All posts by mgonzal6

Binaries for a Single Gender: A Review of “Women Without Men”

Movie Review: "Women Without Men"

The film Women Without Men, directed by Shirin Neshat, is set in Tehran in 1953 during a coup to bring the leader of Iran back to power.  Amid a tastefully mellow colorscape and rich cultural and organic sounds, the film follows the lives of four women during this time and reveals the effects of political unrest on their social lives.  

 

Munis:

Munis is the sister of Amir Khan.  At the start of the film, she rejects her brother’s desire for her to get married, instead choosing to closely follow the political crisis on the radio.  When he threatens to break her legs if she leaves the house, Munis jumps off of the top of a building, killing herself. Through cinematic magical realism, Neshat follows a theoretical plotline in which Munis rises from the dead and escapes her brother’s house to join the resistors.

 

Fakhri:

Fakhri, the wife of a military general, initially appears to be the most socially and financially stable of the four women.  This soon changes when her husband witnesses her admiration for an old flame, and grows jealous. He tells her that it is a woman’s job to satisfy her husband, and if she cannot, he will find a new wife.  With that, Fakhri leaves her husband and buys a house in the forest.

 

Zarin:

A prostitute whose  situation is never explicitly explained,  Zarin’s background is hinted at through her crying as a woman yells at her to prepare for a customer, as well as the image of her emaciated body in a bathhouse. She is not entirely complicit in her situation, possibly as a result of financial need.  In a final session with a customer, Zarin has a breakdown and flees the house. She is seen floating in a stream near Fakhri’s new home and Fakhri finds her, brings her home, and nurses her back to health.

 

Faezeh:

A friend of Munis’s and the more culturally traditional of the pair, Faezeh wishes to get married, especially to Munis’s brother.  Faezeh was the one to dig Munis from the ground after Amir Khan buries her, and she follows her to a coffee shop. At the coffee shop, she catches the eye of two men, who follow and rape her.  She enters a state of mental distress, and Munis takes her to Fakhri’s house, where she is taken care of and reimagines her identity and the concept of purity that she had been clinging to.

 

Completing the narratives of the four women, Women Without Men is framed in a series of conspicuous dichotomies.  The juxtapositions of two opposing concepts make apparent what Neshat is saying about each individual concept.  For example, the first and most explicit dichotomy that is introduced in the film is the binary of silence and noise.  The film opens with the sound of a horn that plays throughout. As Munis is descending through the air, she talks openly in a voiceover about how this is a leap towards silence. By beginning the film with this explicit dichotomy, Neshat prepares us to listen for sound and its absence throughout the rest of the film.  In high-energy moments of celebration or distress, there is loud clamor and music. In times of letting go, character development, women coming into themselves, and the death of self, the film has only silence or organic noises, such as the sound of a stream gurgling.

A less explicit but similarly crucial dichotomy in the film is the one between innocence and maturity.  This is most apparent in the coupling of Munis and Faezeh. Faezeh’s innocence comes at the price of naivety–she idolizes the concept of virginity, criticizing Amir Khan’s new wife for her reputation for sleeping with men, but has no grasp on what it means, suggesting that a woman’s “hole” simply grows wider after she is married– and vulnerability.  After her trauma, Faezeh chooses to opt into Munis’s more agential lifestyle. As part of this transformation, she stops wearing her head covering. When this is drawn to the viewers’ attention by Amir Khan, who asks her to be his wife, with his first wife as her servant, she reacts disdainfully. Unlike at the start of the film, she is unwilling to dismiss his character flaws, and prioritizes her own wellbeing in their relationship.  There are downsides to the maturation of the two women, though– they are both shunned by men in their phallocentric society, especially Amir Khan, and must struggle to realize their own identities and support themselves.

Additionally, there is a pairing of the urban and the organic.  The stream and Fakhri’s home are symbols of the mythical organic in the film.  When the women leave the urban, they leave men, and they are able to fully realize the power in their femininity by creating their own culture in which they can thrive.  Only Munis stays in the urban in the film, and the strength of her character lies in the similarities between her personality and the personalities of men of the film.

