Bijou Roy

By Ronica Dhar
St. Martin's Press

Bijou Roy reminded me a bit of Sameer Parekh's Stealing the Ambassador. Both novels feature a young Indian American who visits India after his or her father's death in an attempt to understand the father better, especially his motivation for leaving his home country. Both are quintessential second-generation novels, I feel, because they attempt to recover the lost homeland through a kind of false nostalgia—a desire for a place that was never theirs, but rather of their parents and of the past.

Dhar's novel seemed to try to touch on a number of cultural issues, too, in the contrast between the United States and India in the Indian American's perspective. One example is that Bijou, the title character, is somewhat obsessed with Ketaki, her aunt's maidservant. Bijou sympathizes with this fifteen-year-old and wants to befriend her because the stark class difference of her aunt and uncle from this maid rubs against the ideal of class mobility that she is familiar with having grown up in the United States.

Bijou's name is French for jewel, a word her father picked up when he visited France. He also met Bijou's mother, Sheela, while in France, and this diversion from a more direct India-to-United States path for the parents is interesting for creating a more complex sense of diasporic movement. The France moment in the parents' lives also brings in Billie Holiday as a favorite singer of the father and Bijou (the father first heard Billie Holiday in France as well).

Bijou Roy also has a number of sections from the perspective of the father, Nitish Roy. (The narration is in the third person throughout, though the character's voices emerge in free indirect discourse.) As in Parekh's novel, there is a past (of the father, of the grandfather) haunted by revolutionary and Communist zeal. Nitish was involved with the Naxalites, a revolutionary group that refused Gandhi's nonviolent tactics for social change. I think it's fascinating how newer fiction by Indian Americans (and Indians in the diaspora) seem to be marking a post-independence moment of political contestation rather than the moment of independence from British colonial rule and the trauma of the India-Pakistan split. It definitely seems generational—that the memories of the authors' parents are what make the substance of the fiction.

There was a kind of interesting relationship between Bijou and her younger sister Pari, too. Dhar sketched out subtle differences in how they perceived this trip to India (due perhaps to age difference but also to the different relationships that they had to their parents).

Ultimately, I think Dhar's novel also aims to explore differences in gender norms in the United States versus in India. That exploration isn't fully fleshed out, though, and gets subsumed by the love triangle subplot, which somewhat predictably forces Bijou to puzzle through her relationship with a White American man and her attraction to an Indian man who is the son of a close friend of the father.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Fearless Female Journalists

By Joy Crysdale
Second Story Press

Fearless Female Journalists is a set of ten short profiles of female reporters, photojournalists, and newscasters hailing from various times and places over the last two centuries.

Among the women featured is one of the early pioneers of modern journalism: nineteenth-century American newspaperwoman Nellie Bly, a daredevil stunt reporter. Nelly Bly is perhaps most famous for circumnavigating the globe in seventy-three days in an era before airplanes, but she also took on assignments designed to do good as well as to make a splash. For example, she got herself admitted as a patient to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in order to expose the terrible conditions there. In a later chapter, we meet Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian reporter who, despite her privileged origins as the daughter of diplomats, made the decision to risk–and ultimately lose–her life in order to report on the Russian occupation of Chechnya. (Politkovskaya was assassinated on October 7, 2006, at age forty-eight.) The book closes with a portrait of Thembi Ngubane, a young South African woman who recorded an audio journal about her life with AIDS as part of an effort to end the stigma around AIDS, as well as to push the South African government to acknowledge the tragic proportions of the AIDS epidemic.

The book is geared towards children–I estimate that it is most appropriate for an audience aged seven to eleven. The profiles are attractive and highly readable, complete with photographs and sidebars containing “fun facts.” The stories are entertaining and inspiring, and the selection of featured journalists reflects some variety in terms of era, type of journalism, and nationality (although the book still skews heavily toward heterosexual North American white women). Unfortunately, the book does have a downside–it is written from a “nice, liberal” standpoint, in which history is presented as an inexorable march towards progress, driven by a few exceptionally determined actors. This perspective glorifies individual high-profile “heroines” while erasing the history of communal struggle. It also obscures the reality that, in most cases, the few exceptional people who “make it big” do so not because they are more courageous or determined than thousands of others, but rather because they got lucky or started out with some “extras,” such as racial or class privilege.

