Saturday, October 19, 2013

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

A festival of feminism, says the poster

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:03 AM PDT

feminsim festval, comedy, theatre, camden people's theatreCamden People’s Theatre is proud to present Calm Down, Dear.

When prime minister David Cameron told Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘calm down, dear‘  not so long ago, was it a bad joke, or a sexist bullying?

Three guesses.

But it’s a good title for a show or two. Or even a festival of feminism.

This particular Calm Down, Dear is a three-week season of innovative theatre, performance, comedy, cabaret and discussion about feminism. What did it mean then? What does it mean now? Why is it resurgent?

Camden People’s Theatre's co-directors Jenny Paton and Brian Logan said they had been struck earlier this year by the number of feminist-themed applications that had been made to the theatre's annual four week Sprint festival which showcases ‘physical, visual and unusual theatre’.

That didn't come out of nowhere, they point out: the boom in feminist thought and action – from No More Page 3 to Jane Austen on banknotes to Everyday Sexism on Twitter – has been one of the most heartening features of public life in the last couple of years.

The Calm Down, Dear festival celebrates and channels that, and Camden People’s Theatre will hosting what Paton and Logan call 'some of the most exciting and urgent art to be found at the crest of this feminist new wave'.

The festival starts on 22 October.

The October programme starts with ‘Pretty Ugly’, presented by artist researcher Louise Orwin.

Pretty Ugly is about you rating me based solely on my looks… It is also about a recent worldwide trend of teenage girls posting videos on YouTube asking viewers to rate their looks.

Pretty Ugly follows Louise Orwin's trail of research into how Generation YouTube uses the ever widening field of social networking to reach others.

There is a live YouTube experiment, a tender and inappropriate love story, and some of Louise Orwin's childhood toys.

It is about our obsessions and pretensions, and teenage girls. It is about you and me and the internet.

Pretty Ugly runs from 23 October to 9 November. For tickets and info, click here.

To watch the teaser trailer, click here.

‘The Fanny Hill Project’ also starts on 23 October. Fanny's got a story to tell. But she can't seem to find the right words. Luckily John is here and, with the audience's help, he is going to tell it just right.

With karaoke, high heels and a whole lot of sanitiser, TheatreState get to grips with accepted expressions of female sexuality. As pop culture and John Cleland's 18th-century porno 'Fanny Hill' collide, TheatreState asks how far we've really come.

TheatreState will, so they say, once more bring their unique sense of fun and irreverence to Camden People's Theatre.

The Fanny Hill Project is running from 23 October until 25 November: for ticket info click here.

‘Poked’, presented by Amanda Monfrooe, is a new spoken word piece with puppets and pop, and the confession of a failed feminist propagandist.

Poked won the Arches Platform 18 Award 2013. Amanda Monfrooe is a US-born, UK-based performance maker, and an artistic associate of the National Theatre of Scotland from 2011-12. Reviews say Poked is 'chillingly contemporary' and 'highly thought-provoking'.

For more info click here.

‘Asking For It’, the winner of the Foster’s Panel Prize at the Edinburgh festival 2013 and the Malcolm Hardee Award for comic originality, isp resented by Adrienne Truscott, one-half of the infamous Wau Wau Sisters.

Dressed only from the waist up and ankles down, she undoes and does in the rules and rhetoric about rape, comedy and the awkward laughs in between.

Showing on 27 October at 7pm. For more info, click here.

A Bic for Her: Bridget Christie's critically acclaimed smash hit show – winner of the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award 2013 – is being performed at the Calm Down Dear event on only one night: 27 October at 8.30 pm

Why does Bic think women need special biros to write with? Who decided Thatcher and Beyonce were feminist icons? What did Sir Stirling Moss say about women's brains?

This show includes some shouting.

For tickets and more info, click here.

On 29 and 30 October Kate Craddock and Steve Gilroy will be presenting an epic tale told on an intimate scale. Inspired by maverick British adventurer Gertrude Bell, 'The GB Project' is a powerful, insightful look at the impact of one woman on the shaping of modern day Iraq.

