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gwynThis vid probably doesn't merit discussion, after all, it's just a dance vid for a dance-to-vids show at a con, but I have things to say about it! In fact, I may even try out the Critical Commons space with it, since it has big underlying themes and stuff. This final version differs quite a bit from the vid shown at Club Vivid and on the VVC discs because I didn't have access to the stuff I needed before the deadline. I also had to fix a bunch of clips from Twin Peaks and Kids in the Hall.
No You Girls
Artist: Franz Ferdinand
Fandom: Multi
File: Divx avi 35MB
Gender's such a drag.
Streaming:
Media included:
Tootsie
Victor/Victoria
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
The Crying Game
Some Like It Hot
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Sweet November
Sorority Boys
She's the Man
Just One of the Guys
Sylvia Scarlett
Breakfast on Pluto
Yentl
Kinky Boots
Flawless
Shakespeare in Love
Twelfth Night
Once a Thief
Due South
Kids in the Hall
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Twin Peaks
Bosom Buddies
The Magnificent Seven (TV)
I have never had a strong sense of gender or sex identification, and it's always been largely a meaningless concept to me personally. It's wonderful to me that I live in an age that when people who do have one, and know that they're in the wrong body or living with the wrong gender ID, can actually change, because I think I've always felt that those things were fluid, or, for people like me, not even on the radar and not what should define a person.
But I've also always had a thing for people embracing other genders than the one they've grown up with, especially men in female drag, for whatever reason they're in it. I have been known to become just besotted with pretty drag queens, and will just stare at them for hours if given half a chance. I don't even know why, just that there's something about the one sex type in the trappings of the other sex type that just fascinates me. Especially since we are becoming less and less a binary-sex world, I guess, and I see more men embracing elements of drag just in day to day life.
When I first heard No You Girls, I fell madly in love with the song, and I knew I wanted to vid it right away. Every time I'd hear it on the radio, I'd be singing along loudly, and thinking of what I could do for a vid. At first I went the obvious route--a multifandom vid with all my favorite cool chicks. But how to segue into the boys? Thinking about the last part, when the song changes from an accusation about girls wielding their sexual powers on the poor boys to one about how badly boys treat girls, made me think of my fascination with men in drag, and I knew that had to be the vid. The girls were the boys, and the boys were the girls. As Abed would say, "Cool cool cool."
I wanted to make sure that I stuck largely to comedy or lighter dramas for the drag. At first I didn't want to use period roles, but I realized that especially for the "no you boys" section, I'd have to go period, since a pretty hefty majority of women dressed as men is in period pieces. It would not be good to use anything really serious for such a lightweight vid, so that actually disqualified a number of female as male stories. About the last thing I wanted to do was make light of someone's suffering.
A lot of people on LJ answered my request for more titles to work with, and I had a pretty good list to start with. It was funny how often I forgot that TV characters I liked had been in drag and that I had quite a lot to choose from. Initially I had wanted to avoid TV just so I wouldn't have to deal with bouncing aspect ratios, but in the end, TV won out.
As I began clipping, I realized that male to female drag seems to largely be centered on one of two themes: lifestyle/identification, or necessity. That is, the male is in drag because that is his lifestyle or identification and he chooses wearing traditionally female clothes and makeup for choice, or he is in typically female clothing because he's trying to accomplish something he can't otherwise. In the former, you have Priscilla, To Wong Foo, Flawless, Breakfast on Pluto, and so on, all men who prefer to be dressed as women and code as female. In the second category, you have Tootsie, Victor/Victoria (which is full of gender bending back and forth all over the place), Some Like It Hot, all stories where the guy puts on female drag because he has to in order to get something he wants or to accomplish something -- Dustin Hoffman needs an acting role, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon have to escape from killers. And pretty much all the TV shows I worked with have men in the second category -- they're ALL trying to accomplish something and wouldn't otherwise be dressed as coded female, except notably Twin Peaks and Kids in the Hall, which is on a completely different level from anything else and doesn't fit into ANY category.
I found this utterly fascinating. I mean, we all know that Hollywood sucks at recognizing the differences in gender identification, but working on this made me very crankily aware of how big a FAIL they're all wearing on their foreheads. The thing is, I love many of the things that I included in this vid (with a few exceptions, like Sorority Boys); Tootsie is one of my all-time favorite movies ever. But few of them show the deft touch of gender expectations that, say, Victor/Victoria did, and the ones that did usually have a non-American sensibility -- V/V, Pluto, etc. The TV shows were often just epic fail in this regard -- rewatching Bosom Buddies was such a dispiriting process, especially as they found more and more reasons to take Kip and Henry out of drag (think of the children!). The rare Miss Fraser or Dennis/Denise were almost enough to take the bad taste out of my mouth. I want to see that drag-wearing superspy heroine that Kitten dreams about in Breakfast on Pluto on my TV every week.
But here's where it got really interesting: when I started clipping the female to male parts, I found that almost all of the stories were necessity-based. Most of the films I couldn't really use because that's where the incredibly serious and painful subject matter of identification took place; as soon as you got into lighter drama or comedy, it was all necessity: Just One of the Guys, Joyce wants to write for the paper; She's the Man, she wants to play soccer; Lianne goes undercover in Once a Thief, and so on. To me, this is a fascinating thing -- are we so afraid of women seeming mannish that we have to make sure they step out of that role as quickly as possible? Do we not want them empowering themselves in male trappings except when they absolutely have to? It's just fascinating.
Anyway. It's rare when a vid turns out to be a social studies learning project, but this was an eye-opener. As a drag aficionado, I found it kind of educational to see how these things fell out categorically. I'd be interested to hear anyone else's comments, as well.
