Hump-Day Hyperlinks: 100 Years of International Women’s Day
Tuesday marked the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day – a day I like to refer to as Feminist Christmas. Why do I love IWD? Quite simply, I always want to know about the state of women, and for one day the mainstream media acknowledges the endless contributions of women, the extreme inequalities that exist between all genders (yes, that’s all and not both), and the immediate prospects for change. News stories or events that have been previously covered, somehow manage to finally accept that women are in the mix and account for the nuances of their varied experiences. In one day, I, as an eager journalism student, get my interests and passions spoon-fed to me in the form of news that matters. Of course, the fact that I can only be satisified with the amount of coverage that the world deems fit to bestow on the numerous accomplishments of women and on the plight of circumstance that continues to affect the lives of many others on one single day speaks to the need of gender and gendered analysis to be included ALL THE TIME. The world has been celebrating women’s day for a century – a marveling feat. On this IWD, the theme most present was weighing how far we’ve come with how much farther we have to go.
Here are the most interesting articles of the day:
The Guardian’s coverage of IWD was quite stellar. Having been alerted to a few links the day before IWD by a fellow feminist friend, I kept a close eye on the material coming from the news outlet. Feminism is often seen through a generational divide – is the term and movement still relevant in 2011 to the daughters and granddaughters of feminists? Feminism: What does the F-word mean today? chronicles what happened when the Observer asked Annie Lennox (mmm, Eurythmics) to chair a conversation on women’s equality with five women at different points in their feminisms and lives.
Courtney Martin, of Feministing, gave a TED talk entitled Reinventing Feminism in December of 2010. The talk highlights the numerous ways that the term and identity is contentious for women. Martin speaks on why some women may turn away from the term and the double binds that still exist that make it so women are in a difficult situation both when they embrace and shun the term.
Not all IWD coverage was cheery, and rightfully so. The state of women in the world in 2011 is far from homogeneous. And, the mainstream feminist movement (which tends to get all the glory and limelight) certainly doesn’t speak for every woman who identifies as feminist, nor her intersection with other oppressions.
Margaret Wente, of The Globe and Mail, really got it wrong with “For the free, educated and affluent, welcome to the century of women.” Feminists all over social media on Tuesday had their fill of Wente’s focus on a small percentage of women which she then extrapolated to speak for the entire experience of womankind. Please, Margaret. Wente’s assertion that “the war for women’s rights is over. And we won,” is disrespectful and ignorant. Wente has a singular notion of woman: white, cisgendered, straight, middle-class, thin, and western. Even women in the western world face more inequality and discrimination than Wente chooses to acknowledge. The fabulous folks at Shameless magazine’s blog have a great response to Wente’s misinformation.
The Observer’s Maria Frostrup puts the ‘International’ back in International Women’s Day by looking at the status and social conditions of women beyond the western bubble of privilege. This is really a must-read given Wente’s narrow definition of womanhood.
There are those, however, who wonder whether a day in the sun marginalizes us even further and allows the systems of power in place to continue to ignore women. A pretty valid argument, if you ask me. The same can be said for Black History Month – why do we continue to be appeased by marginal acknowledgement, when what we really want is to be an equal part of the story. Womanist Musings asks why we’re celebrating.
Now for a little treat. Full Disclosure: I was a teenage wrestling fan. Truthfully, my love affair with men in tights began in my early childhood and was only halted when I discovered scrawny 14-year-olds in grade nine. Mick Foley (AKA Mankind, Dude Love, etc.) gave Jezebel readers this inspiring message.
What’s women’s day without LOUD FEMINISTS?!
Read anything particularly moving yesterday? Leave it in the comments section!
*All photos from denverpost.com
@FeministBieber comforts pro-choicers
Justin Bieber is a 16-year-old* male who has a swagger coach. He, like me (who does not have a swagger coach), is from Ontario. I have fond memories of bicycling through my Mississauga neighbourhood, passing by my former elementary school (St. Gertrude WHADDUP!), and seeing (girl-)handmade signs urging people to vote for Bieber’s songs on some music countdown. Yes, we Ontarians knew about Justin Bieber before the masses did, but I needn’t get into my rants on having public ownership of Justin Bieber, Drake or even Facebook before everyone else did here – I would be happy to have these conversations in person though.
