I [Orlando] am still a relatively new Lasher, but I’m a long-time fan. I first saw a Lashings show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010 - and I loved it so much I came back the next night. It was one of the first times I’d ever seen people talking on stage, in real life about things like consensual kink, heteronormativity, fat-shaming, and the stereotyping of queer women. It grabbed me by the gut and pulled me in. Lashings spoke to me in ways nothing else had. And I know for sure that I wasn’t the only one. At Lashings we get so much feedback saying how much what we do matters to you - how important it is for you to see people like you on stage, and remind you that you’re not alone. How important it is that we’re bringing our politics to people who haven’t thought about this stuff before, or haven’t been able to find the words for it. How important it is that we’re representing queer people, poly people, trans people, ace people, kinky people - and representing them as real and human, not just ciphers for an issue. Reading the reviews of our last pantomime still makes us a little teary-eyed.
Illustration by Marguerite; design by D. Gopal
And this time around, the show's concerns don't stop at sexuality and gender. By inverting the traditional story of 'Dick Whittington', by making our heroes the rats of London - the creatures that we're always told are dirty, dangerous and deviant - we've hit on some powerful ways of talking about what's going on in this country at the moment; about the ways in which some of us are scapegoated, exploited and blamed. The only problem we ran into while writing the show was that whenever we thought of something particularly egregious for the villainous Mayor to do, it usually turned out that the current government had already done it. Making jokes about anti-immigrant policies, bedroom taxes and DLA cuts is hard, but it's important too: as Max and Terry the pun-making, joke-cracking, 'Les-Mis'-filk singing rats point out to one another, if you don't laugh about this stuff, you just end up crying about it.
But to be able to keep doing this - we need your help. Everything that Sebastienne wrote last year is still true - more true than it ever was. Keeping Lashings going is really important, and keeping Lashings going is really hard. We’ve gone from being a tiny Oxford-based troupe doing shows in Oxford to an expanding collective with over 20 members, doing shows across the country. Almost every single show we do leaves us out of pocket, both as a collective and as individual members - charity gigs, student gigs, and academic gigs are never venues we make money. (Even with shows where the organisers are able to contribute to our travel expenses, we don’t turn a profit.) The two recent exceptions have been Lashings of Afternoon Tea Time in Oxford and Pirate Cabaret in London - both shows put together with the express aim of raising money for our Edinburgh run. This isn’t a complaint: we voluntarily do gigs in far-off cities for little-to-no expenses, because it’s important, and wonderful, and we love performing, and we love reaching new people. But also? It is hard, and draining, and it skews our shows towards being put together by those of us who can afford the time and money to travel all over.
Edinburgh is a different beast from all these shows. It’s somewhere where we can reach hundreds of new people - we can and do gain scores of fans, friends, and eventual collective members with every Edinburgh run. We rent a flat, and as many of us as possible spend a few weeks living in a blissful-yet-stressful queer-feminist bubble of singing and acting and flyering. The cost of Edinburgh is significantly higher than anything else we do, and it involves serious financial outlay. Currently, most of this is money that a few of us have been able to lend to the collective - there are Lashers who have put in several hundred pounds, such is their faith in the show. The only funding we have is us, and you.
We know times are hard, and money is tighter than ever with the government’s cuts that push marginalised people into further desperation. But now is the also the time that unapologetically angry, intersectional, feminist, queer, and left-wing voices need to be heard. We want to take vital political theatre to the Fringe this year. We want to skewer the austerity programme, make a show with real queer characters played by real queer people, and we want to make terrible puns while doing it. We hope you want us to do that too.
So - if Lashings' work has ever given you hope, or helped you feel less alone, or been there for you in whatever way - here is how you can be here for us: share this post, share the link to our IndieGogo, and donate if you can.
[TW: This post contains discussion of racism and misogyny]
[image description: A screenshot of the Twitter feed from ‘The Onion’,
a satirical website. It was posted at 8.42pm on Feb 24, 2013 and reads “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?”. The word 'cunt' has been blacked out: this was added by the source from which I obtained the picture]
Yes, that Tweet was posted as a ‘joke’, and yes, The Onion has subsequently taken it down and apologised for it (and good for them for doing so). However, I’d still like to unpack some of the
discourse that has been going on around Quvenzhané Wallis, her name, and her
position in Hollywood over the past few days.
Here is a list of names (assembled in about ten minutes
on the Lashings mailing list) that the film-going, TV-watching and
novel-reading public has had no problem at all in learning to pronounce and
relate to in the past fifteen years:
Yes, these are all fictional characters, and yes some of them are from
texts that do appeal more to that special geeky sub-section of the public that
I hold dear. However, it sure seems to me that names which are
difficult-to-pronounce for an English speaker don’t attract much in the way of
screaming and whining if they come attached to Sparkly Elven Princess or
Awesome Wizard or Space-Age Alien. However, when the name that presents an Anglophone
speaker with some difficulty belongs to a young Black girl – even a
ridiculously talented and adorable one – what we seem to end up with is
comments like this (made, I remind you, by someone who was responsible for judging the Academy Awards):
In the past few days, we’ve also seen incidents of TV producers and
commentators referring to Quvenzhané Wallis as ‘Little Q’ and ‘Miss Wallis’,
presumably out of a desire to avoid having to say or type her real name (I don’t
recall Haley Joel Osment being referred to as ‘Little H’ or ‘Mr Osment’ shortly
after the release of The Sixth Sense,do you?). My point here is that yes, ‘Quvenzhané’ is an
unusual name, and one that doesn’t follow pronunciation rules that are familiar
for a speaker of British English. I didn’t know how to say it when I first saw
it written down either! But it is a real name, it is her name, and it literally
takes all of ten seconds to learn how to say it properly (here’s a handy guide,
which includes a video of the lady herself saying it for you!). If you’re a professional commentator on the entertainment industry, barring disability issues or temporary lack of access to communications devices, learning
to say/spell the name of the person you’re speaking or writing about seems like
a fairly basic minimum job requirement to me.
