Monday, January 23, 2017

Intersectional Pussycat! Knit! Knit!

Some folks have pointed out that all the emphasis on lady-parts and pink pussies at the Women's Marches excluded transgender people by focusing on reproductive systems as the determining factor in gender. 
As someone whose parts match her self-identity, I liked seeing vulvas etc. on display in a positive, powerful way for a change, but it would be fun if there more posters that mixed up gender & sex too. There were some.

I have nothing else to do *cough cough* but play around with a couple re-presentations. So I made these.




Also, some folks said the pink pussy hats were racist because not everyone's labia are pink. The hats make your head into a pussy-cat with ears, but, still, yeah, point taken. (I did think the march was awfully pink myself.)
Anyway, the hat colors would be really easy to change--for instance, the bottom knitter in the photo below is knitting a dark purple edge...  

Thinking about knitting, I had to make this collage.



Would folks get the pun? Not sure how generally well known this movie is--Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
I haven't actually seen it, so now I must.

Noted queer feminist film critic B. Ruby Rich said that when she first saw Faster, Pussycat! in the 1970s she "was absolutely outraged that [she'd] been forced to watch this misogynist film that objectified women and that was really just short of soft-core porn."
But.. 
"Years later it got re-released and I watched it on video at the start of the New Queer Cinema moment — it must’ve been ’91 or ’92 when I saw it, and I just loved it.
And I ended up programming it at the Pacific Film archive in a program they’d asked me to do for a special summer festival called “Scary Women” where I showed it with Basic Instinct.

And what I talked about was how the audience writes the film; how this film, which seemed to be one thing when I saw it in the ’70s in the heyday of feminism, turned into something completely different when I saw it again 15 years later in the heyday of queer culture.

So I wrote that piece for the Village Voice, talking about my first opinion, my radically changed opinion, and how films get edited by history. And that’s a really wonderful thing to be able to do.
www.indiewire.com/2014/02/profiles-in-criticism-b-ruby-rich-126884

4 comments:

  1. LOVE your posters!

    I've ever seen Faster Pussycat either. Your blog makes me curious.

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  2. Got the reference, never seen the film. I like that collage a lot, it's got the film strip thing going for it as well.

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  3. Thanks Sparker---I hadn't thought of a film strip--I used to love viewing those in grade school. That's an idea for future collages!

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