Complete with his own narrative film detailing his rise to fame and in height, Bieber is made of the same sweet nectar that attracted (pre-)teenage girls to the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Usher, B2K and 98 Degrees. Where he differs though, is that Bieber is entangled in the fame machine of 2011 – a system that offers continual access to celebrities and engagement with their real persons as opposed to constructed personas, or so the argument goes. Whether we can chalk Bieber’s recent anti-abortion statements during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine to a little bit of real Bieber coming through, or to a carefully constructed effort not to alienate any of his impressionable teenage fans is really not the issue. Rather, the big hubbub has to do with what it means when a teen icon, based on nothing but HIS own personal opinion, offers his thoughts to millions of girls who may one day be in the position of having to make a difficult choice for themselves. In a world where teenage boys and lesbians (chicken or the egg dilemma, really) are eager to sculpt their hair into Bieber’s former helmet o’ feathery goodness, where does a misinformed 16-year-old’s power end?
I really don’t believe in abortion. It’s, like, killing a baby? – JB.
The feminist blogosphere has been buzzing with 1) whether or not Bieber is qualified to speak to the reproductive decisions of women and 2) a clever little Twitter account that may persuade feminist Bieber fans to think that this little bundle of American Apparel sweaters overhyped pubescence joy, after a knowledge-dropping session, could somehow align with our politics.
Whether anyone is qualified to have an opinion on whether or not abortion is wrong brings me back to the days of high school or first-year university papers on ethics with vague topics such as ABORTION or EUTHANASIA. These ambiguous paper prompts assumed that such issues were morally absolute, or could be argued as being so, and were concepts that didn’t affect real people, or weren’t affected by a bazillion other interlocking things (*ahem* poverty, access to health care, etc.). This point of view is pretty outdated and that being said, Justin Bieber can pretty much think whatever he wants (Note to self: do not f*ck Justin Bieber, and if not possible, make sure the kid uses a rubber to avoid any post-coital awkwardness). The extreme irresponsibility of making anti-choice comments, however, do lie with Bieber (or his handlers).
The most entertaining online activity to come from the Rolling Stone interview has undoubtedly been @FeministBieber! Here’s a sampling of what a feminist Justin Beiber would say, according to Twitter:
As entertaining as these tweets are, doesn’t the comedic value we get from them only work because Bieber would NEVER say these things? Aren’t we really making fun of ourselves for being foolish enough to expect that a teenage pop icon would be feminist inclined, or for being so entertained that a fictional Twitter account can satisfy our demands of public figures? @FeministBieber certainly incorporates some feminist consciousness with Bieber lovin’ and swag and with that it is possible that some young women, influenced by Bieber’s anti-choice statements, could find information and options previously unavailable to them – but I have to wonder, are we taking jabs at Bieber or admitting how silly it would be to expect more?
*Bieber will celebrate his 17th birthday on March 1, 2011.
Hump-Day Hyperlinks
Welcome to the inaugural post of Hump-Day Hyperlinks – a new weekly feature on TSF to round-up the week’s most interesting links in the feminist blogosphere and larger news world.
Why the title? I must admit, I’m not completely sold on it and am open to better suggestions. A few other feminist sites have a links round-up (some on Fridays to signal the end of a newsy week). I figured Wednesday would work best for TSF (and me!). Mid-week is an excellent time for an information pick-you-up! I toyed around with a few other titles (*ahem* Women’s Wednesdays – what the hell is that?), but settled on this alliterative ditty. Don’t be surprised if I change the title in a few weeks and take a cue from fledgling TV dramas and make no mention of it. But I likely will, in that daytime “The role of Carly Corinthos will now be played by …” kind of way.
Just in time for every feminist’s favourite holiday, the Crunk Feminist Collective published this piece on Living Single – a post that offers some thoughts on singledom and the way its coded by a couple-centric society.
Sady Doyle, at Tiger Beatdown, wrote this post after her work on #DearJohn – the hashtag used to voice complete and utter disgust at Speaker John Boehner’s Republican-backed attempt to redefine rape - led her to some realizations about her own experiences with rape culture and reproductive violence.
If this GOP-led push to redefine rape as only occurring with the presence of force weren’t disturbing enough, things for women below the 49th parallel became even more distressing with another GOP-led proposal to allow doctors to refuse to perform abortions on women, even when they are necessary to save these women’s lives. Maddie Oatman at Mother Jones, gave us this run-down of what the proposed change means.