The setting of dichotomies may seem simple, but in fact, it is a meaningful decision.  By showing noise without sound, maturity without innocence, and organic without urban, Neshat gives the viewer no room for misinterpretation of her view of what a world of women without men would be– an oasis for healing and realizing the fullness of the feminine self.

Is College Ready for Me?

Op-Ed

Why does college readiness inevitably  refer to the students’ readiness to grapple with systems that are insufficient to support them? It  should refer instead to the readiness of a college to be held accountable for the success of students to whom it has marketed itself as a supportive and safe environment. In the past few years, Wellesley has made an effort to support POC, low-income, and first generation students. At their core though, all of these efforts place a large burden on the students themselves to spend the time, effort, and energy to find help in navigating academia. But don’t worry—administrators will serve you cake to celebrate diversity and visibility.

The problem with most of the efforts to promote diversity at Wellesley is that they are focused on mentorship.  I’m all for mentorship as a component to a robust effort to bring about inclusion, but on its own, it’s only a band aid solution, and a taxing one at that.

I’m told to find a mentor who understands my experiences.  So I go to my Latina mentor. Then I go to my gay mentor. And my physics mentor.  My mentor who was a first-generation college student. One who grew up low income. The one who descended from immigrants. There aren’t enough hours in a day to go to every mentor I need to fully realize the complexity of my identity and cobble together some sort of strategy for propelling me through a system that was fundamentally not designed to enable  a person like me to succeed. Of course I’m grateful for all of my mentors and everything they do for me, but after spending so many hours getting mentored and designing a strategy, I’m exhausted. Except that it’s not time to be exhausted– it’s time for me to put forth my best effort to execute the strategy. And even then, there’s a huge chance that that strategy won’t work.  It’s not a well-trodden path so we’re shooting in the dark.

Mentor me all you want, the system’s still screwed.

Mentorship has taught me how to file a Title IX complaint when I’m facing harassment from my professors.  But mentorship doesn’t teach the professors not to harass me. Mentorship has taught me how to respond to a professor who refuses to believe when I say I’m sick. But mentorship doesn’t teach professors not to treat me like a serial liar. Mentorship has taught me to fight and fight to prove wrong the people who don’t believe that I’m capable of succeeding.  But the fighting is tiring, especially when the people who are supposed to be on my side are actively undercutting me behind my back.

Of course, there are professors who try support me, but they’re so far outside my experience that making their support effective requires training on their part.  The way academia is set up though, jobs are highly competitive. For a professor who has not yet received tenure, taking time off from research to participate in inclusivity trainings can negatively affect a career. And for a professor who has received tenure, there are virtually no repercussions for being problematic toward students no matter how many complaints are made.

To the administrators: as for the cake, shove it up your ass. Congrats on “seeing and hearing” POC, low income, and first generation students, I guess?  Congrats on “seeing and hearing” the struggles while doing very little about it. Congrats, but until I see equitable treatment of all students, I’ll go ahead and assume this means you acknowledge the struggles, but you don’t care enough to effect any real change.

I’m calling for college readiness, and by that I mean the college’s readiness to deal with the type of students it has never had to consider before.  Train all of your professors, not just ones who express interest.  Critically examine your practices to see who isn’t benefiting and why.  Engage with the problem instead of just hiring a few diversity representatives to engage for you.  To hell with “that’s the way academia has always been.” If you’re looking for a change in the people represented in your system, you have to change the system to accommodate those people.  That’s not negotiable.