Interestingly, I suspect that the reactions of Anglophone people around
Wallis’ name are to some extent backed up by research. A joint study produced
last year by the University of Melbourne and NYU suggested something the
researchers called the ‘name pronunciation effect’, meaning that people in the
study were more likely to positively evaluate people with ‘easily pronounceable’
names in both a laboratory and a real-life context. You can read a short article about
the study here and a copy of the report itself here.
And despite the fact that a lot of people regard Quvenzhané Wallis with
affection and joy, there have been a number of such negative evaluations. See
the not-so-subtle hostility in the comments on this Jezebel post, for example (for those who don’t want to click through, the post features an image of
Wallis ‘pumping her arms’ in her seat at the Award ceremony: apparently a gesture
of pleasure and pride used by many cast and crew members on the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, the film for which
Wallis was nominanted). At the time of writing, comments included:
Which brings me back to the 'cunt' comment in the Onion. Yes, it was a joke -- a joke that revolved around the idea that so many people love Quvenzhané that you can now base humour on the idea of 'taking her down a peg or two': the basic premise of the comedy is still that a little girl -- a little Black girl -- has 'got above her station' and this makes it funny and shocking to throw misogynist slurs at her.
Intersecting with the obvious racism here (a nine-year-old kid looks pleased and happy at the effing Oscars and she's 'full of herself' and needs to 'learn humility'? WTF?) I think that the jokes and complaints around Quvenzhané's name are particularly interesting. Here is where it veers off the theoretical and gets a little personal for me: in non-Lashings life, my family name is non-English and is difficult for many English speakers to pronounce. It's worth noting that for me, this comes with a large side-serve of white privilege (classic immigrant story: perfectly-ordinary-name in non-English-language became awkwardly-misspelled-uncommon-name when illiterate great-grandparents came into contact with English-speaking immigration officials). However, I’ve certainly felt that hostility, that slight frisson of ‘Ugh, awkward kid with awkward name’, even though my racial privilege shields me from most of the worst aspects of it. It was much worse when I was a kid and subject to the whims of roll-calling teachers, but is still around to some extent today. Anyone who’s ever had a microaggressive conversation that ran along the lines of
“What kind of name is that?”
“How do you say that?”
“How do you spell that?”
“Are you sure?”
“Where are you from?”
“No, where are you really from?”
might agree. When the 'name pronunciation effect' study first came out, I shared it with a number of friends on Facebook. Several people jumped in to say that I had it wrong -- there wasn't any kind of racial or cultural bias at work in the study: it's just that people don't like names which are 'unfamiliar'. By an amazing co-incidence, the contradictors were all people with English-based names living in majority-English-speaking countries. Reader, I LOL'ed. It's about more than 'unfamiliarity', I'm afraid. Yes, a ‘difficult’ name demands that the person who
needs to use it work a little harder: ‘Quvenzhané’ requires more effort from an
Anglophone teacher or secretary (or ‘Entertainment Tonight’ journalist) than ‘Sarah’
or ‘Jane’. That's called cognitive bias, it's a real thing, and cheers to fellow Lasher Bishop for reminding me of it.
HOWEVER, I suspect that this interacts in some important ways with who we as a
society deem worthy of ‘extra’ time and effort: we're much quicker to get over our cognitive bias about unfamiliar names when we think the person causing it is important or powerful. When I was little, adults didn't make much effort to say my name properly and were often rude and dismissive when they got it wrong: now that I'm an adult with a professional job, other people tend to be more careful about pronouncing it right and get embarrassed if they mess up. Funny, that. And thus back to Quvenzhané Wallis and an attitude that many powerful people seem to be projecting: who does this kid, this girl, think she is, ‘demanding’ (with
her very presence) that we go to the trouble of learning how to say that
tongue-twister? Can’t we just call her ‘Annie’ instead?
[GIF description: An interviewer is speaking to Quvenzhané Wallis.
Interviewer: “Look who it is! It’s Annie!” (a reference to Wallis’ recent
casing in the 2014 remake of Annie). Interviewer:
“I’m calling you Annie now.” Camera zooms in on Wallis’s face, she looks
shocked and annoyed. Wallis: “I am not Annie! I am Quvenzhané”.]
To my mind, this explains in part why there's been very little crying about having to learn how to say names like 'Jake Gyllenhaal', 'Gerard Depardieu' or 'Arnold Schwarzenegger', and why I've never seen a reporter bounce up to Ralph Fiennes on the red carpet and demand to be allowed to call him 'Ralf'. The 'name pronunciation effect' seems to entangle itself with other factors affecting the way in which we deem people in society to be worthy of our effort and respect, and age, gender and whiteness are all key in this. Having been someone who, by age and gender, was not deemed worthy of that respect at various times in my life (oh, but that "I am not Annie!" expression in the gif above is identical to that which frequently appeared on the face of the infant Galatea), I see what's going on here and I don't like it. I dislike even more the fact that it's still going on in 2013, and that we'll apparently spend more effort on learning to say the name of a fictional hobbit, alien or dragon-keeper than a real live nine-year-old girl.
I don’t have a quick or easy solution here, but I think
that it’s important to keep this in mind, and to remind everyone that this bias
exists and perhaps needs to be consciously countered where necessary. In other words, do 'vote for people you can't pronounce' if they deserve your votes, and maybe be conscious of the need to do so! Another simple
act of respect that you and I can begin with is to deliberately set out to
educate ourselves about names that are not familiar to us, and to use them
correctly whenever possible (assuming that we have the permission of the owner
to do so).
