An extended critique of Ferd's vid "Strip"
I don't know what the current fandom convention is when posting something that critiques someone else's work - I've heard that even whispering that someone might not be perfect can destroy souls and ruin christmas fandom for everyone. Also, I know very well from experience that I don't like it when random white male American people show up in my journal space and tell me that privilege doesn't exist. So I'm f-locking this post, which isn't something I normally do here. And I don't know if that's the right decision, given that one of the purposes of critique is for the person being critiqued to see it and learn something, but whatever. eta: I've unlocked it now. Courage after the fact, I guess.
For the record: I don't know Ferd. What I'm talking about here isn't her intention in making her vid, but the effect that she ended up with. You can download/watch the vid at Ferd's LJ, here.
Part One: The Thing That's Always Bothered Me
Notice how there are no queer people of any kind in this vid? It's a vid about dressing up and then taking the fancy clothes off, for god's sake, a vid about the difference or disagreement between a body and the clothes it wears - but there's no Hedwig and the Angry Inch in this vid? No Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? No Tipping the Velvet, no Marlene Dietrich in Morocco with her top hat, no Rocky Horror or Victor/Victoria or Better Than Chocolate or To Wong Foo? No Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye wearing feathers and singing "Sisters" in White Christmas? No Twelfth Night or As You Like It or The Merchant of Venice? No Benton Fraser in drag or Sam Beckett in fabulous 60s-era frocks and hats? Don't tell me that these films and tv shows aren't a costumer's dream. And don't tell me that she's never seen or heard of any of them. She doesn't seem to be confining herself to period pieces (and even if she were, I'd want to know where my Shakespeare's at) and there are shots that don't even make sense to me in the context of this vid - Kermit the Frog playing a banjo, what? That Sex and the City shot where Carrie's wearing jeans and a cutoff top? So there's absolutely no excuse for this to be so exclusively heterosexual.
Now, I know what you want to say. She has no responsibility to represent sexualities that aren't hers, or to go out of her way to make a vid for me - after all, it's her vid, not mine, and if I don't like it, I can make my own. And aren't there lots of gay vids in fandom already anyway?
Well, to me, that last question is part of the answer - there are in fact lots and lots of vids about gay or queer people in fandom already - which is why I feel like she would have to actually go out of her way to avoid same-sex pairings and crossdressing in this vid. If you've seen more than two vids - which she must have, since she's clearly an accomplished vidder stylistically - then she's seen plenty of examples of gorgeous dressed-up dancing queer people, in Sandy and Rache's "Hot Hot Hot," for example, or in Killa and Tzikeh's "Puttin on the Ritz," or in Mary Crawford's "Improper Dancing." Again, I know nothing about this person, but even if she's exclusively in het fandom, this vid has to be consciously excluding, rather than not-including, queer fandom icons. I mean, Ben Fraser and Ray Vecchio dancing together? Can't be avoided if you've ever seen a vid. I'm a Ray Kowalski girl myself, but I've seen that scene dozens of times.
The second part of my displeasure comes from the vid's tagline, "To all the romantic dreamers." I might buy that she has no responsibility to represent my sexuality, or anyone's sexuality other than her own, if it weren't for that tagline (actually, I probably wouldn't, but let's go with that). Because it's like a slap in the face, in the same way that hollywood romance is always a slap in the face. To all the romantic dreamers: and we know what romance means, right? It doesn't mean gay people. To all the romantic dreamers: and we know who dreams of romance, who yearns for love and understanding and acceptance and representation, right? It's straight people. To all the romantic dreamers, provided that you romantically dream for a very specific kind relationship. Romance and dreams don't exist outside of straight relationships, is what this vid is telling me.
to ALL the romantic dreamers. All of them. Just not me.
Part Two: The Thing That's Only Just Started to Bother Me Because I'm Slow, But Should've Bothered Me Before
So, eruthros and I were talking, the other day, about the difficulty of getting people of colour into multivids. Part of the problem is that popular media, by and large, is filled to the brim with white actors. Some shows are exceptions - Dexter does pretty well, as do The Wire and Ugly Betty (speaking of Ugly Betty: there's a fandom that should've been in this vid), but for the most part: white people. Then on top of that, fandom has a tendency to focus attention on white people, and white men especially. This is something that's been discussed in more detail elsewhere by people who are smarter at race critique than I am, but it seems true, to me, that fandom attention is disproportionally focused on white characters. (My own fandom attention included, btw.) So when making a multivid, if you want people to recognize your source, you're already in a doublebind when it comes to including people of colour.
