Great Gender-Fuck Review
I just read a full-blown review on a longtime friend's LJ -- and you, gentle reader, ought to read it, too --http://slammerkinbabe.livejournal.com/1130753.html
First, I suppose I should admit having NO idea why she uses that handle. (I even double-checked her "user info" in case she'd changed it -- but she hasn't.) Second, before reviewing her review, I need to say that Babe is among those lesbian friends I model my life upon. She's bright, self-aware, and so laid-back you could mistake it for sleep. Yet she's a brilliant writer. (Come to think of it, I don't even know what she does for a living -- theater critic for the New Yorker is what it should be...)
ANYway, she went to a Manhattan review called Broadway Backwards 6, in support of a LGBT center called Broadway Cares. For -- yes -- six years running, they reverse the gender of the singers of B'Way songs, revealing unintended gender-bending subtext. From "Don't Tell Mama" from Cabaret, sung by Alan Cumming, to "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," sung by Len Cariou.
Babe writes that the review mattered "...for the ways that it got you thinking. About all the things we can mean when we say the word 'queer'."
She likes "songs that fucked with gender power dynamics and with gender itself. Bebe Neuwirth did 'All I Care About Is Love' [from Chicago] in a hot-as-hell white pantsuit with a black carnation in the lapel and a cigar, and she sang and performed the hell out of that song."
I could go on, but the point is Babe's wonderful first-person account, including her intelligent and emotionally satisfying criticism of everyone's (including her own) gender reflexes -- bias that complicates our lives. So just go read it, please!
First, I suppose I should admit having NO idea why she uses that handle. (I even double-checked her "user info" in case she'd changed it -- but she hasn't.) Second, before reviewing her review, I need to say that Babe is among those lesbian friends I model my life upon. She's bright, self-aware, and so laid-back you could mistake it for sleep. Yet she's a brilliant writer. (Come to think of it, I don't even know what she does for a living -- theater critic for the New Yorker is what it should be...)
ANYway, she went to a Manhattan review called Broadway Backwards 6, in support of a LGBT center called Broadway Cares. For -- yes -- six years running, they reverse the gender of the singers of B'Way songs, revealing unintended gender-bending subtext. From "Don't Tell Mama" from Cabaret, sung by Alan Cumming, to "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," sung by Len Cariou.
Babe writes that the review mattered "...for the ways that it got you thinking. About all the things we can mean when we say the word 'queer'."
She likes "songs that fucked with gender power dynamics and with gender itself. Bebe Neuwirth did 'All I Care About Is Love' [from Chicago] in a hot-as-hell white pantsuit with a black carnation in the lapel and a cigar, and she sang and performed the hell out of that song."
I could go on, but the point is Babe's wonderful first-person account, including her intelligent and emotionally satisfying criticism of everyone's (including her own) gender reflexes -- bias that complicates our lives. So just go read it, please!