According to NPR, you can get copies of the film by sending an email to info@ggenyc.org, or by calling Girls for Gender Equity at 718-857-1393.

E-mail. Sent.

NPR’s Michele Martin also has a nice post on the film, and the comments that follow make a good read, particularly on the question of whether the kind of harrassment the girls are talking about is just a matter of boys being boys.

But most importantly, Martin also did an interview with the filmmakers. Hooray!

Click here to listen to the interview. Martin also has a follow-up on the comments, here.

You can also click here to make a donation to GGE, check or paypal.

In other awesome news, Kiri Davis’ independent short film, “A Girl Like Me” has won the CosmoGirl “Take action hollywood film contest”! I’ll put the youtube version at the bottom of this post, but you can catch a better quality version at the CosmoGirl website. (+ you can see the two runner-ups, too.)

Hooray!

Finally, if you for some reason need some more inspiration-from-the-youth-in-action, don’t forget about GumboTeen, which I talked about at the end of an April post on The Jim Crow Museum.

Okay, my money has to go run and catch up with my mouth… Doesn’t it feel good to feel good?

Here’s the Kiri Davis film, followed by the original Bill Cosby video from the 70s, which Davis is also referencing:

and the Cosby film…

I can’t wait to get my hands on “Hey…Shorty.”

For now, here’s a trailer from War Zone. You can check more videos from Northampton’s Media Education Foundation, including Byron Hurt’s fabulous, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, by clicking here.

RELATED POSTS @ $3.60:

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Christina Olivares

I find this one difficult to work out: If you have never boxed, or done some sort of martial art, it might be hard to understand how such activities aren’t quite about violence. But in this post that boundary around violence is difficult to identify, since part of what I’m thinking about is a kind of self-defense (which thus assumes violence). I’m not saying, for instance, that I believe that all women should box, or that knowing how to fight would necessarily alleviate women’s vulnerability to domestic abuse. But there is something to be said for the psychological effects of imagining one’s self as able to hold one’s own. It’s an effect on the mind developed through the disciplination of the body.

“Disciplination,” by the way, is just fancy for “what we put our bodies through” in order to achieve some kind of effect. Disciplination makes comportment– or what my grandparents refer to as “how you carry yourself.” So learning a new sport or a new style of dance involves disciplination. We simply use the fancier word when describing such activities as also having psychological effects. The philosopher Iris M. Young has this beautiful essay called “Throwing Like Girl,” and in it she talks about a moment when she realizes that there are all these things she never learned to do with her body because she was a woman, and that “being a woman” was explicitly tied up in having a limited physical relationship to her body. It’s not that girls can’t throw; it’s that girls never learn to throw. We don’t teach girls to throw because girls can’t throw; girls never learn to throw. There is no such thing, really, as throwing like a girl. Oh, unless “girl” just means “badly.” Language is a bitch, huh?

It’s really quite amazing to think about. If I throw a ball at you, will you duck or catch? How much is that reflex guided by your training? How much is your training justified or strengthened by what do you think you should do? Or what you have always done? Who are you anyway?

Comportment is fascinating, especially coming off of a semester of teaching classes like “Girlpower” and “Racial Passing.” Passing is all about understanding comportment, and knowing how to adjust one’s bearing in such a way that people take you to be a certain kind of person. Two of the best examples of passing through comportment I can think of are Will Smith’s character in Six Degrees of Separation, and Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects. (Although I guess these might also be examples of how vexed relationships between the real and the imaginary can be: remember when Denzel told Smith to use a body double for kissing a man, b/c it would ruin his career?)

But anyway, race and gender passing are usually about conscious decisions, while comportment is mainly unconscious, much in the way being “who we are” is an unconscious performance (for instance your regional accent or your gentle manner). But sometimes things happen that make you suddenly aware of “who you are.” Someone tells you that you don’t sound black, or look Jewish, or sit like a man. That moment of being told who “you” are is called an interpellation, and it speaks to how identity requires both our own actions and other people’s explicit recognition thereof. (If you’re interested in thinking about what this means for gender performance, you should check out the Chloé A. Hilliard article I mention in “all lesbians are sneaky.”)