The book reaches its nadir at the beginning of the final chapter, when it begins the profile of Thembi Ngubane by blatantly exoticizing her ethnicity: “Thembi Ngubane had a beautiful voice. Like her name, it was wonderfully African. Her voice flowed and lilted and swam around words, especially words with ‘r’ in them."

While I enjoyed reading Fearless Female Journalists and learning about the ten outstanding women profiled within, I could have happily done without the book’s uncritical, unconscious approach to the narrative of history and social change.

Review by Ri J. Turner

Black Dogs and Blue Words: Depression and Gender in the Age of Self-Care

By Kimberly Emmons
Rutgers University Press

Jerry Seinfeld jokes that pharmaceutical companies could save time by naming all of their antidepressants “Cramitol” (“Cram it all”). Kimberly Emmons would likely agree. Her eye-opening Black Dogs and Blue Words opens up an original, potentially life-changing perspective on antidepressants and the companies who market them. Emmons, an English professor at Case Western Reserve University and an expert in medical rhetoric, offers shocking and persuasive evidence that women are not only the targets of these ads, but have become complicit in the targeting.

Emmons builds her case brick by brick. Although her prose is academic and dense in places, the slowly building logic and the reader’s ensuing sense of outrage make the book as hard to put down as any who-dun-it. In fact, the book is its own brand of who-dun-it. How did women become Big Pharma bulls-eyes? Solving the mystery requires understanding how the language of antidepressant advertising both reflects and shapes gender stereotypes. To illustrate, Emmons dissects print and broadcast ads word by word and frame by frame. She points out how words such as “excessive crying," “fatigue," “loss of zest,” and “tearfulness” have long been used in our culture to describe women’s emotions and alleged deficits, and how drug manufacturers have co-opted the phrasing to describe depression.

It gets worse. Analyzing the photographs that accompany the ads, Emmons demonstrates how they reflect our societal norms of acceptable female behavior. The ads feature sad women standing apart from their family, women whose disappointed children accuse them of being “no fun anymore,” and protective fathers with their arms around children, standing apart from mom, fixing her with baleful stares. Next frame, the woman diagnoses herself with depression. Next, she is shown at her doctor’s office requesting antidepressants, and, presto, next frame, the woman has been restored to her acceptable “gendered self.” How do we know? She reports her progress as she shops for the family groceries, or while playing with her children, or while involved in some other womanly scenario. Emmons also surveys children’s literature and that women’s magazine staple, the self-diagnostic quiz, with equally interesting and well-considered conclusions.

One of the book’s most fascinating chapters traces the history of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which, as the title implies, spells out the criteria for diagnosing psychiatric illnesses. In one of her biggest bombshells, Emmons reveals that much of the language employed by Big Pharma to describe depression is not found in the DSM. Rather, drug manufacturers have cherry-picked synonyms primarily associated with women. Women absorb the ads, diagnose themselves with depression and make a beeline for the doctor’s office. The doctor, bombarded by the same marketing and lacking the time for a more in-depth probing, agrees. Prescription signed. Pills sold. And so we circle.

But don’t think that Emmons is anti-antidepressant, because she isn’t. Her view is much more reasoned. She acknowledges the good that medication can do under the right circumstances. But she also urges women to go from a regime of self-doctoring to a regime of self-care. Emmons uses “self-doctoring” to refer to women’s willingness to buy into the pharma-philosophy that emotional and social malaise stem from chemical problems which only can have chemical solutions. By accepting this rhetoric, says Emmons, women deprive themselves of their own personal narrative, one which may have little or nothing to do with clinical depression. In contrast, self-care involves reacting to signals that something is not right with a conscious surveying of one’s life and all its circumstances. Perhaps medication will help. Or perhaps a much more profound change is in order. Learning how we have been manipulated, our lives altered by corporate profiteering, is depressing. Pass me the Cramitol. On second thought, don’t. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Review by T. Tamara Weinstein

Iron Butterflies: Women Transforming Themselves and the World

By Birute Regine
Prometheus Books

In the eternal question of nature versus nurture, author and developmental psychologist Birute Regine leans comfortably towards nature. She embraces “feminine” qualities and calls for women the world over to do the same. While the anecdotes and reflections she chooses to share are indeed compelling and inspirational, the book as a whole can be off-putting if you do not necessarily prescribe to the idea of gendered personality traits.