But Strip, just as it goes out of its way to exclude queer people, goes out of its way to exclude people of colour. Watch the vid: the only time non-white people are on the screen? Is when they're maids lacing white women into their corsets. One of them is even, if I'm not mistaken, Mammy from Gone With the Wind, whose position in that film has been critiqued up the wazoo in all kinds of popular culture, probably even in American high schools. So here's what I imagine, and this is totally me putting words in Ferd's mouth, but here is what I imagine: I imagine her clipping Gone With the Wind for the costumes. She's clipping scenes with Mammy in them. She must, at some level, be reminded of the critiques of the Mammy-role in American popular film. And then she doesn't care, because I guess racism really sucked in 1939 when that film was made, but it's over now.
Except it's not, because other than Mammy and some other maids whom I don't recognize, there aren't any other people of colour in this vid. Somehow she watched Gone With the Wind in the process of making this vid, and yet it never occurred to her that she had a wee bit of a problem of racial representation. Oh, and The King and I, too, with a white actor playing a non-white character: she looked at that, too, while making the vid.
Imagine if I hacked this vid and put Scarlett O'Hara being laced into an uncomfortable corset by a black maid next to a shot of, say, Martha Jones, dressed as a black maid, taking shit from the Doctor. We'd emerge with a slightly different discourse on how clothes make bodies uncomfortable, wouldn't we?
But Mammy's not the only person of colour that the vidder ran into while making this vid - I mean, we've got Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, but no Denzel Washington in full military garb and blue leather pants? Let me restate that: Denzel Washington, in blue leather pants. Ignoring that is not only discriminatory, but also a crime against hotness. Yoda twirls around in his Jedi-wear, but Samuel L. Jackson doesn't? Kaylee, but no Zoe; Batman and Superman, but no Green Lantern; Dirty Dancing, but no Save The Last Dance; seventeen shots of Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, but not a single shot of Queen Latifah in Chicago.
She fast forwarded right past so many people of colour, while making this vid. And if she looked up "dance movies" or "period costumes" or "musicals" or anything else likely to have dancing / fun costuming, she scrolled right past plenty of films that would've made her vid much less narrow, much more interesting, much less racist.
(I do not call the vidder a racist. I call the vid racist. And heterosexist.)
Perhaps the most egregious moment is the kiss-montage, because at that point, there seems to be absolutely no requirement that the people be in period costume, or in any pretty costume, or naked: the only requirement to be put in that kiss montage seems to be that the characters be straight and white. One couple seems to be wearing baggy dull grey smock-things.
And the lack of people of colour is particularly disturbing in the context of the vid's message, which seems to be about the joy of revealing the body, about the joy in the moment of taking those clothes off. Because the body that's revealed here is insistently, stubbornly white: the bodies that we're asked to desire, or that are chosen as natural objects of desire, are insistently white. To reveal the black body, or the latino/a body, or the brown body, or any other non-white body, is not to evince romance or sex or sensuality. The only body that we're glad to see is a white one. Imagine how startling it would be if there were one revealed black body in the midst of all those white ones. Imagine how it would completely upset the rest of the vid. The vid only manages to do this because white and straight are unmarked categories, are default orientations: they pass by unnoticed until something shows up to demonstrate their privileged status as unmarked categories.
I'm not particularly surprised that the romantic dreamers are all straight white people: that's how romance is conceived of, in America/Canada/Britain, at least. Romantic comedy, musicals, period pieces, dance films, and other movies that tend to have happy endings are all genres that, by and large, belong to straight white people. But fuck this vid for going along with that, y'know?
-
So I rededicate this vid, to give it the dedication it should have had to begin with: to all the straight white romantic dreamers whose black maids lace their corsets too tight.
There are multivids that do a much better job of trying to include people of colour, by the way; if you want some examples, check out Rache and Sandy's "A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Hot Hot Hot)," or - my favourite - Charmax's "I'm Your Man." I love "I'm Your Man," because my god, it's hard enough to find lesbian films, and harder still to find happy lesbian films, but Charmax clearly went above and beyond trying to find women of colour making out with/dancing with/loving each other. With the deck stacked against her, Charmax did everything in her power to be inclusive.