Ms. Magazine’s blog highlights filmmaker Sara Nesson’s documentary short, Poster Girl. The film tells the story of Robynn Murray, a “non-combat” veteran with PTSD, and the reality of “non-combat” women who are told that they aren’t in combat missions (defined as “actively fighting in a war”) but very much face daily combat situations while they are deployed. The designation of “non-combat” personnel means that the services offered to them by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs differ greatly from those offered to soldiers deemed to have been in “combat.”
While checking out my timeline on Twitter during my online journalism class (fitting, i know), I came across this piece at Racialicious, written by Latoya Peterson, that addressed the racial dynamics at play in celebrity interracial relationships and the ridiculous idea that Canadians are incapable of racism.
Finally, I was thrilled to find that Brittany Shoot has reprised her role as guest-blogger for Bitch – this time in a fascinating series called No Kidding. The series discusses “what it means to be an intentionally childfree woman in Western culture.” Shoot tackles the common misconception (in bad taste?) that being childfree means a woman is selfish – because women are apparently MEANT to be mothers, and to fail to do so would be selfish because we owe something to the would-be children we ought to have. LOGICFAIL!
Leave your hyperlinks suggestions in the comments section!
Dear John, She loves Jane!
Well folks, I told you I was making my way through Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women – an anthology of short essays on just that, women who’ve left men for women. The book is quite different from other collections of coming-out stories in two key ways. It challenges the heterosexual/homosexual binary that reductively polices sexuality as an either/or identity (Hasn’t Kinsey taught us anything? SPECTRUMS, people, SPECTRUMS!) and gives voice to all those women who’ve been somewhere in the middle (a vast space in itself). The book also gives legitimacy to those women who’ve chosen to identify as lesbian or Queer who haven’t had traditional trajectories of getting there.
The collection’s pieces do a great job of unraveling the many layers of complex relationships that women who’ve left men for women have – with their former male partners, children, families, new woman-identified partners, and the larger lesbian and Queer communities. I must admit though, that I did tire of the “Had-a-husband-but-now-I-don’t” trope.
Editors Candace Walsh and Laura Andre were clear that they chose which pieces to include based on the quality of writing presented; the sheer volume of submissions and truths of women who wanted to participate meant that there had to be some way of molding this text. If we’re really going to look at the complexity of women’s sexualities though, there needs to be diversity in the situated experiences and identities of the women whose stories we look to for these answers.
As a woman of colour, who is in an interracial relationship with a man (a relationship that I dare NOT classify as heterosexual), I know that the choice to love someone and the conditions under which this love is accepted varies depending on the cultural and social identities of each individual woman. The collection certainly addressed how religion and class complicate the matter, but presenting an alternative to a traditional coming-out narrative means not simply presenting another catch-all story but picking apart the ways that these narratives exclude and ignore the realities of many women, and why they do so.
I had the pleasure of meeting Vanessa Fernando in 2009 as an undergrad at McGill University where we were both active with a campus sexual assault centre. Her writing has always struck me as painfully true. Vanessa’s piece “Wanting” is included in Dear John, I Love Jane.
Q: How did you get involved with the anthology?
A: I read Lisa Diamond’s book Sexual Fluidity about a year ago and it really resonated with me because she emphasizes that women’s sexual identities can’t be neatly categorized and thought of as static. That idea connected with my own experience – I clearly remember this moment, when I was about 17. It was a period in my life when I had just broken up with my high-school boyfriend and was questioning a lot of things about my life, including my sexual orientation. I had just made out with this guy, a cisgendered guy, and I was really, really into it. I remember feeling really turned on by him and thinking to myself, ‘Well, I guess that settles it. I’m straight.’
That attraction didn’t preclude even more attractions and feelings of wonder and surprise when I found myself just as electrified by partners who identified as female and as genderqueer. I wanted to be part of a movement that tries to step away from thinking about sexual orientation as boxes you can check off… because the most amazing and liberating and revolutionary thing I’ve learned so far is that you can really, really surprise yourself with what your attraction is capable of.
Q: Dear John, I Love Jane does a lot to destabilize the traditional coming-out narrative – where people have always “known” their sexuality but waited to come out until they could find acceptance – why do you think this narrative has become the standard?