Honest Stories: An Interview With Melissa Li

Profile

If I had to choose one word to describe Melissa Li, it would be honest.  In spite of significant success in her career, when asked if it is what she would have chosen for herself she doesn’t hesitate to let me know that it absolutely isn’t. With wry humor, she tells of how as a child she felt forced into music, and how when she gained her independence she wanted to distance herself from it as much as possible. Oh, how things have changed.  I suppose when you have as much talent as Melissa, music finds you whether you like it or not. Melissa’s current career is focused on writing musicals. Most notably, Melissa wrote the music for the musical Interstate as well as contributing to the book and lyrics in collaboration with Kit Yan.  Interstate premiered at the 2018 New York Musical Festival, where it was nominated for the awards “Outstanding Musical” and “Best Music,”  and won “Outstanding Lyrics” and “Special Citation: Representation and Inclusion.”

Why has Interstate racked up so much success? Because the real beauty in Melissa’s unapologetic honesty is not her willingness to share facts about her life; rather, it is how her dedication to the truth informs her storytelling.  Interstate follows the story of Henry, a South Asian transgender boy.  Henry takes comfort in the work of the other two protagonists of the show, the transgender man Dash and the lesbian Adrian, artists who are embarking on their first national tour.  When choosing what stories to tell, Melissa prioritizes choosing only narratives she can tell with honesty. The character Adrian is based on herself, and Dash is based on her partner Kit, a transgender man, who carefully reviewed Dash and Henry’s narratives for emotional accuracy.  That’s what makes Interstate so robust– it embodies the stories of real people and the way that those real people see their own stories and emotions.  Melissa explained to me that if she wanted to tell a story that were not her own, she either wouldn’t or would do it to assist someone else who was working to tell their own story.  Ultimately, she doesn’t feel like other people’s stories are hers to decide to tell.

Furthermore, she chooses to tell more diverse and uplifting narratives of queer people of color than the tragedies we typically see in mainstream media.  Melissa hopes that underrepresented people will not only see themselves in her work, but also that they come away feeling hopeful and supported. Even if that means passing up opportunities for her own career.  In our talk, Melissa shared with me that she and Kit were recently approached with an offer to produce Interstate commercially.  There was one condition though– they would have to cut Henry’s support system from the plotline.  Here, Melissa admitted to me what a difficult decision this proved to be. Commercial production, after all, would take away the stress of fundraising faced by independent artists, and would make her work widely available to general public.  Ultimately, she and Kit declined the offer. In spite of all the benefits it would provide, they could not justify adding Interstate, a work already cherished by many as an uplifting creative gesture, to the ever-growing list of work that casts queer people of color as lonely, afraid and sad.

Selfless and honest, Melissa is part of a new generation of artists.  She is working to create a space at the table for people who have traditionally been underrepresented in the whitewashed arts.  She seeks to tell traditional Broadway-style stories, the only difference between those stories and the ones she tells being the types of people she chooses to represent.  Her work is not what she considers radical. Still, she’s making waves in the world of theater, and honestly, it means a lot to people.

Responding to Defense

Letter to the Editor

To the Editor,

In his June 2017 article “In Defense of Cultural Appropriation,” Kenan Malik begins by insisting that he is bravely putting his job on the line by defending a “controversial opinion.” This tactic is often used by people to preemptively invalidate the response of the marginalized communities that they are intentionally hurting, shutting themselves off from opposing opinions. Instead of offering my own opinion, I’d like to point out an issue with the argument itself.

When speaking about challenging racism, Malik postulates that “Once, it was a demand for equal treatment for all.” He then goes on to claim that Elvis Presley becoming a cultural icon was a clear case of racism determining that white people can achieve substantially more success than people of color for the same work-Chuck Berry’s music, which came before Presley’s, had the rock and roll vibes that made Presley’s work “unique” and “revolutionary” . Evidently, the call for society to pressure the Elvis Presleys of the world to stop appropriating culture is, in fact, a demand for equal treatment for the Berrys. This seems perfectly in alignment with the past acts of challenging racism that Malik approves of. However, he then implies that ending cultural appropriation doesn’t challenge racism because it wouldn’t have single-handedly eradicated Jim Crow laws. Malik argues defending cultural appropriation holds that anti-racist acts are only valid if they give redress to the group as a whole, but what is the point of corrective action if it doesn’t include individuals?