One major theme running throughout Iron Butterflies is the need to reject and reform what she calls “gladiator culture,” which is defined by its aggressive, macho, and violent nature. This, Regine writes, is the source of many societal ills. The book is then a call to action for women around the globe to effect change through compassion, empathy, and caring—the antidote to gladiator culture. By accepting and uncovering innately feminine qualities, women can improve their own quality of life while also creating social change in their communities and in the larger world.

Though gender biases, discrimination, and violence continue to exist in full force, further emphasis on the “inherent” differences between men and women feels uncomfortable and one-sided. Instead of gendering characteristics, a more inclusive approach would have been to look deeper into how these traits have come into existence and examine the larger society as a whole for ways that everyone can integrate compassion, for instance, into their daily behavioral repertoire.

Regine does recognize this point in a few isolated moments, but looking at a scale with nature on one side and nurture on the other, she falls much closer to nature. With chapters entitled, “Tears: Heal the Hidden Wound,” and “Chrysalis: Shedding Self-Imposed Limitations,” the general tone of the book is New Age-y self help, with the inclusion of various ethnic and cultural metaphors. The core message is one of positive change and growth, but the means of achieving them may not resonate with all readers.

Review by Shana Mattson

Get Him to the Greek

Directed by Nicholas Stoller
Universal Pictures



Aldous Snow (Russell Brand)—the uber-sexual, tongue-in-cheek (and anywhere else you’ll let him stick it) Brit-rocker introduced to audiences in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall—is back in the latest film from yet another member of the Apatow Film Club for Boys. Based on characters created by Jason Segel, and written and directed by Nicholas Stoller, Get Him to the Greek is an often-comical, always offensive satire of the music industry, rock ‘n’ roll culture, and America’s reverence for all things celebrity.

Capitalizing on the fervor ignited by Brand, Get Him to the Greek succeeds in blurring the line between reality and fiction through inclusion of an original soundtrack and videos (performed by Brand and co-star Rose Byrne) and cameos by more than one recognizable pop artist and media outlet. Brand is refreshingly genuine as a privileged star struggling to gain control of his life, while Byrne offers hilarious support as Snow’s ex-wife and musical partner, Jackie Q. Effortlessly, she rivals Brand with her own sincere wit as she admits on Showbiz Tonight how bored she is with her husband’s sobriety.

I expected to like this film, and I did. Stoller bravely explores intimacy among men and, similar to I Love You, Man, his manuscript explores the complex dynamics of male relationships by offering glimpses of sincerity, vulnerability, and affection, elements often ignored in favor of more acceptably masculine attributes. However, as is often the case in Hollywood, without being well-versed in feminist values, what is meant to be ironic instead reinforces stereotypes and makes it that much harder for girls to be in on the joke.

Some attempts at humor are more problematic than others. While attempting to wrangle Snow in Vegan and escort him to New York City, music intern Aaron (Jonah Hill) is ordered by his boss Sergio (Sean “P Diddy” Combs) to have sex with a woman he’s just met, Destiny. Actually, Sergio commands Destiny to “[t]ake this man into the bedroom and have sex with him," and she readily complies. What follows is a pointless scene in which the petite Destiny forces the hefty Aaron to have sex with her. He says, “No.” He “protests.” (In reality, he could have easily tossed her off him.) Finally, he returns to his friends and announces, “I think I was just raped.” They laugh, and so does the audience. Gross.

