This is part two of my previous post reviewing the Bite Me! Toronto International Film and Arts Festival.

A Question of Beauty is a Canadian documentary directed and narrated by Moncton-based Colleen Furlotte that seeks to answer the question: what is beauty? The film features approximately 20 women of varying ages, and uses art and other creative pursuits in an effort to broaden the audience’s definition of beauty. The film is a feel-good celebration of beauty that asks the women involved to speak against the beauty ideal and celebrate their own beauty through art, dance, and discussion.

As a critical look at conventional definitions of beauty, however, this film falls extremely short. While watching it, I wondered: while it does contain a few positive elements, can anything be gained from such a problematic film?

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This past weekend, I had the privilege of attending the Bite Me! Toronto International Body Image Film and Arts Festival, at which I saw six of the nine films being shown.
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The BITE ME! Toronto International Body Image Film & Arts Festival will take place this weekend, Saturday, July 17 and Sunday, July 18 (details on Shameless here and on the festival’s website here).

Shameless had the opportunity to speak with Jill Andrew, the festival’s director, who explains what this festival is all about.

The festival’s conception:

At the time I was completing my Master’s in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto New College, and I had been consumed with readings about body image, media representation, eating “disorders” (which I, inspired by feminist theorist Becky Thomson, refer to as “eating problems”), and the importance of interrogating issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability, and class when discussing eating problems and body dissatisfaction. I began to read qualitative data surrounding women’s experiences in and outside of their bodies. Women reported feeling “homeless” within their bodies and not being able to talk about body image because they didn’t feel like they had an image at all.

I’d also read about women who were redefining themselves and challenging labels: fat activism, challenging feminist consumerism, and creating zines in order to “talk back,” or, as I call it, “bite back” against those who try to keep us in stifling boxes.

I wondered if there were folks out there talking about their bodies and other people’s bodies, grappling with the way bodies are constructed. Were people taking this up through creative mediums? I came across many fat activism groups that used theatre: for instance, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed challenges heteronormative assumptions about femininity and masculinity and, thus, the female body.

The festival’s aims:

I decided to attempt to share the telling of folks’ stories through film. I wanted to redefine what body “image” meant to my audience. I wanted women and men in attendance to walk away realizing that body politics include discussions around race, class, and sexual orientation. I want them to know that body “image” is also a public health issue. If we do not interrogate the images we see all too often on TV, we are continuing to validate a climate that validates and glorifies violence against women (check out Jean Kilbourne – she is my shero on this issue!). I want people to leave the festival with a newer understanding of how we move through our bodies when they are ill, how we must re-negotiate our identities and our limitations, how others view us, etc. I want this festival to encourage us to challenge how we define “beauty,” “femininity,” and “body image.” I want it to expand our minds into spaces of identity.

Collaborating with filmmakers:

I had followed Jean Kilbourne’s work and knew instantly that once Killing Us Softly 4 came out, it would be hot off the press in my festival!

Colleen Furlotte’s Question of Beauty has a great intergenerational approach to the issue.

Elizabeth St. Philip’s film Colour of Beauty discusses issues of colourism/racism in the fashion industry, which speaks to my goal of expanding our discussion on “body image.” All too often, we discuss the fashion indudstry from the perspective of the size of models, but very rarely have we had critical discussions about colour. Is colour only good when exoticized? For the most part, it’s still an industry with a very Eurocentric standard of beauty.

The majority of the films were programmed by Aisha Fairclough, my partner in both love and war! She was simply amazing. Members of our festival advisory board have also played key roles in pulling this together. Members include Tina Reid, Ai Rei Dooh-Tousignant, and Ashley Demartini, all of whom work or have worked with the National Film Board, where all our films are screening on July 17-18. So while the festival was my vision, and truly sprang from work I’ve been doing for years, you can see that it’s nothing short of a group effort!

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Shameless readers, take note: there is a YouthZone component of the festival that will take plcae on Saturday, July 17, from 10am-4:30pm. Young women aged 12-18 will have the opportunity to see films, participate in workshops, get free feminist, and have a free lunch! For registration, please contact info@bitemefilmfest.com with the subject line: BITE ME! YouthZone.

BITE ME!
Toronto International Body Image Film & Arts Festival

Exploring issues of body image, media (re) presentation, identity and advocacy through creative mediums…

Where: National Film Board, Toronto Mediatheque, 150 John Street, Toronto, ON M5V 3C3
www.nfb.ca/mediatheque, 416.973.3012/ 416.973.0896

Information: http://www.bitemefilmfest.com/index.html

When: Saturday July 16- Sunday July 18, 2010

Shameless readers, take note!