So back to boxing and blows, to subjects and objects, and to the complications of our relations therein. Three powerful readings: In her post on CnS, Olivares has all these important things to say regarding boxing in relation to her own femininity through boxing. Then I saw a post over at a cat and twenty, picked up via Objectify This. Both women riff on how often women apologize, “I’m sorry this,” “I’m sorry that.” Apologies for imposing. Apologies for taking up space. Apologies for making people deal with themselves, and then watching their struggle.

1. So here’s Olivares. I don’t want to reproduce too much here, because I’d really like you to read the women above for yourself:

on the train to the gym this morning i realized that it was fear that kept me rooted & accepting of my teammate’s blows. not about being quick. i’ve just been trained to sustain blows. when i was little – the one time i evaded my father’s heavy hand, perhaps at 7 or 8 years old, i felt, for the first time in my life, not fear, but contempt for him as i spun to the other side of the kitchen – and he, shame? either way, when he caught me by the arm a second later, it became the worst beating of my life. for future (inevitable, i was a back-talker) punishments i never resisted, partly to not bring worse punishment, but partly, it must’ve been, so that i would never have to feel contempt for my father. fear was preferable to loathing. fear made it my fault; loathing, his fault. and so i’ve trained myself to not duck blows.

2. From a cat and twenty:

… she was sorry. she knew enough, even drunk to the point of unconsciousness and physically incapable of movement, that she was sorry about something. because we always are. we are always supposed to be.

you know what i wish? well, i wish a lot of things, really, chief among them being that men would stop hating women so goddamn much. because it’s not our fault. whatever it is that actually drives that misogyny, whatever fear is actually coiled up at the bottom of that vast heart of darkness, it is most definitely not our fault.

but barring these impossible dreams, you know what i wish? i wish that we would stop apologizing. it’s not easy – we’ve learned to say “i’m sorry” to try to preempt the whipping, or to lessen the lashes, or just to quiet our own minds while it’s happening. we’ve learned that “sorry” helps us survive. but i wish we could start fighting back, just a little, in little ways.

3. And finally, two scenes from Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight. The first is when Michelle Rodriguez’s Diana gets into a fight with her abusive father, and beats him. The second, which you can catch a glimpse of in the clip below, is when she hits her sparring partner. Hard. Then she apologizes. Her trainer admonishes her “don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry.”

I could problematize this by emphasizing that the “don’t be sorry” implores women to be like oppressors. But here, I really don’t think it’s about apologizing, about proper conduct in the interest of ethical relations. This is about a state of being: Don’t ever be sorry.Though there are dangers. On top of her father, subjecting him to her blows, there’s this moment when Diana seems to see her abusive father in herself. By virtue of her position over him, she suddenly sees him as her abused mother, which makes her… Multiple subject positions, multiple significations: It’s hard not be sorry– in every sense of the phrase. Hard not to apologize for living while female, and then hard not to be a sorry ass punk… So much work.

To end, a Madonna video, “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” I have some feelings to smash out. The ending doesn’t bode well (nor does her English accent!), but afterwards I always feel strangely fine, being left to the work of recuperation.

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what its like
Wouldn’t you?
What it feels like for a girl?

May 26, 2007
Dublin, Ireland

Dear Democratic Congress,

Hello, my name is Cindy Sheehan and my son Casey Sheehan was killed on April 04, 2004 in Sadr City , Baghdad , Iraq . He was killed when the Republicans still were in control of Congress. Naively, I set off on my tireless campaign calling on Congress to rescind George’s authority to wage his war of terror while asking him “for what noble cause” did Casey and thousands of other have to die. Now, with Democrats in control of Congress, I have lost my optimistic naiveté and have become cynically pessimistic as I see you all caving into as one Daily Kos poster called: “Mr. 28%” [read the rest].

