In Rambling Response: Miss Representation

In 1992, Pat Roberston remarked that ‘the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women’ but rather ‘about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians’. Misogynistic and dismissive rhetoric such as this has served to socialise a stigma around the term ‘feminism’, which should less hyperbolically and more truthfully perhaps be defined as a belief in and advocacy of the equal rights of females as males. Its name is not ‘equality’ as the definition denotes, for such a genderless noun would deny the historically precedent patriarchal bias in power relations and understandings. Feminism is more than campaigning for equal pay or votes for women; it’s also about how we subconsciously perceive the difference between opportunities as viable for, and the breaking down of the apparently rigid dichotomy between ‘male’ and ‘female’. Arguably the greatest vehicle debilitating this movement and continuing to socialise a stigma around ‘The F Word’ in the contemporary political climate is the media, which, Siebel Newsom argues, is both ‘the message and the messenger’. Vitally, the neutrality of ‘message’ and ‘messenger’ should be highlighted in Newsom’s argument, for whilst the media is undoubtedly often a hindrance to the advocacy of equality, reinforcing and perpetuating existing patriarchal structures of power, it can also be used as a powerful and revolutionary vehicle of social change. It all depends on who is behind the discourse.

American teenagers spend an average of 10 hours and 41 minutes each day consuming some form of media. From just this one base fact it is hard to deny the precedence that media holds in shaping our national discourse – one could even go so far as to argue that the media is our national discourse in the technological age, as hinted by the 2011 documentary, Miss Representation. And what, exactly, is the discourse that American teenagers are being fed in their 10 hours and 41 minutes, give or take, each day with regards to femininity? Studies show that 53% of 13 year old girls are unhappy with their bodies, a statistic that increases to 78% by the time girls turn 17. In parallel, rates of depression amongst girls/women doubled between 2000 and 2010, a period of dramatic rise in the pervasion of (social) media into the everyday. And, further, the American Psychological Association has found that self-objectification is now a national epidemic and problem. So? The problem is undoubtedly rooted in the reality that the media treats women as bodies. It’s largely unconcerned with women as intellectuals, equals, or, basically, human beings. As Margaret Atwood insinuates, women are bodies as men are minds. She writes, 

Performative Post-Politics

I've always been a fussy eater. Peas? Fish? A slab of plain chocolate? Gag.* In a commendable but largely unsuccessful ploy to get me to eat such gag-inducing items, my parents frequently delivered the line of how ungrateful me should just think of Those Poor Children In Africa who would die for my discarded plate of peas and fish. Noted, Poor Children In Africa, but I just don't like peas or fish, or chocolate. I'd gladly give them to you if I could. Also, whilst we're in this hypothetical and quixotic dialogue, how did you come to enter the performative politics of my parents' diction, let alone my fussy eating habits? Dear Children in Africa who would die for my plate of peas and fish, who are we to appropriate your sociopolitical demographics in our discussions concerning personal political opinions (This is a democracy, Mother, therefore, no, I will not eat the peas and fish, but thank you for your input)? Do you talk of Those Poor Children in Britain who would just die for your plate of chocolate? Because you're misinformed. I wouldn't die for your chocolate, sorry. 

Does this innocent appropriation of politics, with a multitude of suffixes attached on front (geopolitics, international politics, etc.), into a normative performance by You and I stretch beyond the innocence of my personal food politics (Peace Not Peas!), or, is political discussion the violated territory of Them (the politicians, the journalists, the victims, the perpetrators, the in-the-know people) by Us? I came across someone's statement on Tumblr where they touched upon performative politics in a diatribe against the 'commodification' of grief and outrage again the other day, having previously saved it for future reference, and, currently being in France surrounded by a multitude of EU flags on the backs of every car that passes on the road, scratched stickers of solidarity with Je Suis Charlie plastered onto the tilted walls in our small village and shadows of the recent terrorist attacks in the presence of armed soldiers patrolling the beaches, I can't help but question its point.

Translating definitions of I

Dusk is beginning to edge forwards as the golden shades of Autumnal months slowly blur the fading hues of Summer. I'm looking to choose my second-year modules and explore dissertation options, whilst my brother and his peers look to draft personal statements and compile lists of prospective universities. It's the season of exam results and back-to-school. It's the season of bated breath and tentative preparation for those looking to make and those looking to solidify university applications. It's a question of who I am, and who I need to be to be who I want to be. What defines me? What do I have to offer? What have I achieved? I've long been someone who reverts to defining herself by her grades, but such a definition has a propensity to collapse and is interpretatively variable (an A to one may be a failure whilst to another it is irreducible success). And yet, this season unforgivingly begs the question, who am I? 

I am a hundred unread books and 500 devoured books. I am bitter coffee disguised in taste by the sweetness of three sugars and drunken sullenly for the #aesthetic and the caffeine. I am pink loafers worn to death and stubbornly kept for old times' sake. I am overused semi-colons in an essay laboured over to the soundtrack of Interstellar. I am thirty photos taken on a rainy walk to supervisions, catching old buildings and fresh faces. I am an old 1930s typewriter gentrified into the 21st century and used to type notes and quotes, waiting for the adventure of a five page letter. I am breakfast hurriedly eaten on the way to lectures. I am hopping, skipping and bounding into hard sand on an athletics track, eyeing the clock for dinner. I am burnt popcorn at 4am. I am quoting the words to Father of the Bride out of context and subconsciously so. I am leather satchels and old school blazers. I am the dreamy spires of Cambridge, the mounds of reading lists and the forts of library books. I am the words I type and the words I read. I am. I.

Who am I? 

Each definition is, and can only ever be, mere translation. 

ON THINKING AND CHLOEGRAPHY

"When we 'see' a landscape, we situate ourselves in it."

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I'm no longer reading around the world in eighty novels, but writing myself. I've changed my cyber-address and, though I've dragged my old luggage with me, I want to situate myself in this new address more pervasively than before. 

The first undergraduate essay I was set, in Michaelmas 2015, was to discuss the nature of Geography as a subject being unified or divided. Having no extensive accompanying reading list or lecture scribbles for guidance in formulating an argument, as quickly became the norm for supervision essays, it was entirely in the abstract that my essay planning began. What is Geography, really? The OED says that Geography comes from the Greek geōgraphia, constituted by gē (earth) and graphia (writing). Essentially, Geography is therefore literally writing the earth, or, earth-writing. The suffix 'graphia' (or more colloquially, 'graphy') is hence used to denote some particular form of writing or field of study.  

19 art 

6 writing

1 science

6 types of works

and 19 fields of study are listed on Wikipedia under the brief explanation of 'graphia' as a suffix.

Chloegraphy is not one of them. It's made up. But it's apt.