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potted_music at 12:17am on 31/08/2012
potted_music at 12:17am on 31/08/2012Like most everybody and their mom, grandma, aunty Cecilia and pet parrott Harry, I'm obssessively following The Lizzie Bennett Diaries: and having tons of Feelings(TM) about it. The knowledge that both of the show's creators are male has unexplicably filled me with unease. On the one hand, I am pleased that guys choose to creatively engage with a supposedly-girly text. On the other, now I cannot help watching the series for potential signs of fail. Many things one might say to one's friends would come off as unpardonable rudeness when voiced by strangers; similarly, now that I know that the scriptwriter is male, all the cool elements of the show had suddenly acquired this potential to turn into "silly girls, haha, and the joke's on the viewers" type of narrative. If creators were female, I would have just safely assumed that the show is a feminist narrative about a young professional trying to (to resort to a much-debated issue) "have it all" and both realize her ambitions in the public sphere and, although inadvertently, live out her mother's fantasy about a nuclear heteronormative family as the ultimate goal blahblahblah. (Also, cue metacommentary about reception of Austen's writing, which even now, in a completely different era, generates comments like Naipaul's, coloured by preconceptions about hierarchies of plots and stuff. I read/watched the story of this modernized Lizzie Bennett, whose professional life is framed as a result of, or a substitute for a romance, within that context. And, ultimately, Lizzie/videoart is THE romance of The Lizzie Bennett Diaries: oh, the joys of them being together:). However, when told by a guy, what are the chances that this story won't go wrong?)
Anyway, that was an interesting clump of gender prejudices to find in one's mind, so.
On a different note: when they first mentioned a Bing Lee, I assumed he would be Asian and went all "how cool is THAT!" - remembering the critique of underlying, if unspoken (and, supposedly, all the more dreary for it), imperialist assumptions Austen's characters' world is built upon. (I do not necessarily think that this is the most productive approach to her novels, but it is still very much an integral part of the readerly framework.) So, when the mysterious Bing Lee first appeared onscreen, I was in for a surprise, for he was played by a white actor. I liked my assumed casting better!
(Back to being subsumed by a huge translation project and pre-conference ennui. I'll be going to Chicago for the most important conference in my subfield, and I'm mere days from that pre-conference ennui turning into a full-blown pre-conference panic. I know that my social anxieties won't dissapear anywhere without me participating in the very social situations that I'm terrified of - esp. since said situations are a part of the job - so I'm trying to be very rational about it.)
Anyway, that was an interesting clump of gender prejudices to find in one's mind, so.
On a different note: when they first mentioned a Bing Lee, I assumed he would be Asian and went all "how cool is THAT!" - remembering the critique of underlying, if unspoken (and, supposedly, all the more dreary for it), imperialist assumptions Austen's characters' world is built upon. (I do not necessarily think that this is the most productive approach to her novels, but it is still very much an integral part of the readerly framework.) So, when the mysterious Bing Lee first appeared onscreen, I was in for a surprise, for he was played by a white actor. I liked my assumed casting better!
(Back to being subsumed by a huge translation project and pre-conference ennui. I'll be going to Chicago for the most important conference in my subfield, and I'm mere days from that pre-conference ennui turning into a full-blown pre-conference panic. I know that my social anxieties won't dissapear anywhere without me participating in the very social situations that I'm terrified of - esp. since said situations are a part of the job - so I'm trying to be very rational about it.)