In a perfect world, we can laugh about anything. Considering the world we live in, however, perhaps the more appropriate question is "who is allowed to laugh about rape?" When victims speak out with humor about their own lived experience, they are ridiculed or shamed, but when white men in Hollywood poke fun, its satire. Satire, by definition, is an exaggeration that is so far from reality that it is ridiculous to even consider. (The punchline to this joke being how ridiculous and non-threatening rape is for men – that men can’t be raped.) Unfortunately, this moment in Get Him to the Greek reinforces cultural myths surrounding the acceptance of rape. Instead of calling attention to the cultural, systemic, powerful epidemic of sexual violence, the "joke" nullifies its severity by applying it to the most powerful social group (white men).

The film industry is a site where creative potential can be harnessed to provoke meaningful change, and this band of brothers has the ability to lead the way for other Freaks and Geeks. But if we don’t start getting some feminist minds in on the action, these bright men are headed straight for the John Mayer Celebrity School of Shame.

Review by Alicia Sowisdral

Women Without Men

Directed by Shirin Neshat
Indiepix



The story of director Shirin Neshat is almost as compelling as her first feature. Born in religiously conservative Qazvin, Iran, Neshat has been using visual art to explore gender relations under Islam for nearly two decades, traveling back and forth between the States and Iran to enrich her perspective. But because her work has been so politically outspoken, Neshat has been exiled from her native country since 1996.

A visionary as courageous as she is condemned, Neshat is perhaps the most likely candidate to direct Women Without Men, an adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur's sweeping novel. The scope of Parsipur's story is both epic and intimate, juxtaposing the Western imperialist invasion of Tehran with the intertwining lives of four Iranian women during the tumultuous summer of 1953. To call such a project ambitious would be an understatement.

The connection between this political upheaval and the four characters in question is unmistakable; just as the people of Tehran have decided to come together and fight to maintain democracy, these four women have reached an impasse in their own lives. Nearing thirty and still unwedded, Munis (Shabnam Toloui) seeks to escape the oppressive hand of her older brother; Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni), a rape victim, must flee to avoid condemnation; long-time prostitute Zarin (Orsolya Tóth) is finally ready to leave the life behind; and middle-aged Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad) has grown weary of her stifling, loveless marriage. The greater struggle of the revolution provides a moving counterpoint to the individual struggles of these characters to achieve solace.

Both the book and the film use elements of magic realism to tell their story. In order to be free of her brother and reinvent herself as a revolutionary, Munis either fakes her own suicide or actually commits suicide and comes back to life; it's unclear which. While roaming the woods, Faezeh sees a surreal reenactment of her rape. Though the device isn't consistent, it still manages to be effective when used.

It helps that the film is beautifully shot, with careful compositions and a palpable tone and style. Neshat uses a metallic palette throughout, giving the film an appropriately imprisoning feel. The film is also remarkable for its avoidance of graphic imagery, with the exception of a disturbing scene in which Zarin scrubs herself raw in a public bath, but this is more to emphasize her diseased, nearly skeletal body, and needless to say, this lone image has a lingering impact.

In fact, it is Zarin's story that ends up being the most effective, while some of the others seem a bit heavy-handed at times. Fakhri's husband chides, "A woman hitting menopause shouldn't be flirting anymore," while Munis' brother declares, "A woman's body is like a flower. Once it blossoms, it quickly withers away." It's not that these sentiments aren't believable, but pairing them with a sheer lack of sympathetic male characters makes it all seem intentionally exaggerated.

From the film's final disclaimer, it seems that Neshat's primary objective was to focus on the revolution, but the way Women Without Men unfolds makes the political aspect of the story more of a backdrop than a feature. It is quite poignant, however, to realize that, in the end, our four main characters have been afforded a rebirth of some kind, even if it's through death, while the Iranian people have failed to achieve the one for which they've so bravely fought.

Review by Caitlin Graham

The Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture

Directed by Sut Jhally
Media Education Foundation



The main theme of The Codes of Gender is “commercial realism.” As explained by the narrator of this film, Sut Jhally, Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, a code of gender has to be understood as a shorthand language, a set of rules and behaviors. This is how Jhally analyzes the ways in which both women and men are portrayed in advertisements and on the covers of glossy magazines.