A: The traditional coming-out narrative is this way that queer people connect to one another – ‘What was it like when you came out?’ And it feels like you need to have this neat arc, this neat narrative about your life: ‘I was always gay, but I just didn’t know how to name it, and then I realized, and I was truly myself.’ I think that arc is true for a lot of people, including my partner – she feels like she’s always been a lesbian, and that when she ‘discovered’ that she was attracted to women then it made sense of her whole past.
I have a more ambivalent relationship to the coming-out narrative because it’s hard for me to make sense of my past attractions in a way that feels authentic – I don’t want to just create this revisionist history of my life to fit with how I currently identify. I mean, there are some things that are just facts: I had crushes on women as I was growing up, from a very young age, and I felt confused and anxious about this. I have diary entries from when I was 11 years old with “I swear I’m not a lesbian!” written on them. In high school, my best friends and I kissed to experiment and I wanted to take it farther, but I was scared to cross that line between joking and being serious which might actually mean something. But coming out, for me, wasn’t so much a single event as a slow progression – Kissing my friends to admitting that I wanted to sleep with a woman to going to a queer gathering to kissing a girl there to inviting her to stay over to having sex with her to getting outed in front of my parents. This whole rambling answer can attest to the fact that it’s messy. It’s a process.
Q: How does being a feminist and woman of colour affect your writing?
A: When I decided to submit to this anthology, I was really conscious of all the identity signifiers that you become hyper-aware of when you do a degree in something like women’s studies. Queer. Mixed-race person of colour. I thought this anthology might be white-dominated because it wasn’t explicitly aiming towards including people of colour. That made me a little anxious because I didn’t want to be the token non-white voice. So I guess being a feminist affects my writing because I’m more aware of how I’m positioned, as a writer, and of how my work will be framed. I was also aware that I would probably be one of the only Queer-identified (as opposed to lesbian-identified) women contributors, although you can never assume these things. I decided to submit despite all of that because even if it’s tokenizing, I wanted to share my experiences, to get it out there to other people and maybe start a ball rolling to get more voices talking.
Before, when I wrote, I just wrote my own life story without thinking about how I’m positioned in these larger power dynamics, but now I feel hyper aware of the way my writer-self is perceived. I also feel a certain amount of responsibility for how I present issues or present myself in my writing- I feel pressure to be the good feminist, to touch on all the anti-oppression points, to make people feel good that way. I try to actively fight against this urge because as important as anti-oppressive language is, I think real anti-oppression can only be achieved if we are completely and brutally honest with ourselves, even about the unflattering parts of us. Otherwise everything looks good and sounds good on the outside but no real work is being done.
I am constantly trying to find that balance between connection in the purest form and creating something that I’m politically in line with as well- politics without shoving it down your throat or being preachy, just representing something complicated and multi-faceted that hurts to read because it’s true.
Q: Lisa M. Diamond, in the foreword to the book, uses a pivotal point from your piece to tie the anthology together as an alternative to the strict hetero/homosexual binary that constricts women’s sexualities. You wrote, “I spent years trying to be the kind of girl a boy would want to toss into the air. I wish I had realized earlier that I didn’t want to be like those girls so much as I just wanted them.” I think this really resonates with women along all points on the sexuality spectrum. Could you explain this further?
A: It’s really neat that you connected with this idea because it is so so so true for me and I wish I had realized it earlier. One thing I really wanted to get across in the piece was how interconnected sexuality is with every other feeling that we have in life and about our bodies. For me, my relationship with my sexuality was intertwined with my negative feelings about my own body and my feelings of alienation towards my ethnicity as a mixed-race Sri Lankan woman – a part of my legacy that has been pretty denied and cut off in my life. So it wasn’t just learning to love women, it was learning to love myself enough – body, skin, hair, to be at peace – to love women. I wanted to be the tiny blonde girls and I wanted to fuck them, too. Sex is so complicated.
My friendships with other women have always been loaded with a lot of emotion. Just heavy. I think a lot of female friendships can be like that. Some of that was definitely sexual. Letting it go to the sexual place lets me explore different parts of myself and my body too. You don’t have to hate somebody because they’re skinnier than you or whiter than you. Desire doesn’t have to ricochet into self-hate. Desire can just be desire, plain – but not simple, never simple. It’s liberating to have another way to look at women, and a different way to see myself: as a desiring agent, not just some inferior version of those blonde girls.