[image description: Quvenzhané Wallis standing outdoors, wearing a red dress and smiling].
Who does this kid think she is? She thinks she is Quvenzhané, and she’s
damn well right.
A: Because they stink and they're ugly and they don't care.
I've been noodling around this idea in my head for quite some time now – in fact, this is a version of a post I wrote lo these many years ago, about the time of the Great Fuss Over Susan Boyle Being On National TV in 2009. It’s about a concept that I think I want to call ‘the beauty debt'.
Essentially, what I’m thinking of when I say ‘beauty debt’ is the idea floating around in modern culture that women owe a certain standard of attractiveness to those who 'have' to look at them, and that if a woman's 'natural' beauty is not sufficient (and it very rarely is), she must perform a certain amount of beauty work in order to rectify the problem, to 'pay the debt' as it were. This work might involve shaving, waxing, dyeing, surgery, food restriction, exercise, straightening, lightening, tanning, all according to individual situation, sub/culture, race, class etc. It almost always involves paying money, and quite often involves physical discomfort or pain. I probably don't need to list here what happens if she fails to perform this work or fails to perform it to a sufficient standard, but what's interesting is that often the undercurrent is we don't want to see that!; she's hurting my eyes!, how dare she make us HAVE to see that!
Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time This week's blog post is something a little different - below, a number of Lashers share the story behind their Lashings names! We figure that regular readers might find it interesting, and that potential new Lashers might be find it useful when it comes to thinking of their own stage names... Galatea When I’m feeling particularly dangerous, I perform under the full stage name ‘Galatea Gorgon’. I acquired the first part of the name from an appallingly creepy story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which we’ve performed as a dance piece from time to time -- the sculptor Pygmalion, disgusted by the lewdness and crudeness of human women, decides to make himself a perfect girlfriend out of ivory and sleep with that instead: a bit like an Ancient Greek version of a RealDoll. He ends up falling in love with this beautiful inanimate statue which never talks back, and eventually the goddess Venus makes it come alive so it can marry him. Bleargh. I think that in 21st century culture, a lot of women are encouraged to be our own Pygmalions, shaping ourselves into perfection for other people’s benefit while keeping as quiet as possible; shoving any inconvenient messiness or imperfection out of view. The Gorgons, meanwhile, were completely the opposite -- they’re female monsters from very early Greek mythology, and so outrageously fierce and ugly that one look at them will turn you into stone! Put together, I think these two names speak to a really interesting tension, particularly since most of my performance is dance-based and I rarely speak directly to the audience. I like the idea of playing around with the gaze, looking and transfixion -- when I dance for you, is it about beauty or about horror? Who is being brought to life, and who is being turned to stone? Sebastienne This is a name I’ve been using for at least ten years, now. It’s a feminised form of Sebastian, as in Saint Sebastian, who’s been a site of deeply queer and kinky imagery for some centuries. He’s generally portrayed bound at the wrists and bleeding, pierced by phallic objects. Ahem. Anyway. After leaving prison, Oscar Wilde used the name ‘Sebastian Melmoth’, in what I’ve always considered to be a nod to posterity - to the idea that he might be (as he now is) considered a queer martyr. “Sebastienne” was only ever meant to be one half of my psyche, the other part being designated “Alia”.. but we don’t hear from her much, any more. (That’s not quite true; I’d say there’s been a reintegration. Alia’s still around in my gender identity and my politics; but I have Sebastienne’s sexuality and sense of style.) The divide was a necessary consequence of my adolescent inability to reconcile my belief in social justice and the importance of truth (Alia) with my Wildean conviction that “pleasure is the only thing one should live for” and the importance of artifice (Sebastienne). Lashings is where I learnt that it is entirely possible to embody both these things. Goblin at some point in my anorexic early 2000s, i dropped to 2 1/2 stone and ended up in hospital, in starvation psychosis. seeing my reflection in a hospital mirror in my delirious state, i thought i was a goblin. And then, as i recovered, it kinda stuck - still, a significant proportion of my friends call me Goblin. Like a number of anorexic girls, i used to adore the symbolism and images of angels and elves, their effortless perfection - for me, referring to myself as Goblin, implying all my skinny gawky pudgy glory, is part of embracing my many imperfections instead of striving for impossible perfection. Also, it suits me, and i think the ears are cool. ;-) kaberett I’m a singer; my first language is German; and I’m decidedly political. And the deliberate misspelling of the German “Kabarett” - a word that is suggestive of cabaret as political satire? Well, that’s for reasons to do with my wallet name & a slightly unhealthy love of anagrams: so my stage name comes from the handle I invented for commenting on political blogs. In news that will surprise no-one who’s ever met me, I am indeed entirely too delighted by my own cleverness, at least when it comes to multilingual puns. Orlando I took my stage name from the eponymous hero of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando. It was actually CN who suggested I use it, after reading an essay I wrote about the novel, but it fit so perfectly that I now can’t imagine using anything else. The character Orlando is born a boy in the Elizabethan era: the book follows them through a surreal and dreamlike version of history, during which they age very little over several hundred years, undergo a mysterious change of sexed morphology, and begin presenting as female, male, and neuter in different contexts. Orlando is openly gender-fluid and bisexual - they ‘changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive… and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally’. The book has a lot to say about the cultural construction of gender, and I feel that the gender-fluidity of the main character speaks a lot to my experiences, despite the fantastical nature of the story. Valentina I turned my surname, Valentine, into my stage name! Valentine came from my looking for something that sounded awesome that also went with my blog’s name, Silicone Valley, and is extra-excellent because it’s also the name of the villain in Mortal