BITE ME! YouthZone @ NFB Mediatheque
Saturday July 17, 10:00a.m.-4:00p.m.

Free Film Screenings, Media Literacy & Self Awareness Workshops, Books and Lunch for Girls 12-18 years of age.

For registration, please contact info@bitemefilmfest.com
Subject Line: BITE ME! YouthZone

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Here’s something you Toronto readers may want to check out. It’s an art opening and also a screening of a film made by Jessica Yee, activist, community organizer, and Shameless blogger and contributor.

The Centre for Women’s Studies in Education and The Native Youth Sexual Health Network present:

Youth Resisting Colonialism and Rebuilding Pathways to Hope - A Film Screening and Art Exhibition

Monday, September 21st, 2009
OISE Building, 252 Bloor St. W., Room 2-212
6 pm to 9 pm (film @ 7 pm)

This event exhibits the work of youth reflecting their resistance to violence and colonialism through artistic expression.

The exhibit will be followed by a screening of Building a Highway of Hope, a documentary filmed and directed by Indigenous feminist activist Jessica Yee about the numerous disappearances and murders of Aboriginal women along Highway 16 in British Columbia, followed by a panel discussion featuring Jessica Yee of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, Charlene Catchpole, Executive Director of the North York Women’s Shelter, and Tannis Nielsen, Artist and Youth Program Coordinator, Native Canadian Centre of Toronto.

The exhibition will continue until October 2, 2009.

Light refreshments will be served. Venue is wheelchair accessible.
For more information contact the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education at: 416-978-2080 or cwse@oise.utoronto.ca

This week, one of my friends informed me of the premature passing of filmmaker John Hughes, a man who practically defined youth culture in the Eighties with his brat pack movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, and The Breakfast Club. We were discussing our favorite Hughes films, our favorite brat pack members, our favorite soundtrack song, when someone brought up Sixteen Candles.

We all remembered loving Sixteen Candles when we were younger, but when we rewatched it as adults, we found certain aspects disturbing. There was the racist comic relief provided by the Asian minstrel/exchange student, Long Duk Dong, and there was the scene where Jake Ryan, Molly Ringwald’s Object of Affection, passes off his car and his bitchy cheerleader girlfriend to The Geek, the lovable loser portrayed by Anthony Michael Hall. The girlfriend has had too much to drink and has passed out in the front seat. Instead of, I don’t know, doing something crazy like driving her home, Jake Ryan, Dreamboat Extraordinaire, gives her to The Geek, telling him to have fun (read: have sex with her, she won’t even remember in the morning). Wow. Thanks a lot for that wonderful message, John Hughes.

I’m not trying to hate on the man. After all, he gave the world the forever-awesome scene of Jeannie Bueller kicking Ed Rooney in the face. But I find the casual and unremarkable depiction of men trading a woman as a commodity disturbing. Unfortunately, sexual assault and violence against women is running rampant in Hollywood. Rape or the threat of rape appears in everything from comedies to action movies. Hollywood takes our terrifying culture of misogyny, which has most recently gifted us with a massacre in a fitness club, and turns it into a punchline. And it’s becoming more and more common.

I rented Blindness and found myself sick to my stomach after a 10-minute gang rape scene. My friend Trancer was grossed out by the threat of rape playing a part in the new Terminator movie, especially offensive since the franchise has spent over two decades as a bastion for strong female characters. In response, she decided to make a list of all the movies in which sexual assault or rape occurs. The list doesn’t judge the quality of the movies. As she states, “Some of these are good movies, some are bad and some are *really* bad! Some of these deal with the issue seriously. Most of them don’t.” And like the Guerilla Girls statistics comparing the number of exhibited women artists versus the number of female nudes on display in museums, Trancer decided to compare the number of films depicting men being sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault with the number of films depicting women being sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault. The current count, just based on reader submissions?

MOVIES IN WHICH WOMEN ARE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED OR THREATENED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT: 179

MOVIES IN WHICH MEN ARE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED OR THREATENED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT: 15

Click more to see the list as it currently stands. Have another film to add? Leave it in the comments. Let’s see exactly how big this list can grow. Let’s “show how commonplace and totally cliched sexual violence against women (while presented as entertainment and something that only happens to women) has become.”