Feminist Faux Pas
It can happen easily enough, which is maybe why it’s so troubling. Every feminist has encountered a moment when feminist consciousness fails, or doesn’t kick in, and the social norms of a patriarchal society dictate her* behaviour in a way that comes off as so instinctual that it frightens her.
More often than not, before I fall asleep every night I NEED to play Monopoly on either my iPod Touch or iPhone (I am aware that this, in itself, is enough for you to judge me, but please dear readers, keep reading). I’ve had a lengthy battle with insomnia most of my adult life and the stimulation but effortless ease of a hand-held game really soothes me (Again, please keep reading). I often find myself speaking about the other computer-generated game pieces as players – “Thimble will want Reading Railroad, so I can trade that for Pennsylvania Avenue.” Last night, while observing Iron’s game path and hoping that it would land on one of my hotels and be instantly bankrupted, I referred to the game piece as a “she.” I noticed what I had done, and was congratulating myself on referring to the piece as a woman when the universal male has been shoved down audiences throats since the Bible. Drunk with my conceited feminism, I continued playing my mindless game … until I referred to the Racecar as a “he.” My mind began to race (get it?) and I started critically evaluating my thought process.
English, unlike say Spanish or French, is not a gendered language. That is, when speaking, English speakers need not worry themselves with identifying the gender of people and inanimate objects in order to convey the necessary information. A person could easily say that ‘a friend is coming over’ without needing to identify or reveal the gender of this friend. Yes, more often than not, English speakers do add extra information such as gender to the sentence equation, but the point is that this deliberate detail is not required by a listener to understand meaning.
Gendered languages do ascribe a gender to objects without one, and the rationale of native speakers (long after the gender was affixed to whatever object) is that maybe these inanimate objects in their structure, physical attributes and overall aesthetic could be seen as either masculine or feminine.
I thought about this, staring at the 3D iron moving across the Monopoly board that I held in between my hands. The iron was not particularly feminine, the way I might argue that an Ikea chair might be (this, however, would also be getting into some non-feminist language if we started to think of curves as definitively feminine). Struck with the inevitability of accepting the thought that I had been trying to avoid since giving my little game pieces gendered pronouns, I conceded and allowed myself to acknowledge what I had done.
I had associated the iron with domesticity and as a result had gendered it female. She was a “she” because “women iron.”
I obviously know better than that. I have successfully operated an iron 3 times in my life, and truthfully, as a device, it scares me (what with the potential of getting burned and all). But the way that this thought had permeated my conscious efforts to eliminate such sexist language, and still managed its way out of my mouth astounded me. As much as we actively reject gendered socialization, it still requires constant effort to undo the linkages our socially constructed brains want to make.
A patriarchal society will socialize individuals in ways to accept its power dynamics. And feminists, who counter this power scheme, develop their own communities. I wonder if our abilities as feminists require a socializing-feminist community both to strengthen our resolve and maintain our gains?
Change requires hard work, and consistent effort. I will continue to play Monopoly and will work to not make the same mistake again.
What are some recent feminist faux pas(es?) that you have made?
*I am more than well aware that feminists can identify with the female pronoun, male pronoun or another gender-neutral variant, but for the sake of copy – something that journalism school has me thinking about more and more – I will stick to using the female pronoun. 1) Because I identify as female and 2) in an effort to combat the universal “he.”
King-Kong-Theory-Kinda Empowerment
While interning at bitch, I reviewed Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory – Despentes’ manifesto of gendered expectation defiance and memoir of the key moments of her feminist awakening. Thanks to a feminist-book-buying sister, I was armed with my very own copy over the holidays. The book was a great re-read while on the plane, especially given how wrought any holiday and significant amount of nuclear family time can be with both gendered and life-track expectations (the two, of course, are not always mutually exclusive).
I was viscerally empowered by the text, in ways that were dormant in my earlier reading (leave it to anger to awaken every other feeling possible). Here are a few of my favourite passages:
“But I have also avoided telling my story, because I already knew what people would say, ‘Well, if you carried on hitchhiking after that, if it didn’t make you more sensible, then you must have liked it.’ Because with rape, it’s always up to you to prove that you really didn’t give your consent. It’s as if guilt obeys an unspoken moral pull toward the one who got hit, rather than the one who did the whacking.”
“Because if the prostitution contract became part of everyday life, the marriage contract would be shown up more clearly for what it is: a market in which for a bargain price the woman agrees to carry out a certain number of chores – notably sexual – to ensure a man’s comfort.”