Engines, which is basically one of the greatest books ever. Yay! My name rocks. Cleopatra This is my full real-life name. Natch. I’ve almost never used it in English-speaking day to day life, it feels a lot like a best Sunday dress, too much for everyday use. Plus, it’s a mouthful. (In GREEK it sounds fine.) I’ve wanted to be on stage for basically for ever and at some point my best friend and I coined the idea of keeping my full name for a stage name, so when people started telling me to pick a Lashings name there was never really any other choice. (Plus, I am a Classics nerd so it has that going for it too. Galatea was rooting for Patroklos based on this. ;)) Nigel Newt I'm a Nigel - that friend, relative, partner or other close acquaintance, who seems to understand enough of the principles of feminism to not be completely unbearable. I make some contribution for the easy stuff, like the housework, or generally progressive causes. But I also get something of a free pass - I'm shown more patience when I inevitably show my privilege. Newt is a female character in "Aliens", who gets to talk to Ripley (another female character) about monsters - fulfilling all three requirements in Dykes To Watch Out For's "The Rule" . As my first role in Lashings was the increasingly grumpy recipient of all the token female roles from popular sci-fi & fantasy, this seemed an appropriate aspiration. Florestan It has two famous uses as a name for characters in classical music. First, it is the surname of heroine, Leonore, and her imprisoned, starved husband, in Beethoven's opera Fidelio. She disguises as a man (called Fidelio) and rescues her husband from political prison. I like having a name that belongs to both male and female, being somewhat genderqueer, with the female displaying strength. It is also a name used by Robert Schumann, a brilliant composer who experienced quite complex mental health issues in his short life. He often wrote words and music signed with the names Florestan and Eusebius, who represented contrasting aspects of his personality. Florestan was the exuberant, passionate and - in my imagination - slightly out of his own control side. So we have a heroine/boi, a man she saved (both all-singing), a fictitious wisp of borderline personality disorder and a source of wild, imaginative music and musical philosophy; Florestan. ... so there you have it! Readers who have chosen their own names, whether for the stage, the internet, as a new legal name, or in any other venue: is there a story behind yours? We'd love to hear it!
Today is Lashings' last day in Edinburgh! BOO! It's been an amazing ride, and we can't wait to write all about the good (99%!), the bad (one incident in particular) and the downright ridiculous (pudding, anyone?). But while we're all packing away our Thatcher costumes and preparing to put on our very final Edinburgh show (8.30pm tonight, so you've still got one more chance!) here's a post cunningly written the weekend before we left...
This post was inspired by an epic chat thread that ended up eating most of Sunday July 29 for quite a few Lashers! Many of you who've seen Lashings perform have probably seen our 'Sci-Fi Skits': basically, a set of gleefully shambolic two-minute mini-plays where we act out some of our favourite science fiction and fantasy films, TV shows and books, but with the gender ratios reversed (Nigel gets to wear the lovely pink dress and pretend to be Hermione, Kristine Kochanski, multiple Dr Who companions, etc., the rest of us get to wave swords around and shoot laser blasters at each other. It's glorious).
(Almost, but not quite, as glorious as this picture:)
[Image descripton: Twelve people are lined up on a staircase, dressed in costume as the characters from DC Comics' Justice League -- but all male characters are played by female cosplayers, and vice versa]
The chat on Sunday started because I got furiously angry after taking a silly internet 'Which book character would you be?' quiz that asked me to state my gender as the opening question. When I put 'female', I got Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings. When I went back and changed my answer to 'male', I got Superman. (There was, quelle suprise, no non-binary or 'other' option). Well, put me in a silly-looking helmet and call me a shieldmaiden if that doesn't really sum up the reason that I wrote the Sci-Fi Skits in the first place! The exact same set of answers with one gender box ticked will score you an iconic, globally-recognised hero, the star of any number of versions of his own story, who always wins through and saves the day. Tick the other, you'll get a minor character, a failed love interest who gets to do some cool things (but only while concealing who she really is), and then finally gets her big Crowning Moment of Awesome upstaged by Legolas bullying an oliphaunt (yes, I know that's not how it happens in the books. No, I don't care). I've posted about this kind of thing before, I know -- but sulking about gender-based obnoxiousness in fictional texts isn't something I intend to quit any time soon.
So to relieve my feelings, I stomped off and wrote a new Avengers Sci Fi Skit and happiness was restored (I have a feeling that Cleopatra being the Hulk and SMASHING stuff is going to be the highlight of my Edinburgh experience this year!).
Tonight, our Edinburgh Fringe show - Alternative Sex Education - opens at the Bongo Club. This is the culmination of a lot of work for us - a chance to package up our politics, honed with sympathetic audiences and friendly bloggers, and take it to the general public. A quick plug, in case you, or anyone you know, are going to be in Edinburgh this month:
I still can't believe that this is going to be my third Edinburgh with Lashings! Even though I'm only coming up for a little while this year, I'm so, so excited to be bringing the QUILTBAG joy to a whole new audience for another year. In celebration, I present to you, in no particular order, some of Galatea's favourite Memories of Edinburghs Past: 2010:
Sitting backstage at the late lamented underground Carlton Cabaret Bar, crushing ridiculously on the exquisitely beautiful and talented Rachael Sage and trying to find places in the overcrowded dressing room/cupboard to stash all the costume bits and ballet shoes.
Late-night performance readings of very bad vampire fanfic conducted by Florestan and Lil!
[TW: Fictional character death, suicide] Not exactly a favourite memory, but... of all the shows I went to in the 2010 Fringe (including our own), all of them except one featured at least one dead or deeply, permanently unhappy queer character. The one that didn't? Was a children's production of The Wind in the Willows. My own fault for choosing to prioritise attending queer-themed shows, I guess... but it was then that I resolved that we needed to start making a special effort to tell happy queer stories too.