It takes a village: Many people loaned me media or helped on this, but I especially want to shout out tomontana_harper for the amazing volume of stuff she loaned me, and mrs_laugh_track and belmanoir for the clips that went way above and beyond the call of duty; and once again, I have to thank marycrawford for her heroism in helping me navigate the waters of Hercules.
No You Girls
Artist: Franz Ferdinand
Fandom: Multi
File: Divx avi 35MB
Gender's such a drag.
Streaming:
Media included:
Tootsie
Victor/Victoria
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
The Crying Game
Some Like It Hot
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Sweet November
Sorority Boys
She's the Man
Just One of the Guys
Sylvia Scarlett
Breakfast on Pluto
Yentl
Kinky Boots
Flawless
Shakespeare in Love
Twelfth Night
Once a Thief
Due South
Kids in the Hall
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Twin Peaks
Bosom Buddies
The Magnificent Seven (TV)
I have never had a strong sense of gender or sex identification, and it's always been largely a meaningless concept to me personally. It's wonderful to me that I live in an age that when people who do have one, and know that they're in the wrong body or living with the wrong gender ID, can actually change, because I think I've always felt that those things were fluid, or, for people like me, not even on the radar and not what should define a person.
But I've also always had a thing for people embracing other genders than the one they've grown up with, especially men in female drag, for whatever reason they're in it. I have been known to become just besotted with pretty drag queens, and will just stare at them for hours if given half a chance. I don't even know why, just that there's something about the one sex type in the trappings of the other sex type that just fascinates me. Especially since we are becoming less and less a binary-sex world, I guess, and I see more men embracing elements of drag just in day to day life.
When I first heard No You Girls, I fell madly in love with the song, and I knew I wanted to vid it right away. Every time I'd hear it on the radio, I'd be singing along loudly, and thinking of what I could do for a vid. At first I went the obvious route--a multifandom vid with all my favorite cool chicks. But how to segue into the boys? Thinking about the last part, when the song changes from an accusation about girls wielding their sexual powers on the poor boys to one about how badly boys treat girls, made me think of my fascination with men in drag, and I knew that had to be the vid. The girls were the boys, and the boys were the girls. As Abed would say, "Cool cool cool."
I wanted to make sure that I stuck largely to comedy or lighter dramas for the drag. At first I didn't want to use period roles, but I realized that especially for the "no you boys" section, I'd have to go period, since a pretty hefty majority of women dressed as men is in period pieces. It would not be good to use anything really serious for such a lightweight vid, so that actually disqualified a number of female as male stories. About the last thing I wanted to do was make light of someone's suffering.
A lot of people on LJ answered my request for more titles to work with, and I had a pretty good list to start with. It was funny how often I forgot that TV characters I liked had been in drag and that I had quite a lot to choose from. Initially I had wanted to avoid TV just so I wouldn't have to deal with bouncing aspect ratios, but in the end, TV won out.
As I began clipping, I realized that male to female drag seems to largely be centered on one of two themes: lifestyle/identification, or necessity. That is, the male is in drag because that is his lifestyle or identification and he chooses wearing traditionally female clothes and makeup for choice, or he is in typically female clothing because he's trying to accomplish something he can't otherwise. In the former, you have Priscilla, To Wong Foo, Flawless, Breakfast on Pluto, and so on, all men who prefer to be dressed as women and code as female. In the second category, you have Tootsie, Victor/Victoria (which is full of gender bending back and forth all over the place), Some Like It Hot, all stories where the guy puts on female drag because he has to in order to get something he wants or to accomplish something -- Dustin Hoffman needs an acting role, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon have to escape from killers. And pretty much all the TV shows I worked with have men in the second category -- they're ALL trying to accomplish something and wouldn't otherwise be dressed as coded female, except notably Twin Peaks and Kids in the Hall, which is on a completely different level from anything else and doesn't fit into ANY category.
I found this utterly fascinating. I mean, we all know that Hollywood sucks at recognizing the differences in gender identification, but working on this made me very crankily aware of how big a FAIL they're all wearing on their foreheads. The thing is, I love many of the things that I included in this vid (with a few exceptions, like Sorority Boys); Tootsie is one of my all-time favorite movies ever. But few of them show the deft touch of gender expectations that, say, Victor/Victoria did, and the ones that did usually have a non-American sensibility -- V/V, Pluto, etc. The TV shows were often just epic fail in this regard -- rewatching Bosom Buddies was such a dispiriting process, especially as they found more and more reasons to take Kip and Henry out of drag (think of the children!). The rare Miss Fraser or Dennis/Denise were almost enough to take the bad taste out of my mouth. I want to see that drag-wearing superspy heroine that Kitten dreams about in Breakfast on Pluto on my TV every week.
But here's where it got really interesting: when I started clipping the female to male parts, I found that almost all of the stories were necessity-based. Most of the films I couldn't really use because that's where the incredibly serious and painful subject matter of identification took place; as soon as you got into lighter drama or comedy, it was all necessity: Just One of the Guys, Joyce wants to write for the paper; She's the Man, she wants to play soccer; Lianne goes undercover in Once a Thief, and so on. To me, this is a fascinating thing -- are we so afraid of women seeming mannish that we have to make sure they step out of that role as quickly as possible? Do we not want them empowering themselves in male trappings except when they absolutely have to? It's just fascinating.
Anyway. It's rare when a vid turns out to be a social studies learning project, but this was an eye-opener. As a drag aficionado, I found it kind of educational to see how these things fell out categorically. I'd be interested to hear anyone else's comments, as well.
It takes a village: Many people loaned me media or helped on this, but I especially want to shout out to
montana_harper for the amazing volume of stuff she loaned me, and mrs_laugh_track and belmanoir for the clips that went way above and beyond the call of duty; and once again, I have to thank marycrawford for her heroism in helping me navigate the waters of Hercules.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-05 06:20 am (UTC)