To address Malik’s concern that he will be out of the job because people will be offended by his opinion, I am not offended.  How could I be? Malik’s “defense” of cultural appropriation doesn’t make enough sense to cause offense.

Collecting Stories Under the White Gaze

Feature Report

The  special exhibition Collecting Stories: Native American Art premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts  Boston in April 2018 and is set to close in March  2019. The online announcement of Collecting Stories identifies it as “the first in a series of three exhibitions funded by the Henry Luce Foundation that will use understudied works from the MFA’s collection to address critical themes in American art and the formation of modern American identities.” The goal of the exhibit is to unearth overlooked pieces of its collection to reconsider and correct its history of poor representation of the artwork of other cultures.  It is running concurrently with popular events such as Ansel Adams in Our Time, which draws in a queue long enough to wrap around the museum’s foyer.  It was apparent from the few guests visiting the Collecting Stories exhibit that it was a relatively less popular attraction.  Still, I anticipated an enriching experience.

Frequent patrons of the museum know that when they visit special galleries they will experience not only the art being advertised, but also the art of high quality curation. In the past year alone, they would have been able to view such notable collections such as Unexpected Families, a multi-room display juxtaposing pieces from many eras and mediums that challenged conventional notions of family by showcasing  platonic, adopted, multiracial, and queer families. The emotional rawness of that exhibit brought many visitors to tears on the cushioned benches positioned about the room, potentially for that explicit purpose. The curation of  Collecting Stories stands in stark contrast with the museum’s high standards.

The most immediately striking feature of the room in which Collecting Stories: Native American Art is housed is its size.  The space is tiny, with room for three to four paintings or boxes of handicrafts per wall, and another four pieces free-standing in the middle of the room.  The size alone was enough to discourage some visitors; I witnessed a group of women who opened the door, scanned the collection, then turned around and exited.  They say good things come in small packages, though, so I decided to explore the exhibit anyway in the hopes of finding some hidden treasures. And some of the pieces truly were beautiful.  There was a large striped Navajo wearing blanket, and and a collection of ancient Mississippian earthenware. Authentic Native American voices were integrated into the descriptions of the work, through quotes, traditional stories, and even a video of a Native woman talking about the significance of a Navajo Biil and Sis’tichii on display.  

Work your way around the room counterclockwise, however, and you will only make it past the first wall before you notice a piece that seems out of place in the exhibit.  It is a painting that, while it features Native Americans, is clearly in a different style from Native American work. In fact, a look at the object label reveals that the piece is by a German American.  Several other pieces follow the same theme. The museum’s publicity materials had indicated that the exhibit would explore “the range of perspectives, motivations, and voices involved in building the early holdings of Native American art at the Museum,” so I was utterly unprepared for the volume of pieces that were from white artists.  Nor was there any indication that passing these works off as part of Native American culture had been a misstep in the museum’s past. In total, around one-third of the collection, including the most prominent silver-plated vase that was the centerpiece of the room, was the creation of white Americans.  The relative size of the collection, combined with the amount of work by white artists on display leaves visitors questioning the exhibit’s stated purpose to provide an “opportunity to reconsider this understudied collection.” Is a reconsideration of Native American artwork that heavily features the work and interpretation of white Americans really a positive message for the MFA to be sending?

In an attempt to represent this exhibit as objectively as possible, I approached the information desk of the museum to inquire if there would be a docent available in the exhibit, or perhaps a formal tour that I could go on at some point in the day.  I explained that I wanted I wanted more insight into the curation of the pieces. The response of the woman at the desk was puzzlement, mixed with an air of condescension. “Can you not look at it on your own?” she wanted to know. Admittedly, it was a busy day at the museum, but with such a closed-off response to questions, a visitor is left with their own interpretation of the prominence of white American pieces within the Native American special exhibit.  Unfortunately, my interpretation, and likely that of many other guests, was not favorable.