Getting apocalyptically drunk on the last night of the Fringe with Dr Carmilla, Rachael's band and sundry assorted Mechanisms, and wandering the streets at 3am singing 'Vagina Dentata'.
2011:
Performing Lashings classic 'You're the Top' with Sebastienne at the Midnight Kabarett and having the audience near-about take the roof off!
Flyering on the Royal Mile dressed in full-on Victorian Goth mode, and performing flag dances with giant rainbow flags while perched on top of bollards.
Appearing on Gareth Vile's late-night Edinburgh radio show and having the guests that were supposed to appear after Lashings not turn up... leading to a 1.5-hour long rambling Lashings interview of JOY!
Hiding out from flyering with Rob in a chocolate/coffee shop and cooking up the idea for Cinderella: A Queer Sort of Pantomime in a burst of sugar-addled creativity.
Carlotta's trademark early-morning porridge with peanut butter, brown sugar and strawberry jam... better (for me) than some types of sex, and every bit as sticky.
I can't wait to make some new Edinburgh memories to go alongside these... if you're at one of the shows between the 9th and the 13th, I'll be the small ginger-blonde blur hovering six inches above the stage in excitement!
I suppose that I now count as an Edinburgh veteran. This is my third year co-producing a Lashings show, and my sixth year performing. To start with, it was just an excuse to show off - to find myself a fabulous costume and strut around as a panto villain or a high-school goth. I couldn't afford much at all, so mostly went to free shows or just took in all the free street theatre on the royal mile. It was almost like a package holiday - the show's producer(s) would take care of my accommodation, my food, and tell me where I had to be when. All I had to do was just show up and sing...
These days, it's a lot more involved. Lashings operates as a collective, so no-one is just "along for the ride" any more. We've all written and rehearsed acts, planned setlists, built costumes, and once we get here we're contributing by flyering or networking or cooking. We're all much more invested in the show going well - not only have we all had a lot of creative input, but we have a lot of political engagement as well, and a bigger audience means a larger number of people who've heard our message.
Also, this year, we're attempting something new - to stop treating Lashings as a hobby. Our WeFund campaign was part of this, and a corollary of that is that, for the first time, performers aren't being expected to pay rent out of their own pockets. If all goes well, we should make enough money this year to cover our costs for the first time (thank you, so much, to the people whose donations have contributed to this). This is so, so important to the ethos of Lashings - our kind of activism should never be for just those people who can afford to pay.
So, what does this Edinburgh mean to me? It's about getting a chance to really finesse some of our acts by performing them every night for two weeks. It's about getting the chance to bring our message to a much more diverse audience than we might attract outside the adventurous fringe festival context. But, most of all, it's about spending two weeks in a political utopia, where we eat communal vegan food and respect each other's identities and work to make the world better.
Cleopatra
I write this sitting at the kitchen
sink.
All right, no, I don't, but I DO write
it AT OUR VENUE. (We're doing our tech rehearsal and I'm an extremely
last-minute multi-tasker.)
I am somewhat on the fence writing this
blog post (as I am in most of life, generally, natch) because on the
one hand, this is my first Lashings Fringe experience, and I am so so
unspeakably excited. On the other hand, I went to Edinburgh
University and have also been a member of the audience, performed in
shows and worked Box Office at the Fringe on several different
occasions, so I feel like I'm coming home. This also means I feel
like I'm coming at the Festival itself from two different angles,
both as a local and as a visitor/performer.
Most Edinburgh locals hate the
Festival: it's kind of a measure of your cache as an Edinburgher.
Unsurprisingly, this isn't an attitude I have a ton of patience with.
I love the Fringe, and could fill an entire blog post with all my
reasons why. In short, I think it's a wonderful opportunity to level
the playing field, we get to perform alongside much more well known
and established performers such as Miriam Margolyes, Susan Calman and
Sandi Toksvig. As Sebastienne said, it's an opportunity to get what
we're saying heard by a much larger audience. I love going back to
London in September and seeing which shows are now being performed at
the West End (at massively inflated prices). I love that the city
explodes with people for a month, that the Royal Mile is jammed with
audience and performers alike. I know I'm in the minority but I
actually quite like both flyering and being flyered. (I love that
flyering is a verb.)
I actually originally first saw
Lashings here at the Fringe, because of one of their flyers. My best
friend, her girlfriend and I hid out from the rain at the Starbucks
on the Royal Mile at the 2010 Festival to go through the flyers we'd
been handed and thought Lashings sounded awesome. We loved them so
much they were on our 'must see' list the following year.
Even though I've performed at the
Fringe before, I've never put this much into a show, both in terms of
my time and energy, but also myself and my beliefs. It really does
feel like coming full circle somehow. Did I mention the unspeakably
excited? I guess I found some words after all.
This is my first time at the Fringe,
ever, and it's fabulous to be here helping make a show happen.
Yesterday was spent ambling the streets, giving wide smiles to
shopkeepers and hoping I could persuade them to add just one more
poster to their overflowing walls. Today, we're passing the laptop
around between sets in our tech rehearsal, and we open this evening.
I'm excited! The number of shows happening here is overwhelming, and
I'm so glad to be here as a performer, rather than 'just' a consumer
of the festival. If nothing else, it simplifies things.
Having done my good share of activism
involving serious, negatives-focused consciousness-raising, taking
part in something involving song, dance and silly costumes instead feels like a much-needed break. As queer feminist activists, we seem
to spend a lot of time living in spaces that are not our own and
trying to justify our existence to others. I feel like Lashings
doesn't primarily exist to try and get right-wingers on side: we're
here to create the shows and the spaces that our communities need.
