lightspeedsound:

A paper I wrote a while back on Disney’s Mulan, vs. the Original Ballad of Mulan. I think it’s pretty cool. Sources are cited at the end of the paper, if you want to read more. I recommend it.

Read More

A very interesting paper on Disney’s Mulan and how the film has been created to sustain a western audience’s orientalist and sexisst conceptions about (Chinese) women.

The analysis of the film is spot-on, but I am a little worried about the author’s starting point of a universalist feminism which somehow retroactively fits around a medieval Chinese poem. The author makes it sound like the original poem might have served as a liberating tale for Chinese women (Which women? Which ethnicities and cultures? What parts of the enormous area that now equals China?) - but the poem, if, as I am assuming, written within a Confucian paradigm, could, for the women contemporary to it, probably only assist in reconfirming the filial duty of a daughter. As far as I know, women are always below men in classical Confucianism but this does not mean that they need be passive (which is often the case in western story-telling, and possibly one of the reasons that the creators of Disney Mulan felt they were breaking through some sexism).

Pragmatically speaking: I would need to know (per version of the tale) more about the period, location and author to be able to say anything about how it influenced the people who consumed it within their culture. If I chose to share this story with my children (future) then I would want to find all the different versions of it, and share them all and explain why the Disney one is specifically problematic.

Come to think of it, the only way I get to show those kids Disney films would be to simultaneously home-school them on all the stereotyping, sexism, racism and etc. in Disney films and would that even be worth it anymore since I would obviously just be guilt-tripping them into a love-hate relationship with a popcultural unit.

TLDR; Jienny are you here? Did you read this? Let me know what you think, you know more about Confucianism and all dis here.

The other one.

“On Earth people aren’t weightless”

Still troubled with the typography but I’m sure Herr Baumgärtner won’t let me down tomorrow

this is the one
that was already done

(I should go into rhyme
but haven’t the thyme)

ANYWAY

it’s a poster design about feeling confident about your body. The text (Dutch) says,

everything rests on self-confidence,

your bum too

greaterthanlapsed:

[Trigger warning for discussions of weight, diet, thin privilege, fatphobia, body policing.]

Great post that highlights to just what extent women can never be thin enough. It reminded me of Luisel Ramos, the model who died from complications of anorexia—while participating in a fashion show.

And the biggest problem is the complete loss of connection with one’s body. No matter how thin one is, the conviction of one’s Not Being Thin Enough to the point of no longer recognizing the state of one’s own body- this is what terrifies me, both at a level of general culture as well as up close and extremely personal.

Thanks to greaterthanlapsed’s link to the upsetting story of Luisel Ramos (and her little sister), I read another article on the starvation of models. Sadly, several men in charge of the fashion industry felt no sense of responsibility whatsoever.

From the article: Didier Grumbach, head of the Chambre Syndicale, the body that governs French fashion, says it is not the role of fashion to solve public health problems.

‘I think it’s a non-issue. You don’t solve public health problems by regulating the size of models,’ he says. ‘You know, fashion is only the reflection of what is happening in society. It is not the cause.’”

I do not believe him. I do not believe that girls look at pictures in magazines or online, watch movies or tv, or play with barbie dolls (or computer games), to observe the form of women in all these form of culture, only to remain unshaken and observe that these shows have got it wrong. Because girls are part of culture. Their mothers and fathers are. The boys who want a girlfriend -also those who don’t- are part of culture. It’s hard to pin down and easy to displace blame. At this point I guess I believe that sharing blog posts like this are a very small start of a discussion, a sharing of opinion, a deepening of consciousness.