In a second post, written yesterday, she elaborates:

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat? [read the rest]

I actually don’t have so much to say, because I haven’t read the book yet! I do want to say, however, that reading her interview made me think about how, after a semester of watching y’all emerge as public intellectuals, that there is something really beautiful in the search for finding one’s voice, and something exemplary in using it.

. . . .

by Supriya Pillai

I’ve been in the basement of the UN for all of last week and I’ll be there until the end of this week. The Commission on the Status of Women meets every year to discuss government’s various commitments to a particular theme having to do with women. General, I know and, annoyingly, pretty non-binding, but the theatre I have been witness to has really been something. Watching world politics unfold in one room as people comb through language and text, the silent fights become more vocal. Diplomacy is just a nice way of fighting. Like, when most delegates take the mic, they respectively thank their other delegates, the chair and then they proceed with their “fuck yous”– but ever so gently.

This year, the theme is the Girl Child. Interesting to note, there are no international treaties, documents, etc that indicate that girls can express their human rights. Rather, there are places where girls are protected (i.e. by their families), but in and of themselves, they are not entitled to inalienable human rights.

Here’s the thing, the US is one of the very few countries that hasn’t even ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), let alone the Convention of the Rights of the Child or the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)… and they are proposing new language. It’s really arrogant. The US won’t ratify the UDHR because they claim we cannot have universal human rights when we believe in state sovereignty. To be honest, the US just wants to be exempt… exempt from owning up to torture at Abu Ghraib, owning up to starting a war when war wasn’t necessary, owning up to the systematic imprisonment of black folks and latinos in this country… I mean the list is long and basically they want to be exempt from fulfilling human rights and exempt from being held accountable for violating them.

So, what gives them the right to introduce any new language, to boss around other countries, and then to denounce the whole UN system at once? And for those of you who think that the UN is a waste of time, that’s our government’s propoganda and I can’t figure out, if that’s what they think, why they’re present and why they’re fighting so hard.

This year the US is [presenting] 2 resolutions. One got nixed today and the other will most likely get trashed too. They’ve put their hands into the pot of female infanticide, which we can all agree we are against, but then they had to throw in sex selective abortion. Our administration is so against abortion that they will fight battles outside of the country (since they can’t win them inside the country) to try to gain allies to deny women the right to control their own bodies and choose an abortion.

Another government’s delegation said to me and some other colleagues today, “I don’t understand why the US has to meddle in abortion, opposing it so much, when it’s legal in their own country.”

The other resolution is against forced and early marriage… I won’t go into it but it’s really the US’s back up… they have thrown in language on sex selective abortion into this resolution today with no negotiation from others… so really very diplomatic, to say the least. It’s all confusing and doesn’t make sense, but they are letting the world know that they are going to fight abortion wherever and however they can.

China has been funny… they blame all of the problems that the girl child faces today on globalization. They aren’t far off the mark, but they don’t see themselves as accountable in any of it.

Our friends from South America lobby in a block called Mercosur and they are doing a phenomenal job. Brazil, in particular, is very progressive.

Every year the Palestinians [present] a resolution (through another country since Palestine is not considered a member state) on women and girls living under foreign occupation. And, every year it gets shot down (by guess who? The US and Israel). But, this year we hope will be the year that it gets recognized.

I have a post below on Kiri Davis’ A Girl Like Me, which I feel is especially in the midst of this terrible Don Imus/Rutgers moment. And if you are at all interested in how girls today are representing their own concerns, please, please, please check out all of the videos (the link above will take you there). Also, Melissa on the Girlpower 2 blog has a post with the Davis video in it, as well as the original video the film is based on. There are also some comments on the post.

“The Estrogen Bomb” from the Guerrilla Girls:

Is there such a thing as ‘female power’? Is power always ‘power’?

(To learn more about the guerilla girls also check out “The Guerilla Girls Bare All“)

I thought both classes would find her film interesting. Passing people may have seen it alongside the Bill Cosby video we watched earlier in the semester, and Davis also references the black doll/white doll thing, as mentioned in class today.

It would be pretty cool for Davis to win the scholarship, but all three videos are interesting, and particularly relevant to you girlpower people.

Maybe you should vote!