“I have come to the conclusion that femininity is the same thing as bootlicking. The art of servility. You can call it seduction to make it sound glamorous. But it is very rarely a skilled sport. For the majority of women, it’s the simple habit of behaving as an inferior. Walking into a room, checking whether there are men in it, wanting to please them. Not talking too loud. Not being forceful. Not sitting with your legs splayed to be more comfortable. Not speaking with authority. Not talking about money. Not wanting to claim power. Not wanting a position of authority. Not seeking glory. Not laughing too loud. Not being too funny.”
Re-invigorated by my friend, Feminism (not by any means a monolith and, in fact, is more aptly FeminismS, but for the sake of prose …), I can’t stop reading. I’m currently making my way through Dear John, I Love Jane – an anthology of short essays about women who have left men for other women, and in doing so have challenged the hetero/homosexual binary and the traditional ‘coming out’ narrative.
What’s on your feminist reading list?
Sarah Harmer: WMST grad.
I spoke to singer/songwriter Sarah Harmer late last week in preparation for a preview of her upcoming January 19th and 20th shows in Edmonton. We discussed her recent release oh little fire, her years of activist work with PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land) – an organization she co-founded to protect the Niagara escarpment from wilderness-encroaching development, and FEMINISM. (I wonder how ethical it is for me as a journalist to sneak in questions relating to gender in every non-feminist endeavour I undertake? My defence: Sarah Harmer studied Women’s Studies at Queen’s University. Word.)
Here’s a sampling of our interview.
TSF: There’s been this steady development of a Canadian canon of indie feminist music: Neko Case, the Be Good Tanyas, you of course, and a whole stream of others. It’s an exciting time. What are your feelings on being a part of this movement of independent women musicians?
SH: Yeah indie feminist rock! You know when I first started playing in a band I was 18. I’d never really seen women drummers, there were a couple women bass players or something, but it was new. And I’m not that old! I think it was like the Pixies or Kim Deal and The Breeders that were around and just to see that stuff – to see women playing guitar or playing drums or whatever – and also just to see that Empowered Woman running the show in a very male music world, which it still is largely, was really good. It’s amazing what one example will do you for you, just like it’s amazing when one person says ‘Hey, why don’t you play that guitar solo?” When you think you can’t really do it and you realize that others think maybe you can, it’s amazing how just the tiny bit of encouragement or the tiny bit of someone else thinking you can do something can set you in a more confident path. I feel happy to be a part of that.
As far as feminism goes, I grew up with four sisters and a pretty strong female family but growing up I still thought it was a handicap to be a girl in a way, kind of subconsciously I thought that and tried to become macho and tough cause I could see culturally men were considered strong and they were the heroes. They were the ones that everything revolved around and it’s just nice to try to dismantle that, and recognize it, and be a part of that cultural expression that supports women as strong and independent. I could go on and on.
Cupcakes and Cutlines.
My first-semester of J-school comes to a close with the publishing of this post. My photo essay on the challenge to traditional femininity presented by roller derby, and the woman-identified community that this oppositional subculture fosters has been successfully submitted! I made some red velvet cupcakes for my fellow future journalists last night (going to bed at 5:45 a.m. only to be painfully woken up at 6:30 a.m. is only made better by an influx of sugar), and now, or eventually, sleep.
Fairytales and all that jazz
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Dear faithful twentysomethingfeminist readers, on this holiest of all matrimonial days I vow to consistently and thoughtfully blog my little heart out.
It’s been quite some time since my last post and I DO (ha!) apologize. The end of my first year of J-school came with heavy doses of stress and high levels of alcohol consumption. I’ve had a week to catch up on sleep and can finally get back to this little blog o’ mine.
So without further ado …
THE ROYAL WEDDING! That was slightly anti-climactic, I know. I struggled to decide whether I would make my return post about Will and Kate’s pending nuptials or the upcoming Canadian election and what it means for women in Canada. That being said, it isn’t often that feminists get to tackle the reality of the fairytale-ism that permeates wedding culture and the narrative of marriage with REAL LIFE examples of consumerism and lavish escapism. I’d kick myself as much for not waking up at 3 a.m. and missing the whole production as I would for failing to highlight some great commentary and offering my own thoughts.