The film is based on the works of the Canadian social anthropologist Erving Goffman, who was born in Alberta in 1922. His greatest contribution to social theory and to gender representation was the analysis of visual communication between spectators, the subjects of their attention and how attitudes about gender are shaped by culture and society.

The film starts with an explanation of the difference between biological sex identity and constructed gender identity, which leads to the process of contrasting these identities in magazine advertising for commercial films. Gender expressions on magazine covers are skillfully manipulated to reflect the identity of women and men– not as they are, but how they should be, according to a societal norm. The women in the advertisements are posed in awkward positions. They lie down with their heads tilted off balance, stand on one leg, or kneel to suggest powerlessness, submission and dependence. Women become sexualized and accepting of their helplessness, embodying both men’s desire and subordination to them. In contrast, men are portrayed as active. Their poses suggest power, strength, and control.

As an example, Professor Jhally uses a clip from the Seinfield TV series that shows the lead character dating an attractive woman with hands that are big, rough, and strong, like the ‘normal’ hands of a man. Jerry Seinfield is put off by the image and loses interest in the woman.

A second example is Danica Patrick, an American auto racing driver, who is also an athlete and therefore does not fit with the stereotypical image of ‘natural’ femininity. But Patrick is portrayed on the magazine covers in the same way as other women. She lies down, ready to be gazed at–weak and submissive. Paul Marciano, founder of Guess, is portrayed as selecting images of passive women for Guess advertisements, as if he was making a statement that ‘women should know their place.’

Another striking feature of the visual images is the association of women with childhood. As though they never left this part of their lives behind, in commercials women are frequently portrayed as childlike, with fingers in their mouths. Women's posture with men is that of father and daughter: constantly hiding behind men, snuggling with men for protection, or resting their heads on men’s arms in sweet and helpless positions. Men, on the contrary, are shown in straight posture, muscular and strong, and project a hyper-masculine image of ‘accepted normality’.

The Codes of Gender will be of interest to all who question the visual images of what is deemed natural and normal. The film is well-made and presented, and it serves as a fitting tribute to Goffman (who died in Philadelphia in 1982). His work was underestimated when he was alive, but his contributions to ‘the codes of gender’ are as equally valid today as they were thirty years ago.

Review by Anna Hamling

Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia

Edited by Kenneth M. Cuno and Manisha Desai
Syracuse University Press

Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia makes available twelve essays that were presented, in earlier forms, at the 2004 symposium of the same title, which took place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The essays, edited by Kenneth M. Cuno and Manisha Desai, include analysis of eleven nation-states from Morocco to Bangladesh. With thirty-one pages of works cited, this is a valuable reference on an increasingly critical topic. Major themes include the impact of colonialism and postcolonial struggles with national identity; religious politics, and in particular religion’s impact on family law; and international standards, as outlined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and related conventions, versus nationalist efforts for self-determination without perceived pressures from outside.

The issues dealt with in these essays are complex, and I am wary of oversimplifying any of them. In the discussion of the role of colonialism, one idea that emerges is that colonial patriarchies interact with local patriarchies, creating hybrid forms that become sites of negotiation and contestation. Another idea that recurs is the interplay of religion, local custom, and the state, three venues for regulating behavior and establishing social mores. In practice, as contributor Shelley Feldman points out in her discussion of Bangladesh, this means that constitutional reform alone is insufficient to create change, because it will not (necessarily, or sufficiently) impact local customs and religious laws.

Taken together, the analyses shed light on one another. The reader can see commonalities among the nations in these interrelated regions, as well as critical differences that make each locality’s challenges unique. It becomes apparent that, as the editors point out in the introduction, “neither nationalism nor elite women’s feminism guarantees the ‘liberation’ of women.” Thankfully, these discussions also highlight many ways in which women are actors, participating in many ways, from liberatory habits of daily life to transnational feminist organizations.