It fuses fragments of text gathered from diaries, letters and biographies, alongside contemporary voices and speeches to raise questions about history, legacy, loyalty and love.

For more info or tickets, click here.

Am I Right, Ladies?! is a work in progress from Luisa Omielan, who after a phenomenally successful debut hour with What Would Beyoncé Do?! is back with the tricky second album; and on 31 October you get the chance to help her.

To find out more, click here.

To see the programme for the November part of this festival, click here.

The women of classic ‘Doctor Who’

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 04:00 AM PDT

Tardis, dr who, bitch flicks

by Barrett Vann

Our weekly cross-post from Bitch Flicks.

Let's talk about Doctor Who. Let's talk, in fact, about the Doctor's companions. Back in the day of 2005, when Doctor Who came back to the airwaves, there were a lot of inevitable comparisons between this New Who and the Classic Who that ran from '63 to '89. People talked about the Doctor himself, about the plots, the monsters – and they talked about his companions. Rose Tyler was lauded as a new kind of companion – not so much an assistant as a partner, wearing baggy jeans and using her wits and determination, not one of those screaming, knicker-flashing ninnies from the old series back in the sexist sixties and seventies.

Well, wait just a bloody minute. Certainly the stereotype exists that companions back in the day were nothing but a bit of eye candy to entice the dads into watching a family show, and no-one is going to argue that feminism and gender issues haven't advanced in fifty years. But were the women of Classic Who really nothing but a load of scantily-dressed damsels who screamed at the first sign of danger or imminent alien invasion?

They certainly were not.

I'm going to start with the Third Doctor, because I love him, and because two of his companions make a wonderful illustration for the variety of why and how the women of Classic Who were awesome. The Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee from 1970-1974, had several companions, but it is the first two I want to compare here, Liz Shaw and Jo Grant.

Dr Liz Shaw was a Cambridge-educated scientist, and expert on meteorites with at least two degrees, one in physics and one in medicine. Although young and fashionable (fashionable here meaning improbably short skirts and equally improbable heels), she has no romances whilst on the show, and grows impatient with being treated like the Doctor's errand-girl. A career woman (and undeniably a woman not a girl), she's part of UNIT before the Doctor showed up, and though they do develop a good relationship, he's never the end-all be-all of what she's doing with her life. Indeed, when she does eventually leave UNIT to return to her research, she cites as her reason that the Doctor did not need a capable assistant, what he really needed was "someone to pass him his test tubes and tell him how brilliant he was." Amusingly, this rather meta observation does indeed reflect what was often the role of the Doctor's companion, a role Liz often deviated from.

Her successor, Jo Grant, would seem initially to fit much more comfortably into that role. When she first hit the screen, Josephine Grant was young, 19 or 20, inexperienced, and only got the job at UNIT because she had an uncle in the ministry. She's blonde, bubbly, and at first appears to be a bit of a ditz. She flirts with the UNIT men, she giggles, she admits (often) that she doesn't understand things; when she's frightened, she screams. In her first appearance, she accidentally wrecks an experiment the Doctor's working on, and then is hypnotised into almost blowing up UNIT. In stark contrast to the very scientific Liz, and the Doctor himself, she's a New Agey 70's girl, open to the possibilities of magic and superstition, and occasionally the show mocks her for this. On one occasion, she actually ends up dressed in white and strapped to an altar as a virgin sacrifice. A more potent image of objectified, powerless femininity it would be hard to find. Unlike Liz, who leaves the show to further her career, Jo leaves because she's fallen in love and wants to get married and study mushrooms in the Amazon.