As soon as the royal engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton was announced in November of last year, I began to salivate at the media coverage that would accompany the royal wedding. Partly because, yes, I would be excited for all the critical commentary that looked at what a royal matrimony meant for social stratification, race and gender in 2011, but partly also because I couldn’t wait for traditional media to construct their ideal narrative of Will and Kate’s courtship and relationship and then spin it into a fairytale for the ages that would conveniently be coupled with bridal culture. And here we are, mere hours away from the wedding, and all has gone according to plan.
The carefully constructed narrative of the romance of Will and Kate is what deserves the most feminist scrutiny. It is a tale of upward social mobility and “fated” moments that all culminate in a woman who could be Queen. Kate came from humble beginnings but it was her mother’s success in the party business that hugely affected the family’s income and made it possible to set Kate on the track of private schools that would eventually land her at St. Andrew’s University with Prince William – or so the story goes. Life events and decisions have an impact on the people we become and on the specific roles that we might fill. Yet this narrative is absurdly reminiscent of How I Met Your Mother and the specific, nearly neurotic, interconnections of every major decision that Kate or William has ever made. I took a job hostessing at a chain restaurant in Ontario one summer and met my partner. Our first date was at a Tim Hortons. I had a mocha and he had a green tea. Fast forward five years, throw in a stint in a war zone, and bam! BEST.LOVE.STORY.EVER. It’s really that simple. I’ve seen many a woman ooh and ahh at the story of Will and Kate and wonder why they haven’t given the solid, stable, loving relationships in their lives the same value.
The fact that Kate is constructed as a commoner who dazzled a prince in a see-through dress is what seems to be sticking with those buying into the narrative. The transcendence of class seems to be a signal of the modernity of the monarchy. If it happened to Kate, it could certainly happen to YOU. But could it? The practices of a monarchy that is increasingly insignificant to its population are not nearly as modern as we want to believe. Could I as a woman of colour marry Prince Harry? Heck no. As a person raised Catholic? Doubtful. As someone who is not British? Outlook not so good.
There are moments within this narrative that media seem to flock to, and rightfully so since they were instrumental in picking out and decorating such instances. As recitable as our favourite moments in our favourite fairytales, we’ve memorized these perfectly formed images, put them into the larger context of Will and Kate’s romance, and muted the other insignificant characters and less desirable moments to favour our love story. William’s numerous indiscretions at pubs with women have conveniently been left out of the larger narrative, or worse, have been brushed aside as moments of weakness that have nothing to do with his undying love for Kate.
It seems silly to say in the 21st century but aren’t these romantic tales of happily ever after just plain dangerous? Does it all have to neatly fall into place or can we allow for the nuances of real lived experience to muddy things up and offer a clearer image of what love and marriage might be? Furthermore, what will happen to the ambitions of a woman who grew up not wanting to be a princess, who had other goals (as ridiculous as that may sound to some), and is now the model of royal femininity?
Fairytales and Feminism
Kate Middleton & the Trouble With Fairytales – Examiner.com, a MUST READ!
Royal wedding feelgood factor overrides feminist impulses – Reuters
The benefits of a feminist in the family – The Telegraph on Kate Middleton’s familial tie to a forgotten feminist
The Wedding March – bitch Magazine, a blog series that marries feminism and the royal wedding. Be sure to check out previous posts in the series.
Media and Marriage
Royal wedding media coverage round-up: How journalists plan to cover the big day – Press Gazette, a look at how the major news outlets in Britain will approach wedding coverage
Royal Wedding Getting More News Coverage in U.S. Than in U.K.: Nielsen study – The Huffington Post (isn’t it lovely when headlines speak for themselves?) Perhaps the American Dream and it’s emphasis on upward mobility and the possibility of wishing big has something to do with the royal wedding’s appeal across the pond?
Royal Wedding ticket the latest benchmark of citizen journalism’s ascendancy at CNN – Poynter, where monarchical traditions meet modern journalism.
Nobility and Mobility
The Royal Wedding and the British Relationship With Class – The Huffington Post
And now for some surprising news …
Most women don’t envy Kate Middleton – Women’s Views on News
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Written by twentysomethingfeminist
April 28, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Posted in EXTRA! EXTRA!, Life interrupts blogging, Pop Culture, Social Commentary
Tagged with duchess of cambridge, duke of cambridge, fairytales and feminism, feminism, kate middleton, kate middleton feminism, prince william, royal wedding, royal wedding 2011, twentysomethingfeminist