Review by Lisa Rand

King Kong Theory: A Manifesto For Women Who Can’t Or Won’t Obey The Rules

By Virginie Despentes
Translated by Stephanie Benson
The Feminist Press

King Kong Theory is most easily my favourite read so far this year; it packs a punch and voices everything I feel about our oppressive patriarchal society. This work is completely free of any hesitation to say what is really going on in the Western world today. Virginie Despentes blew me away with her fresh and honest analysis of what women (and men) struggle within their half-baked, destructive gender roles. She uses research combined with her own gritty experiences to prove her points (of which there are many): silence rots and speaking heals, men exist and women are the negative to the male positive, and what we (both men and women) really feel and need have been smothered by glossy mainstream duct tape.

Yes, this slim tome covers the King Kong story. Despentes points out that the beast has no sex/gender, and is in fact, asexual. He gets along with the beauty, but in the end, he is killed off (nothing but heterosexual relationships here, so bye-bye King Kong!). Poor beauty, like so many other women out there, she is forced to leave the security of King Kong and go back to the dissatisfying and unsafe patriarchal realm.

Currently stuck in a broken system that benefits nobody (do rich white men count?) is angering. I’d forgotten how angry I am that I’m a sole supporting parent (the result of forced sex) without family support (the male predator is always right, so they, like society, stand by him), but King Kong furiously reminded me of how I’ve buried it over the years as yet another maladaptive coping mechanism. Violence against women and children today remains mainly unspoken.

King Kong Theory is not for those in denial or the fainthearted or the apologists; it’s for real men and women who want to change the landscape of power or who simply want to be included, validated as self-actualising individuals with agency. There are many people out there who have been silenced and have similar stories. Unfortunately, as Despentes notes, feminism represents more than just women; it represents a whole system of injustice that rests on gender differences.

This is a book I believe every woman and man should read, even if it means buying, borrowing, or begging for it. If Despentes' provocative films are anything to go by, a prospective reader can expect a powerful polemic that intends to shake up the female and male consciousness, and forces one to recast a blade-sharp view on the continuum of gendered violence permeating in society.

Review by Nicolette Westfall

Kick-Ass

Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Marv Films



Kick-Ass, the movie, ruled. And though I thought the central character's journey was an interesting one, by far the movie appealed to me because of eleven-year-old Hit Girl. I had a big plan to dissect the movie here, but then this gal over at Jezebel totally stole my brain and wrote the most eloquent review ever. (I'll get to that in a minute.)

In a nutshell, this movie made me cringe, laugh, turn my head away from the screen in horror, and many times think, "I'm really uncomfortable with that," followed by, "I think. Am I?" For an action movie that originated in comic form, that's saying something. I usually have clear and distinct opinions about things, and use my mental arsenal of academic blatherings to back it all up. At the end of this film I knew two things for sure:

1) I liked it. It made me think. About violence, gender, and heroes.

2) I disliked intensely the parents who brought their kids (some of whom were as young as six years old) to this film. They didn't even seem distressed walking out of the theater. It was, like, no big deal that their young kids had watched a man being put into a giant microwave and exploding into bits. And now I had to feel shitty for vocalizing my love for gratuitous violence and vengeance-fueled murder because I just endorsed that ideology in front of kindergarteners. So thanks.

Anywayz.

I like super-violent films, I love comics, I love female characters, and so I tolerate a lot of crap movies and am willing to suspend a certain measure of disbelief and accept that some jerk-off was hired to "punch up" a script to sell the movie to a teen male demographic. And I know that if this movie got greenlit primarily because someone managed to get Halle Barry to play the female lead, you probably aren't gonna try to butch her up and have her wear something that would be more realistic for running after bad guys. I get that it's a business run by dudes, for dudes, and that it primarily showcases the fantasies of dudes. But for a small shining moment, we got Hit-Girl. And I am all for a sequel based totally on her.

"In Defense of Hit Girl" over at Jezebel should be read even if you never plan on seeing this movie. It's a great defense of the action genre by a feminist, and not the "it's just entertainment" or the "it's not a movie you should spend time thinking too much about" defense. And for the record, I'm a pacifist and a scaredy-cat. I've never been in a fight, nor do I plan to, but I ♥ violent cinema, especially warrior women characters. It's a thing.

I'm thinking this will make for an awesome Halloween costume, btw.

Review by Sandra Falero

Cross-posted from Sweet Lady