We're here to make shows about us. And
with that, I feel like there's an acknowledgement that we don't need
to be serious or debatey to get our point across: cheesy musical
numbers are a great form of activism for us as performers and
marginalised people, they're great for our QUILTBAG audiences, and
the logic that dismisses us based on our frivolity is the same one
that would brand us as unreasonably angry from the other direction.
We may as well have an excellent time singing about carnivorous
vaginas.
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee-we're-back-at-the-Fringe-we're-back-at-the-Fringe-this-is-so-awesome!
– and also, also, there was banana and golden syrup porridge for
breakfast, and we have squid soap. *Squid soap*! And we're in the
middle of our tech run and there are people singing songs I've never
heard them sing before, but they're only singing snippets right now
because, well, it's just a tech run, and the whole thing's *so*
teasery. Teasery? Yes, that can be a word. This is all very joyous!
:D
This is prompted by an epic debate thread that, at the time of writing, seems to be just kicking off over at Shakesville (ETA: The discussion thread has now closed). In the midst of a rather interesting post about stereotyping of Scottish people in the upcoming Disney/Pixar film Brave (link contains spoilers!) several commenters have also begun a discussion about the representation of non-white people in medieval-themed fantasy writing. As the link isn't good for anyone who wants to stay spoiler-free for the film (*shakes fist in the direction of movie Powers That Be who have proclaimed that UK viewers shall not be allowed to see it until August*), I've excerpted a couple of comments below:
(discussion below the cut does NOT include spoilers for Brave: please do not post any in the comments!).
Over the past six years or so, I have run up against a number of the ways in which twenty-first century Western society is set up to assume that people of my age bracket will be partnered or actively looking to be, and have sometimes had bad times as a result (with some irony, a lot of this running-up-against happened while I was actually part of a couple, just not one that operated in the assumed-default mode). Thus, to beginning to think about couples privilege and the privileges associated with coupledom, and to beginning to compile a Couples Privilege Checklist.
This isn't, of course, to suggest that people in couples are all evil, or that there's a giant social conspiracy wherein everyone come up with ways to mess with single people (although if you've met some of my relatives, you might start to have Suspicions...)! However, I do think it's important to look at some of the ways in which our charming heterocentric nuclear-family oriented society creates (or fails to smooth over) obstacles for people who don't fit into the one-man-one-woman-couple model for whatever reason.
I'm deliberately leaving out the sex-and-romance parts of coupledom in this post, and just focusing on the privilege points that affect daily life. A lot of these points are heavily tied to straight or m/f couple privilege, and some of them are tied to class and race privilege as well. I'm also sure that there's a lot of stuff I'm missing, and would appreciate it if anyone is able to point any missed issues out in the comments.
ETA: As andustar pointed out below, many of these privileges also apply only to people in non-abusive relationships.
I should also say that as a sexual/romantic person who has been in relationships (and indeed, is in one now), I've experienced most of these privileges from the 'good' end as well as the pointy one -- I have some brief and transient experience of what might be a much more long-term problem for, eg., an aromantic person.
The final added caveat, of course, is that these are my issues seen from my perspective, and that YM, as ever, MV.
[Image description: A GIF file of Professor Quirrel from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
running through the Great Hall screaming ‘TROLL! IN THE DUNGEON!’. This is
possibly my favourite GIF ever.]
An opening caveat: if you happen not to have already read
the article by Samantha Brick that was realeased on the Daily Mail website on Tuesday, do not, repeat, DO NOT go over there
and read it. I mean it: sit on your hands, step away from the computer, install
Kittenblock (a handy piece of software that re-routes all Daily Mail links to
pictures of tea and kittens) if you have to.
The reason that I tell you this is because the Daily Mail are being trolls, fol de rol LOL, and we are all falling for it. My Facebook page and Twitter have been
falling for it all week, I’ve had several heated arguments about it today and
yesterday, and now apparently, courtesy of me, the Lashings blog is falling for
it too. The reason I’d prefer you really didn’t go over there because of me is
because the Daily Mail is getting advertising money for each person who clicks on their site – a total of £19 million in the year to October 2011
according to this Guardian article – and I really don’t want to be furthering their economic growth.
If you do really want to read the article for whatever reason,
a cached version of it that will NOT give hits to the Daily Fail is available
here: http://www.freezepage.com/1333534875NBQAQDMZOF
(if it appears not to work, click on the first line that reads ‘Samantha Brick
on the’).
(Courtesy of Annalytica: Here are some other ways of preventing giving ad revenue to the Fail)
Basically, it’s a story that was written by a journalist named
Samantha Brick describing a) the ways in which she feels that she has been
judged, bullied and put down by other women because of her attractive
appearance, and b) the gifts, special attention and general happytimes that she
feels she has received from men because of her attractive appearance.
As shocking and startling as it may seem to you and me (she says, only somewhat facetiously), Lashings does get a bad review every now and then. Personally, I tend to pay much more attention to these than I do to positive feedback: as a nervous perfectionist, I like tweaking the corners of our shows to try to make them the best shambolic journeys into QUILTBAG anarchy that they can possibly be...
There is one line of critique, though, that gets not only my goat, but my chickens, my Shetland pony and my small herd of heritage-breed long-horned cattle, too. It's the variations that we occasionally hear on the theme of 'Awww, their hearts are in the right place. But it's 2012 (or 2011, or 2010...). Is there really a need for a whole cabaret show about gender and sexuality?'*.
* [Unspoken subtext: 'You ladeez and queers is equal now, plz to STFU about teh oppresshionz']
Tell you what, boys and girls and everyone else: I would take this criticism so much more seriously if I'd ever heard it come out of the mouth of a queer person.