One might also note that, while Charmax's vid is about one particular sexuality, it doesn't label itself as "for everyone" - in fact, it labels itself as femslash. Ferd's vid? Apparently doesn't have to label itself as het. Because it is for everyone, you see.
For the record: I don't know Ferd. What I'm talking about here isn't her intention in making her vid, but the effect that she ended up with. You can download/watch the vid at Ferd's LJ, here.
Part One: The Thing That's Always Bothered Me
Notice how there are no queer people of any kind in this vid? It's a vid about dressing up and then taking the fancy clothes off, for god's sake, a vid about the difference or disagreement between a body and the clothes it wears - but there's no Hedwig and the Angry Inch in this vid? No Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? No Tipping the Velvet, no Marlene Dietrich in Morocco with her top hat, no Rocky Horror or Victor/Victoria or Better Than Chocolate or To Wong Foo? No Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye wearing feathers and singing "Sisters" in White Christmas? No Twelfth Night or As You Like It or The Merchant of Venice? No Benton Fraser in drag or Sam Beckett in fabulous 60s-era frocks and hats? Don't tell me that these films and tv shows aren't a costumer's dream. And don't tell me that she's never seen or heard of any of them. She doesn't seem to be confining herself to period pieces (and even if she were, I'd want to know where my Shakespeare's at) and there are shots that don't even make sense to me in the context of this vid - Kermit the Frog playing a banjo, what? That Sex and the City shot where Carrie's wearing jeans and a cutoff top? So there's absolutely no excuse for this to be so exclusively heterosexual.
Now, I know what you want to say. She has no responsibility to represent sexualities that aren't hers, or to go out of her way to make a vid for me - after all, it's her vid, not mine, and if I don't like it, I can make my own. And aren't there lots of gay vids in fandom already anyway?
Well, to me, that last question is part of the answer - there are in fact lots and lots of vids about gay or queer people in fandom already - which is why I feel like she would have to actually go out of her way to avoid same-sex pairings and crossdressing in this vid. If you've seen more than two vids - which she must have, since she's clearly an accomplished vidder stylistically - then she's seen plenty of examples of gorgeous dressed-up dancing queer people, in Sandy and Rache's "Hot Hot Hot," for example, or in Killa and Tzikeh's "Puttin on the Ritz," or in Mary Crawford's "Improper Dancing." Again, I know nothing about this person, but even if she's exclusively in het fandom, this vid has to be consciously excluding, rather than not-including, queer fandom icons. I mean, Ben Fraser and Ray Vecchio dancing together? Can't be avoided if you've ever seen a vid. I'm a Ray Kowalski girl myself, but I've seen that scene dozens of times.
The second part of my displeasure comes from the vid's tagline, "To all the romantic dreamers." I might buy that she has no responsibility to represent my sexuality, or anyone's sexuality other than her own, if it weren't for that tagline (actually, I probably wouldn't, but let's go with that). Because it's like a slap in the face, in the same way that hollywood romance is always a slap in the face. To all the romantic dreamers: and we know what romance means, right? It doesn't mean gay people. To all the romantic dreamers: and we know who dreams of romance, who yearns for love and understanding and acceptance and representation, right? It's straight people. To all the romantic dreamers, provided that you romantically dream for a very specific kind relationship. Romance and dreams don't exist outside of straight relationships, is what this vid is telling me.
to ALL the romantic dreamers. All of them. Just not me.
Part Two: The Thing That's Only Just Started to Bother Me Because I'm Slow, But Should've Bothered Me Before
So, eruthros and I were talking, the other day, about the difficulty of getting people of colour into multivids. Part of the problem is that popular media, by and large, is filled to the brim with white actors. Some shows are exceptions - Dexter does pretty well, as do The Wire and Ugly Betty (speaking of Ugly Betty: there's a fandom that should've been in this vid), but for the most part: white people. Then on top of that, fandom has a tendency to focus attention on white people, and white men especially. This is something that's been discussed in more detail elsewhere by people who are smarter at race critique than I am, but it seems true, to me, that fandom attention is disproportionally focused on white characters. (My own fandom attention included, btw.) So when making a multivid, if you want people to recognize your source, you're already in a doublebind when it comes to including people of colour.
