biological sex to another.

There are many explanations for these crimes. "Gay panic" and "trans panic" are still considered reasonable explanations for acts of violence visited on these marginalized people. That transgendered people are marginalized makes them easy targets for crimes that will go unaddressed and unpunished. That transgendered people are victims of high crime rates as opposed to any other gendered group goes unnoticed by most people. Their names disappear into the darkness, forgotten.

Why are they killed? 

These people were killed for being trans, or suspected of being trans. They were killed on account of something that is part of their identity. It's akin to being targeted because one is gay, or one is Asian.

For all the clever arguments that prosecutors can come up with, for all the lies people tell themselves to minimize the crime, it still boils down to the fact that people react violently to those they perceive as Other. Because, as always, an Other is a threat to one's peace of mind.

It seems everytime I write about this, it's me repeating myself, but it seems there's no help for it but to reiterate more and more: when a transgendered person dies, another human life is extinguished. When a single human life is destroyed as a result of hatred, fear, prejudice, it is a human rights issue, a concern belonging to all of society.

We (meaning I, and many other cisgendered people like myself) go through life capable of ignoring the threat of violence and death that many transgendered people live with. For us, such troubles, of prejudice due to our identities, are only philosophical exercises, and we don't have to care, because we do not have transgendered people in our immediate vicinities. None of my cousins are transgendered. Not my brother. Not my parents. Not anyone I know of personally.

But we let that "not one of ours" get in the way of our memory too often. We forget that there are people dying everyday for reasons completely unrelated to us, horrific deaths that should not have happened. It's easy to see why - it's distressing to remember this fact, that the people we love could be at risk of death at the hands of violence, visited upon them for some reason integral to their humanity. We cut the rest of the world off because it's easier that way.

It is so difficult to be connected to the rest of the world. It's exhausting, it's upsetting to cry over someone who we don't even know.

But someone has to - mourn our dead because they are part of our dead too, remember their names and faces, remember who they were when alive, why they died, and it is this remembrance that gives us the resolve to carry on fighting for this cause so that no one would have to die anymore.

It's easy for me to say, because I'm a cisgendered woman, who calls herself an ally, and I sign petitions and I write blogs and I talk about these issues in company who probably doesn't want to hear it. I can light a candle today, and I will.

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, for those who have lost sisters and children, friends and family, and to remember the people who have died because others could not control their hate and fear.

Coupledom Propaganda

 


I like this song. It's from the sequel to Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame (which was completely unfaithful to the original book, but in a good way, I think) in which Quasimodo finds someone to fall in love with, and who falls in love with him.

Now, I like Disney movies. Who doesn't? But you know what I don't like about Disney movies? And a lot of other media, let's be honest.

The fact that it is a given for the heroine to always end up with a hero.

A hero can end up with no one, or guy friends, sure! But if it's a heroine, she's always going to have some love interest with whom her life is deeply intertwined. It's a theme that's been overwrought. Even in Sex and the City we couldn't escape the idea that part of life is finding a good man to settle down with, and that Breaking Up Is A Big Deal.

What happens is we get a whole society of women who think that without men, they have no lives, who are constantly haranguing each other on Why Are You Still Single, and are incomplete, unfulfilled. We get bullshit like Twilight, and every single bloody cheesey romance novel where attraction based on being desirable and looking desirable, works out to be True Love. And further on, the idea that women have to mold themselves to be the perfect submissive wives for men.

I swear, if I have to deal with any "got any boyfriend?" at home, I am going to up and leave the room, or say, "no, thank goodness."