So it might be easy to dismiss Jo as one of those useless female companions. A pretty bit of skirt to be an audience stand-in for the Doctor to explicate to. Except for the fact that Jo Grant is awesome. She's a trained escapologist, she can fly a helicopter, she can abseil; in 'The Mind of Evil', she karates a prison riot leader out of his gun. On numerous occasions, when the Doctor's got himself locked up somewhere, she comes to his rescue. Though in her first appearance, the Master hypnotises her, the Doctor teaches her how to resist it, so that in later confrontations, the Master is utterly frustrated by his inability to dominate her mind. In 'The Time Monster', when they run into the Master, again, and he finds himself unable to find anything to say, she mockingly suggests, 'How about, "Curses, foiled again"?' She's also bold, capable of making hard decisions under pressure. Again in 'Time Monster', the Doctor threatens their mutual destruction by initiating a Time Ram, shoving his and the Master's TARDISes into the same temporospatial coordinates; but when the Doctor hesitates, Jo's the one who makes the final move to press the big red button.

Ultimately, though, even disregarding her badassery, Jo is a great character. It's easy to dismiss her because she is, in many ways, very girly. And as anyone knows, girliness is too often considered one and the same as weakness; girly characters have to 'make up' for themselves by compensating with more masculine traits if they are to be considered strong. But are Jo's girly qualities weak? Not at all. She's good with people, certainly better than the Doctor; she's emotional and empathetic– and if she screams when she's frightened? I call that a perfectly reasonable response. She is sometimes gullible, ditzy, she did fail her science A-levels, but all that means is that she's flawed, as all good characters should be.

One of the things about the women in Doctor Who that's wonderful is that, like Liz and Jo, they're strong in different ways. Another interesting dichotomy appears with the Second Doctor, when he travelled with Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot. Jamie– short for James Robert– is a Scottish Highlander from the mid 18th century, while Zoe is a scientist who lived on a space station in the 21st. Despite the fact that Jamie was snatched, literally, out of the middle of a battle, and is still quick with his knife, it is he, not Zoe, who spends the most time physically clinging to the Doctor in times of danger.

Here, while Zoe is the competent scientist, Jamie is the volatile, emotional party who depends on the Doctor. Being a Scot, there are, of course, also the obligatory jokes about which member of Team TARDIS is the one wearing the short skirt this time.

And the list continues. Travelling with the Doctor' fourth incarnation, there's Romana, a Time Lady. Cool, arrogant, sharp-tongued, the Doctor's intellectual equal; as she's quick to point out, she did graduate from the Academy with a triple first. Romana is also eager to see the universe, despite coming from a highly insular society. Later, Leela, a knife-wielding warrior, all instinct and impulse, who doesn't care for being treated like the Doctor's own personal Pygmalion project. With the Fifth Doctor, there's Nyssa, an alien, a scientist and pacifist; with the Seventh Doctor, Ace McShane, an emotionally troubled teenager who puts on an unfailingly tough facade and likes blowing things up. Or beating up Daleks with baseball bats. Even Peri, the American who travelled with the Fifth and Sixth Doctor, and who fairly obviously was there to be little more than a lot of bouncing cleavage, is a botanist, clearly intelligent, and refuses to take down-talking from anyone, whether the rather bombastic and volatile Sixth Doctor, or the Master, whom she famously tells, 'I'm Perpugilliam Brown, and I can shout just as loud as you can!'

All these characters have strengths and weaknesses, but one thing they certainly are not is a homogeneous mass of legs, high heels, and helplessness. Another wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that the universe is a living one. In non-televised media (the Big Finish audioplays, and Doctor Who novels, which, incidentally, I wholeheartedly recommend), characters who were short-changed in canon, like Peri, are expanded, and others who were a little one-note, like Tegan and Ace, are allowed to develop. But even without that, there's far more to the women of Doctor Who than might at first meet the eye, and there are no few who'd give you a proper talking to for saying otherwise.

Barrett Vann is an English and Linguistics student at the University of Minnesota. An unabashed geek, she's into cosplay, literary analysis, high fantasy, and queer theory. After she graduates in December, she hopes to tackle grad school for playwrighting or screenwriting, and become one of those starving artist types.

Malala given top human rights award

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:09 AM PDT

MalalaShe, like all the previous recipients of this award, has shown extraordinary courage.