But Strip, just as it goes out of its way to exclude queer people, goes out of its way to exclude people of colour. Watch the vid: the only time non-white people are on the screen? Is when they're maids lacing white women into their corsets. One of them is even, if I'm not mistaken, Mammy from Gone With the Wind, whose position in that film has been critiqued up the wazoo in all kinds of popular culture, probably even in American high schools. So here's what I imagine, and this is totally me putting words in Ferd's mouth, but here is what I imagine: I imagine her clipping Gone With the Wind for the costumes. She's clipping scenes with Mammy in them. She must, at some level, be reminded of the critiques of the Mammy-role in American popular film. And then she doesn't care, because I guess racism really sucked in 1939 when that film was made, but it's over now.
Except it's not, because other than Mammy and some other maids whom I don't recognize, there aren't any other people of colour in this vid. Somehow she watched Gone With the Wind in the process of making this vid, and yet it never occurred to her that she had a wee bit of a problem of racial representation. Oh, and The King and I, too, with a white actor playing a non-white character: she looked at that, too, while making the vid.
Imagine if I hacked this vid and put Scarlett O'Hara being laced into an uncomfortable corset by a black maid next to a shot of, say, Martha Jones, dressed as a black maid, taking shit from the Doctor. We'd emerge with a slightly different discourse on how clothes make bodies uncomfortable, wouldn't we?
But Mammy's not the only person of colour that the vidder ran into while making this vid - I mean, we've got Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, but no Denzel Washington in full military garb and blue leather pants? Let me restate that: Denzel Washington, in blue leather pants. Ignoring that is not only discriminatory, but also a crime against hotness. Yoda twirls around in his Jedi-wear, but Samuel L. Jackson doesn't? Kaylee, but no Zoe; Batman and Superman, but no Green Lantern; Dirty Dancing, but no Save The Last Dance; seventeen shots of Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, but not a single shot of Queen Latifah in Chicago.
She fast forwarded right past so many people of colour, while making this vid. And if she looked up "dance movies" or "period costumes" or "musicals" or anything else likely to have dancing / fun costuming, she scrolled right past plenty of films that would've made her vid much less narrow, much more interesting, much less racist.
(I do not call the vidder a racist. I call the vid racist. And heterosexist.)
Perhaps the most egregious moment is the kiss-montage, because at that point, there seems to be absolutely no requirement that the people be in period costume, or in any pretty costume, or naked: the only requirement to be put in that kiss montage seems to be that the characters be straight and white. One couple seems to be wearing baggy dull grey smock-things.
And the lack of people of colour is particularly disturbing in the context of the vid's message, which seems to be about the joy of revealing the body, about the joy in the moment of taking those clothes off. Because the body that's revealed here is insistently, stubbornly white: the bodies that we're asked to desire, or that are chosen as natural objects of desire, are insistently white. To reveal the black body, or the latino/a body, or the brown body, or any other non-white body, is not to evince romance or sex or sensuality. The only body that we're glad to see is a white one. Imagine how startling it would be if there were one revealed black body in the midst of all those white ones. Imagine how it would completely upset the rest of the vid. The vid only manages to do this because white and straight are unmarked categories, are default orientations: they pass by unnoticed until something shows up to demonstrate their privileged status as unmarked categories.
I'm not particularly surprised that the romantic dreamers are all straight white people: that's how romance is conceived of, in America/Canada/Britain, at least. Romantic comedy, musicals, period pieces, dance films, and other movies that tend to have happy endings are all genres that, by and large, belong to straight white people. But fuck this vid for going along with that, y'know?
-
So I rededicate this vid, to give it the dedication it should have had to begin with: to all the straight white romantic dreamers whose black maids lace their corsets too tight.
There are multivids that do a much better job of trying to include people of colour, by the way; if you want some examples, check out Rache and Sandy's "A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Hot Hot Hot)," or - my favourite - Charmax's "I'm Your Man." I love "I'm Your Man," because my god, it's hard enough to find lesbian films, and harder still to find happy lesbian films, but Charmax clearly went above and beyond trying to find women of colour making out with/dancing with/loving each other. With the deck stacked against her, Charmax did everything in her power to be inclusive.
One might also note that, while Charmax's vid is about one particular sexuality, it doesn't label itself as "for everyone" - in fact, it labels itself as femslash. Ferd's vid? Apparently doesn't have to label itself as het. Because it is for everyone, you see.