The museum presents this exhibition as an attempt to redeem itself for years of overlooking Native American art.  Collecting Stories: Native American Art, however, fulfill that objective.  The MFA’s appropriation of native culture shows a disrespect that is a reflection of the disrespect of the rest of white American society, from the feathered headdresses of Coachella to sexy Pocahontas Halloween costumes.  The Museum of Fine Arts may be intent on “collecting stories,” but it’s unclear if they want to step away from their problematic past and start allowing artists from different cultures to tell those stories.

Tias, Comida, Amor

Blog Post

My father pulls up to a house one Christmas evening. As he silences the car, the sound of the engine is replaced by the squeals and the  chatter of children playing. My sneakers hit the pavement, and I’m desperate to join them. These kids, who are being schooled in the States, switch fluidly between Spanish and English, making our playtime much more comfortable than what I know I am about to endure on the inside.  Inside, I’ll find a place to sit, glued at the hip to my father. The TV will play the news or possibly a soap. At least seven people will be around, laughing and celebrating. I’ll be staring at the carpet, studying the floral design, the swirls and faded patterns, and burning the image into the back of my mind.  I’ll be sweating and praying to the figurines of La Virgen that line the room that no one will direct a question to me.  I feel like I’m trying to integrate with a different culture for the first time and realizing just how difficult that can be.

But this is not a different culture.  This is my culture. As my father likes to remind me, I’m not a guest in this house, I’m family. These aren’t strangers who have invited me to take part in their celebration.  These are my tias, my tios, my primos. The difference is that I grew up at my mother’s house. At the request of her family, who are uncomfortable when people don’t speak their language in the home, I only speak English.  In school, growing up without an accent has served me well. Here though, trying to interact with my loved ones, especially the older generations who speak only Spanish, I can’t hold a conversation with my own family.

My tia offers me a ladle of something on the stove.  It’s a deep purple color, and looks uncomfortably slimy and lumpy.  I try to refuse but my father, my papi, shoots me the look, the one where his lowered eyebrows and suddenly unsmiling mouth tell me that refusal will not be without repercussions later. My tia has been working on preparing food all day for anyone who stops by, and it would be rude to the point of hurting her feelings to turn this down.  I ask him what’s in the spoon. After a quick exchange with my father, my tia turns to me and says with a heavy Mexican accent something that sounds like the word punch.

Punch? It doesn’t look remotely like the bright red, sweet, sticky stuff that I’m used to, and I’m skeptical, but I know that the lecture I’ll catch from my papi later if I don’t try it will be worse than it could possibly taste.  I take a sip.

When I taste the punch, I am taken aback. Full-bodied and full of fresh fruit flavors with sparkling cinnamon notes.  It’s warm and comforting and inviting, and tastes like fresh foods before they have been processed and packaged beyond recognition, like the punch I had been expecting that has no recognizable flavors, only sugar and tang.  It tastes like Christmas before the commercialization. I take another big drink and mumble my gracias, hoping that my face can express my emotions better than my limited vocabulary.

My childhood was full of these awkward but loving family celebrations. I attended solemn Posadas celebrations and large parties complete with mariachis. At each and every one, I broke away as quickly as I could to go play with the children, but not before “visiting” with the adults, sitting uncomfortably while they chatted after hugging hello, unsure of what to do with my mouth until they handed me a morsel of whatever they had been preparing for me. Warm punches, freshly-baked and fragrant sweet breads, and cheesey, spicy, savory tamales  gave me a literal taste of a culture that I had been born into, despite the Spanish language barrier. I never understood what my tias were saying but I understood their love expressed in the flavor and efforts of preparing the home cooked foods that they offered me, and I hoped that, through my appreciative smiles, they understood mine . Before we left the house, we hugged our farewells, and my tia’s embrace told me the message had gotten through.