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When we started the Roller Derby League here in Prince George we were pretty excited about the onslaught of Roller Derby culture about to hit our communities: the Hell On Wheels documentary, Knockdown Knits, and the forthcoming Whip It. With Whip It about to come out it’s like we, the roller derby’ers, have fully arrived in hegemonic pop culture. The trailer brings on debate about the showiness of the sport, the brutal beatings so often left out on television (and not usually on the track), and the weird continuity issues of a teenager being able to play in an adult league. Regardless, the soundtrack is phenomenal and the stacked cast including Zoe Bell, Juliette Lewis, Eve, and Ellen Page will make this movie a gem. And, it must turn out right because Page’s character’s dad gives her a shiny new pair of Riedells: such a well earned and classic new gift for any roller girl who tries to make a name for herself on the track.

Last week, Heather Wood Rudúlph wrote an article for Huffington Post highlighting five reasons we still need feminism. Number four on that list was as follows:

Obsessed, Bride Wars, Bridezillas and everything else that paints women as crazed (in various and sundry ways) to find, keep, and marry a man.

To that, I say “Amen, sister.” I am quite sick of living in a world that offers men movies like The Hangover or the oeuvre of Judd Apatow, where shlubby loser guys get to have all the fun and women exist only as punchlines to the jokes, and offers women… well, very little. Except for, y’know, a chance to fight with each other over said shlubby men.

The white heterosexual male still rules Hollywood and sometimes I think that will never, ever change. Not when I read articles like this one, in which an earnest and talented young screenwriter is told repeatedly by both professors and producers that the world doesn’t want to see a movie starring a woman, or about a woman, or even a movie where two women talk to each other about something other than a man.

To this I say, fine. If Hollywood insists on offering me nothing in the way of suitable entertainment, well, then, I will make my own fun! I have long been a devotee of fanfiction, if only because, as a queer girl, I gotta take representation where I can get it. If Hollywood isn’t going to give me a TV show where the hero is a woman who just happens to enjoy making out with other women, well, I am not going to scoff at any writer who helps to fill that gap. Plus, I’ve always thought there’s something rather subversive about fanfiction, about taking the subtext, or even the text, and seeing it in a radical new way.

And thus, I present, Bride Wars: The Alternative Story, in which, using nothing but film stills, one of the most sexist, misogynist movies of the year is turned into nothing short of a glorious lesbian love story. Don’t you just love it when the two women get married at the end? Everyone say it with me: Awwwwwww.

And they lived happily ever after…

Interested in adding some female oriented fanfiction and subversive subtext to your summer reading list? You’re just in time! Next month is the second annual International Day of Femslash.

Since the discussion has been so lively on my previous post about sexism in the new Star Trek movie, I thought I would open up the discussion of race in the new movie and in the series.

While I thought Sulu’s dramatic sword fight was awesome (and pretty sexy, too), I was disappointed by Uhura’s reduced role in the new movie. Already saddled with a legacy of being a glorified receptionist, this new Uhura lost even more power by becoming not much more than Spock’s girlfriend. A franchise that had once been praised for its diversity (which was impressive for the ‘60s) has once again become the playground of white heterosexual men.

Diversity in space?

Danielle C. Benton has written an interesting article (note: contains spoilers) for The American Prospect about the history of minorities in science fiction shows, connecting Uhura to Petty Officer Dualla of Battlestar Galactica by their occupation — answering the phone.

She also points out why a future society envisioned by white writers as being “post-racial” is so dangerous:

Most Hollywood sci-fi presents a “post-racial” world in which we’ve moved from fighting each other over cultural differences to fighting some bigger intergalactic evil. On its face, this type of film should allow for more colour-blind casting and minority roles. Yet even in the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, where the humanoids are “beyond race,” black and other minority actors are rare. Morton calls such tokenized roles the “new Mammy”

Another blogger, Center of Gravitas (note: also contains spoilers!), has also tackled the less than impressive diversity of the new film:

Unlike 1967, it is no longer revolutionary to just acknowledge the presence of people-of-colour or women. They can’t be the tokens who promise future inclusion, but then step aside when the “real” decisions need to be made. This new Star Trek only sneaked around questions of gender and racial equality. In the end, it is still a boys’ franchise that no longer wants to think about contemporary problems of racism and sexism.

I do hope that if there is a sequel, and I’m sure there will be, that some of these problems will be addressed. What was considered groundbreaking in the ‘60s just looks dated today.

What are some of your favorite sci-fi characters of colour? What about queers in space?