By Victoria Sadler

The RAW Anna Politkovskaya Award is given annually to a woman human rights defender from a conflict zone in the world who, like the award’s namesake, stands up for the victims, often at great personal risk.

In a ceremony at London’s Southbank Centre, the award for 2013 was given to the young champion of education rights, Malala Yousafzai.

On October 7 2006 Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s most famous journalist and outspoken critic of the Putin regime, was assassinated outside her apartment in Moscow. The award named after her is given out annually on the anniversary of her murder.

Anna wrote relentlessly from the war in Chechnya, exposing the brutal treatment of civilians there by both the Russian forces and Moscow-supported Chechen officials. These reports won Anna no friends in the Kremlin and meant she worked in almost constant fear for her life.

Anna survived several attempts on her life including abduction, a mock execution by the Russian Army and an attempt to poison her but such was the power of Anna’s writing that the attempts continued until Anna was killed.

Such was Anna’s profile that when she was murdered, both the then-President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair issued public statements condemning the killing and urged the Russian authorities to find her killers. Justice for Anna though remains elusive. A second trial is currently underway in Russia on gunmen accused of being involved in Anna’s murder but the perpetrators for the crime have never been identified.

To honour Anna and other women like her in the world, RAW in War (Reach All Women in WAR) created the Anna Politkovskaya Award. RAW is an international human rights NGO supporting women human rights defenders, and female victims of war and conflict around the world.

Sadly the rota call of previous Anna Politkovskaya award winners does not make for happy reading. The first winner of the award was Natalia Estemirova, a close friend and colleague of Anna’s who worked in Chechnya collecting testimonies from civilians tortured by the Russian forces. In July 2009 Natalia was kidnapped and murdered.

Last year’s winner was the American journalist Marie Colvin, probably the most noted war correspondent of her generation. She was the victim of a targeted killing for reporting from Homs in Syria on the atrocities against civilians, defying the ban on foreign journalists imposed by the Syrian government.

It’s not much better for the extraordinary women who won the award in the years in-between. Malali Joya, the winner of the award in 2008, has been pursuing the warlords in Afghanistan, demanding they face justice for the crimes they committed against civilians, in particular women. She has survived several assassination attempts.

In 2010 the award was given to Halima Bashir, a doctor in Darfur/Sudan. During the conflict in Darfur, Halima treated the victims of gang rape, including children, committed by the Janjaweed militia. She gave detailed witness statements to UN representatives of the perpetrators. As a result, she was abducted by Sudanese soldiers, held hostage and gang-raped for three days. In spite of this horrific experience, Halima still testified against the Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir before the International Criminal Court.

Malala Yousafzai walks bravely in their footsteps. Last year Malala was shot by the Taliban in an attempted assassination following a blog she wrote for the BBC website (under a pseudonym) on her life under Taliban rule and the need for education for girls.

That she, like all the previous recipients of this award, has shown extraordinary courage is beyond doubt and she spoke eloquently about the special dangers facing women in conflict zones in her acceptance speech.

“Women are more courageous than soldiers. It is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier, in conflict. This war is being waged against women who are our mothers, our sisters and our daughters. This needs to cease and it needs to cease now…. I believe in the powerful woman. Our strength should not be judged by our bodies.”

A recurring theme in Malala’s extraordinarily mature speech was the need for collective action. “Individual voices are powerless but collectively we have the power to struggle, to raise our voices and prevail.”

Displaying oratory skills way beyond her years, Malala moved most of the audience to tears as she spoke passionately of her convictions. “Nothing is more important to me than the right of every child to be educated.”

And like all the previous recipients of the award, Malala espoused the need for peaceful solutions. “We must fight not with guns and bombs but with pens and books. The power of pens and books will always defeat guns and bombs. Knowledge always defeats ignorance.”

That Malala speaks with wisdom and a spirit beyond her years has been noted many times before. But as this 16 year-old girl concluded her speech with “There is a long journey [ahead] for me” one could only hope and pray that it is also a safe one.

A version of this article first appeared in The Huffington Post.