sundries

[rm]

Brief, as it's Sunday, and you got a few links from me last night too. This included me jumping the gun on a thing. Sorry to get my over-excitedness on you. If you have any questions, please address it with me privately.

You do no want to know how many moths decided to come into our flat last night. Ugh ugh ugh ugh. Fuckers.

Yay, finished the edit for HackGender.

Hey, so a friend of mine is a CART provider, and has a cool blog about it, that's interesting from a few perspectives -- including disability access, being a sole proprietor in New York, and neat technology stuff. It occurs to me that with my readership, a large number of you may very well care about at least one of those three things. So hey, check it out.

Advocating for people with disabilities in Syria.

Black and (mostly Orthodox) Jewish.

Rounnd 1 of bidding in the help_pakistan auction ends today.

I still cannot find just a handful of links I find adequately discusses the many problems with the Beck rally: from intense racism to the apocalyptic delusions that rule of law has fled in the US and Marxist homosexuals are rampaging through the streets stealing everyone's guns.

Folks, voting for writerinadrawer Round 10 -- the round that decides the winner -- closes tonight. More votes are needed. Check it out. It's just three little stories and some opinions. You can do it!

So, the Buffy finale.... Really good. Satisfying. Calls back to things in the series without hitting you over the head with it, but also allowing you to remember the journey you've been on. Deeply, deeply aware of itself as a finale, and deeply deeply aware of its audience as knowing it is watching a finale. And, even still, when people die, there is still just a tiny moment of time to acknowledge and mourn that death (both Spike and Anya get that). It's also one of those finales that makes me stand up and cheer, because it has the right music, and the right vanquishing of the evil and all of that.

Which brings me to CoE and its reception. It wasn't written as a finale, although it was written as something that could exist as a finale if need be. And, I suspect, it was viewed by a lot of the audience, especially the American audience for who the structure of the way Torcwhood has aired is a much more radical departure than what they are used to, as something that was a finale. Which really, really, impacts reception. Because seriously? Our show is over and it ends in defeat? No wonder people are angry!

Of course, this also raises the question of how we place programs in time. I.e., did Joyce die when that episode first aired? Does she die every time that episode is watched? Is she dying, constantly, right now, over and over again? Extrapolate to Torchwood. See how that works?

I also felt, ultimately, that the finale of Buffy was more true to its aspirations of feminism than much of the series. All girls who are called arrive, and they skills are not just for survival, but for the perfectly ordinary, victorious living of their lives. Great power ultimately didn't turn Willow evil, but good and wise.

And the argument that "well, it was actually Spike who saved everyone and that's not feminist" doesn't hold for me; a man had to die to save people, but the girls saved people and got to keep on living. Ultimately, I think in a show like this, where you want all key characters involved in the end and to make sacrifices, you're sort of fucked in terms of reception -- at the end of the day, the women will always seem not enough, and rescued by men, no matter what you're trying to say (and you know I have serious problems in general with Whedon's feminist cred).

I almost don't want to read the comics, as I thought the ending was so cleanly and suitably executed, but I will eventually. In the, I have no time!!!! place that I'm in now, can someone just briefly tell me if there are any graveside/mourning type moments in there I need to find now as opposed to later for my D*C presentation?

Comments

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Thank you! This was a lovely comment to read. I have to agree with you on all points.


I do want to explain that when I was growing up, my quietly feminist parents raised me to look past gender and sex when reading stories and watching movies. This was literally my thought process as a small child: "Okay, that person with a penis has more testosterone, hormones, etc, that make him physically stronger, but he's not looking at the person with the vagina and thinking that she is weak because she has more estrogen, etc - he sees her as an equal as a person. Male people and female people have their various differences, but they're people, and people do things like people." Nobody told me that playing in the dirt and having short hair was "a boy thing." I loved to bury my Voltron toys and turn them into zombies and then have my Ninja Turtle action figures save the day. I would take half my Barbie dolls and chop off their hair and have them be the lovers of the other Barbies, although I may have been influenced by my neighbor Sue and her girlfriend, Susan. When I played with my She-Ra toys, the female figures always rescued the male figures, but I never "compartmentalized" genders. I was aware of how "boys and girls were different" but I never saw the big deal about it.
It wasn't until I got into middle school that I realized the weird gender/sex gaps that people place on each other. Girls do this, boys to that. Why are you doing boy things if you're a girl, and visa versa. I didn't tell anyone that I used to have lesbian neighbors and that one of my elementary school classmates was trans (born female, presented as male). Because I saw that a lot of the other kids didn't like knowing these things. My favorite creative writing teacher got teased by students for having a girlfriend. So my world got jolted for a bit.

When I watch Buffy, I am keenly aware of all these issues, but the little girl in me shrugs it off and says, "But they're all people. So what?" And when I read some blog posts by people who blasted Whedon and Spike, etc, that little girl in me thought, "Seriously why all the man hating? They're PEOPLE."

I think my childhood issues stemmed more from being disabled and shunned than being a disabled female and shunned.

I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I'll stop now. I hope I got some kind of point across.

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

I totally see what you're getting at. I was one of two girls and the eldest. Since there were no boys about, a lot of the jobs that our society likes to peg as "stuff guys do" my sister and I got to do, like take out the trash, haul firewood, help dad fix cars and build stuff, etc.

We lived with my grandmother for a time, who both was widowed early and grew up with just her mom (her dad died when she was 3). This meant that I saw women doing traditionally male tasks all the time and heard about women keeping jobs and raising a family all without the benefits of having a man about, doing things like heading the household.

So, I too, grew up with people being people first and everything else second, third, or irrelevant.

There is some interesting commentary in one (some) of the Buffy essay books I read a few years ago that discusses how Spike is Othered enough to come across as more female than male, in that he is kidnapped, tortured, and needs to be rescued as much as any "damsel in distress".

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

I giggled at the "Spike as damsel in distress" thing. I'll have to find that essay book.

And the child in me is confused again, asking "What does being feminine have to do with being rescued?" and I can no longer explain the world to Child Me without stumbling.
I grew up to live in a crazy world full of psychic separations that smack so hard of essentialism that it makes my head spin.