Following on the heels of Annalytica's post on the messages that we take in, consciously and unconsciously, from popular culture... I'm pleased to report a minor episode of mainstream Hollywood film gender-win, just in time for anyone who feels like taking in a film over the holidays!
I went to see the new 'Puss in Boots' film expecting not-a-great-deal in the way of positive political messages. As a pop culture and folklore/fairytale geek, I usually find films from the Shrek franchise juuuust clever and entertaining enough for me to put up with their fail -- but the fail is definitely there. The exploitation of stereotypes in the Shrek world is occasionally playful and parodic, but I find that it often steers too close to uncritical parroting of sexist, racist and fatphobic traits for me to be entirely comfortable with it (and I'll deliver my full critique of the politics of Shrek another day, boys and girls and everyone else).
The trailer, which focuses heavily on the figure of Puss himself and the action scenes, can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55gmAtakjJ4 -- and again, it doesn't promise much in the way of departure from what we've seen in previous Shrek outings. So while I like Puss, and enjoy listening to Antonio Banderas go 'Meow!' as much as the next gentleman-fancying person, I really wasn't expecting great things from this film. But what I got was...
Kitty Softpaws. Leaving aside the rather icky name (gratuitous pun on equally ickily-named James Bond character for the lose), what we have here is a mainstream Hollywood heroine who does the ass-kicking-female bit we've all seen from a hundred tedious action films... but takes it a bit further in some quite pleasing and interesting ways.
Gratuitous Photo Post today, as the greater proportion of the Lashings bloggers are currently frolicking around Dublin, spreading love and joy and lashings of queerness wherever they go.
What am I talking about? From Monday 2nd - Saturday 7th May, Lashings is at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. I was lucky enough to be able to go for the first two days, and it was a wonderful time! We met so many friendly, politically-enaged and generally awesome burlesquers and queerfolk (and got to re-meet the gorgeous and seriously talented Emily Aoibheann whose acquaintaince we made in Oxford last year), had lovely audiences and saw some amazing LGBTQ theatre.
Two things I’m not about to apologise for: being an enormous nerd, and caring about children’s film and literature.
In case you were wondering, mine is the geeky sensibility that animates a lot of the critiques of sci-fi and fantasy in Lashings, including our existing Lion King sketch (which was, if I say so myself, the breakaway hit of our Edinburgh 2010 run – if you haven’t yet had the chance to see twelve grown adults miming carnivorous vaginas for a paying audience, I recommend you rectify this ASAP).
I’ve spent most of my adult life struggling to balance an extremely sharp and pointy feminist nose with a love of all things animated and super-powered, hobbit-ridden and Hogwarts-bound (I draw the line, however, at psychic talking dragons). I love geeky shit enough to ask some really difficult questions about who it serves and what it does: feminists who want to know why I’m wasting my time with this trivial silliness and geeks who whine that I’m harshing their uncritical squee tend to be given equally short shrift.
I also think that there’s nothing less feminist than acting as though children’s literature isn’t important, or that popular children’s texts (such as Disney films) aren’t literature. These things, which are pushed on kids to a ridiculous extent in Western culture (see here and here for discussions, and here for a really interesting alternative take on The Little Mermaid), play a huge role in shaping their inner lives. I don’t mean ‘Oh, kids will watch Superman and then think that they can fly’ or anything so pointlessly reductive: what I mean is that the ranges of characters and situations shown will, in some very real ways, help to shape kids’ senses of what is possible, both within fantasy* and outside it**.
* Eg., a child (generally!) knows that flying is make believe and ze cannot really fly.
** But if flying = a make-believe symbol that stands in for ‘being strong and adventurous’, and child only ever sees a certain type of character getting to fly... well, you tell me.
I think Ursula le Guin puts it best:
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin
Disney Princesses are a rant for another day, or possibly even another lifetime. But this is what I have to say about the five things I really wish that ickle baby Galatea hadn’t learned from The Lion King:
1. Girls kick ass! For exactly as long as they need to until the Real Hero shows up.
This is the thing that got me angry enough to write the Lashings skit in the first place. When It All Goes Horribly Wrong at Pride Rock re: evil Machiavellian uncles, young lioness Nala courageously leaves her family and travels across the desert in order to find somebody who can come and put a stop to Scar. She’s the sole surviving hope of her people (mostly because they believe their prince to be dead, but hey, I’ll take my female heroes where I can find them), and gets sent off with a really touching duet in the stage-musical version*.
* Which interests me particularly because it's performed by two women (link is to a video, lyrics here), backed with a chorus of mostly women -- which is not something you see that often in mainstream pop culture, particularly when the song isn't about love or men. Hooray, Bechdel-test-passing on the West End!
But all of that immediately ceases to be important once Simba decides that hmmm, maybe he’ll wander back home and fulfil his patriarchal dest-- er, I mean, claim that pesky kingdom back after all. And answer me this, cats and kittens: if adult!Nala is demonstrably able to knock adult!Simba over and pin him to the ground just as she did when they were cubs... why is that he is able to fight Scar and she isn’t?
[Video description: Pumbaa the warthog and Timon the meerkat are stalked and chased by Nala. Pumbaa becomes stuck under a tree root, and they seem about to be eaten until Simba appears and attacks Nala. The two lions fight until Nala knocks Simba to the ground and pins him there, in a pose that echoes a moment when they played together as cubs at the beginning of the film. Simba recognises her, and gasps 'Nala?'. End clip.]
What really spins me out is that I’d never even noticed this as a wee’un. Because of course, no matter how strong or brave or clever Nala is, she isn’t The Hero. Of course, she isn’t there to be identified with, or loved in her own right, because she’s The Girl, and no matter how competent she is we’d better not forget that her real job is to look sexy in a disturbingly anthropomorphic fashion during the profoundly G-rated Disneyfied sex-scene.
Phooey.
2. Accents as narrative determinism:
Let’s break it down, shall we?
Standard USAmerican = Hero (Simba, Mufasa, Nala, Sarabi, all the good lionesses)
British RP = highly intelligent, whether for good (Zazu, played by Rowan Atkinson) or for evil (Scar, played by Jeremy Irons).
Working-class Bronx = the Comic Relief (Timon and Pumbaa)
Afro-American/Latino cadences = Comedy Villanous Henchmen (the hyenas, speaking parts voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin)
Swahili?* = Unfathomably Wise Elder (Rafiki).
It’s particularly worrying that the accents also seem to function as marker of species, and that the more class privilege your accent is associated with, the higher up the food chain you tend to be. Literally.
On the other hand, I do have to give massive props to Niketa Calame and Jason Weaver, who played Young Nala and the singing voice of Young Simba resepctively and were, to the best of my knowledge, the first Black actors to voice a Disney hero and heroine.
* Given that the character is named in Swahili, and speaks a couple of phrases of it, I’m going to assume that that’s what the voice-actor Robert Guillame, who is actually USAmerican, was going for. The racefail in that isn't mine to unpack, particularly as Guillame is African-American, but I do think it's that it's there.
3. Effeminacy Is Evil
Oh Scar, Scar, Scar. Much as you might be the favourite character of every gentleman-fancying person with whom I’ve ever watched this film as an adult, you are still decidedly problematic . Between the dramatic gestures, slinky walk, camp asides about being surrounded by IDIOTS!, and being physically slighter and less muscular than the other lions, it’s fairly easy to read the character as less conventionally-masculine, and I think this is intentional on the film-makers’ behalf. More troublingly, his gender performance seems to be directly linked to his evil nature, as in one scene the character admits that he resorts to conspiracy because he is less physically strong than his brother (‘at the shallow end of the gene pool’). Although in the stage version, part of Scar’s villiany is wanting to ‘marry’ Nala against her will, he shows no interest in her until the idea of a succession is suggested by Zazu – make of that what you will.
For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t really object to Disney fielding a queer villain as a once-off. But it happens with irritating regularity, and it tends to be the only portrayal of non-normative gender performance that gets into mainstream kids’ film. If the only images of gender-unconventionality you see growing up are irrevocably paired with evildom, what does that do to your perception of queers? If you’re a baby queerthing yourself, what does it do to your perception of you?
Well, aside from turn a lot of us into Goths, obviously.
(Full disclaimer: At the time The Lion King came out in cinemas, I was a freakishly tall, skinny pre-teen with an enormous mane of bushy black hair and a withering contempt for anyone not conversant with fractal geometry and the intricacies of the mythos of J.R.R. Tolkien. D’you think I got called ‘Uncle Scar’ every day for a week at break? Answers on a postcard. See also: my ongoing obsession with the bewilderingly high proportion of Disney villians who happen tohavegreeneyes.)
Occasionally I think of the legions of soft-spoken, elegant, evil-intentioned but physically non-violent men who have been the antagonists in every Disney film I grew up with, from Robin Hood ’s Sir Hiss to Aladdin’s Jafar to The Frog Princess’s Dr Facilier. Then I place them alongside the legions of Disney lady-villains who have similarly broken the conventions of gender presentation by being conventionally-unattractive (Ursula the Sea Witch), loud and aggressive (The Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, Cruella de Ville) or unfemininely ambitious/determined/demanding (Cinderella and Snow White’s stepmothers, Madame Medusa from The Rescuers, the evil Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp). And then I dance around and around the room, singing at the top of my voice: ‘Thank G*d, thank g*d, thank g*d I’m queer!’.
(Full-on butch ladies, incidentally, don’t exist. Or at least they won’t until Disney makes Mulan, five years later, and that is another post for another day.)
4. Hierarchy Is Natural and Monarchy Is Awesome (particularly when the Royal Family is capable of eating you)
Say what you like about the Royal Wedding Hype that is already tying multiple knots in my organic anti-heteropatriarchy knickers... but not even Princess Anne at the peak of her fox-hunting career was ever known to chase down her subjects with a pack of corgis, rip out their carotid arteries and nom on their juicy still-twitching corpses. ‘Circle of life’, my free-range herbivorous arse.
5. ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight’
... finally my most deeply-felt and serious objection to this film of all: like anyone else who was a teenager in the 90s, I had to listen to this being played at graduations, school dances, weddings, end-of-year choir numbers, etc until it came out my fucking nose. Eurgh. Sir Elton, I love you like the slightly embarassing Tory-leaning luvvie uncle I never had, but at times you have a lotto answer for.
... and one thing I wish I had:
[TW for discussion of kitty incest]
This has been bothering me for SIXTEEN YEARS now: Seriously, who the hell is Nala’s father?
Either it’s Mufasa, in which case she ends up having kids with her half-brother, or it’s Scar, in which case she ends up being almost pressured into having kids with her Dad (and still ends up having kids with her cousin). I’ve had enough cats in my life to be prepared to give points for animal-behaviour accuracy if turns out that either theory is true, but I think that both of them may cause Disney executives to spontaneously combust. For what it’s worth, a quick Google suggests that I am not the only person to have lost sleep over this. In the extremely unlikely event that I ever come into contact with anyone who worked on the film, I’m going to fix them with my best wide-eyed and innocent expression and ask about it.
Because I am, of course, chock-full of highly-intelligent green-eyed genderqueer evil.
Posted by 
