In the book, “Van Gogh: The Life,” due out next week, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith present evidence that raises doubts about the source of the gunshot wound van Gogh sustained in or near the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, France, in July 1890.
“No physical evidence of the shooting was ever produced,” they write. “No gun was ever found.” Van Gogh, who “knew nothing about guns,” left no suicide note, and the bullet entered his upper abdomen “from an unusual, oblique angle — not straight on as one would expect in a suicide.” The authors hypothesize that he was shot by a friend’s teenage brother, who carried a gun and “had a history of teasing Vincent in a way intended to provoke him to anger.” (The artist, for his part, “had a history of violent outbursts.”)
As for why van Gogh did not accuse the boy before he died, but instead offered “hesitant, halfhearted, and oddly hedged” confessions of a suicide attempt, the authors speculate that he welcomed his own death and saw no reason to punish anyone for bringing it about.
I’ve discovered a little more about the artist. Her name is Kelly Turnbull. The internet knows her as coelasquid. She’s a professional animator. This fascinates me because as far as I know, there are few women in animation.
I like drawing comics about unapologetically macho things because I’m not on board with this modern trend of telling men that they should act less like men. I dream of a world where the beer is cheap and plentiful, violence can still be an acceptable solution to life’s problems, and no one ever has to talk about their feelings.
Sometime this is a comic about macho action heroes. Sometimes this is a slice of life comic about a time traveling Navy SEAL single dad from the nonspecific spacefuture. Really, it just depends on how things were going that day.
Apparently, a frequently asked question is whether or not she’s really female. Her coy reply is: Does it matter?
I suppose her rendition of males posing like Wonder Woman could be interpreted as affirming culturally accepted masculinity rather than making fun of enforced femininity. Can you exaggerate one end of the polarized gender spectrum without revealing the ridiculousness of the other? Whether Turnbull is male or female, for real or tongue in cheek with her words and images, however your choose to interpret her art, its undeniably creative and provocative. She makes you think about gender and culture in a new way, whomever you are and whatever your beliefs may be about men and women. That’s just what great art should do.
Though Turnbull’s subject is men, ReelGirl is curious what her creative mind would come up with as far as alternative images of Wonder Woman. There have got to be more choices than either WW showing her legs or not showing legs. I sent her an email asking her about this. I’ll let you know what she says.
Update! Here is my email back from Kelly Turnbull. She writes she is not picking on ‘sexy’ women; she is saying women (and men) superheroes bodies should reflect much more diversity. I totally agree. I wouldn’t even have a problem the anorexic supermodel image if it was just ONE of many possible representations of women out there in the media. It’s the dominance and limitations of the same old recycled icons that limit creativity (and reality.) Hollywood, are you listening???????
Also, Turnbull makes a great point below: it’s not the clothes, it’s the pose! Even titling this post, I mixed the two up. If you look at how imaginary females are posed from the Smurfette to Ariel to Wonder Woman, they look weak or submissive or sexualized, no matter what they’re wearing.
Here’s Turnbull’s email:
Hello!
Hey, checked out your site, thanks for the article! It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside!
If you’vee got any specific questions I’d be glad to answer them, as far as the Wonder Woman thing, though… well, pants or no pants first, I really don’t think pants necessarily matter, I wish she looked more Mediterranean first and foremost (artists who draw every character like they came from a base stock of White Anglo Saxon Protestants are a big pet peeve of mine) I think one of my favourite reimaginings of her is from Jill Thompson (Granted, when people say lady heroes in pants don’t make sense because pants limit movement, all I can think is “Wow, imagine how much better the military and police-force would be able to do their jobs if we just had an all-out pants ban!”)
I think the pose is the big thing that needs to be examined on the DC cover. Diana is royalty and she’s a warrior. She’s a feminist of the “don’t hold the door for me” variety judging by the solo animated movie she got. It seems out of character for someone like Diana to hear “POSE AS A TEAM!” and default to a Victoria Secret kind of stance. Now if we were talking about Poison Ivy, Catwoman, someone like that whose who schtick is being seductive, it would make perfect sense. Hey, they’d probably even take it further! But Diana is not Catwoman and Diana is not Poison Ivy and Diana is not any number of other DC ladies.
Any time any person brings up “hey, maybe every single woman in this piece shouldn’t look and act like an underwear model” so many people listening automatically assume that person wants NO MORE SEXY WOMEN. No, folks, I don’t want to take away your sexy things. Saying it’s out of character for Diana to pose like she’s selling underwear doesn’t mean I want Selina Kyle to show up next time in full military body armour or that I want artists to start drawing Powergirl with a b-cup or Black Canary with stretch marks or anything like that. It just means I don’t want every woman in the comic to be there for the sole purpose of being sexy and I want the artists to draw characters in a way that reflects their personality. If it makes people feel any better, I also wish they would give Flash a sprinter’s build, Aquaman a swimmer’s build, Batman an MMA build, and Superman a weightlifter figure compared to that unilateral “this is that one body every superhero artist knows how to draw” look they all have now.
Another common point of contention that comes with debates like this is people who assume women who speak out against this kind of thing are jealous or shaming other women for showing off their bodies or what have you. Again, I just don’t think “being sexy” is something anyone should feel bad about, I just think it’s kind of a time-and-a-place matter. Imagine a board of military leaders gathered around to discuss a new strategy. One person out of ten wanders into the room in their underwear. Then that person, say, sits on the table and strikes a provocative pose. Now imagine they want you to take this character exactly as seriously as the other nine. That’s how I feel every time they show Emma Frost in her corset and panties trying to be passed off as some sort of authority figure. That is not the sort of outfit a cool-headed serious person wears while they negotiate important business transactions.
I suppose what it comes down to is, I would appreciate if more mainstream comics presented alternative ways of looking at female characters. I’m not saying they need to be unattractive, just that if they aren’t a cheesecake-pinup kinda character don’t present them as one unless it’s in the context of something silly like those old marvel swimsuit pinups.
Think of it like this, Lobo’s the kind of guy who hams it up enough that you could picture him in goofy beefcake pinups. Lobo got a two-page spread in one issue where he’s sprawled out poolside in a spikey chainlink codpiece. Imagine they did the same with Superman or Batman. Like, out of the blue All-Star Batman #3 has a two-page playgirl-esque spread of Bruce in a speedo, grinning at the camera. That would seem weird. I’m sure a number of fans would love it, but others would hate it for being out of character so they probably wouldn’t do it. I’m just saying either give the girls the same kind of consideration or draw more Playgirl Batman.
“Why is Wonder Woman only wearing her underwear?” asked my five year old daughter when I introduced her to the superhero in the form of the DVD of the 70s series starring Lynda Carter. I was so bummed, yet another foiled attempt to expose my kids to strong females in the media and ending up with only exposed female bodies.
Here’s the latest Justice League comic cover– Wonder Woman the lone female character surrounded five males. She is the only one “in her underwear” looking not so much like an invulnerable superhero and more like some male comic book artist’s dominatrix sex fantasy– torpedo breasts, long legs tapering into shiny boots, and even a whip– sorry, golden lasso. Makes me think about the time I went to see Lara Croft ten years ago and couldn’t get past the D breasts and short shorts. Clearly, we need more women comic book artists, animators, video game creators, studio heads, and media moguls.
I’ve always loved to, but I also felt like it didn’t matter as much. Writing about politics and culture is important. If you write about ‘issues,’ you can use your writing to change the world. Or try to. Making up stories might be fun but what’s the point?
Then I had three kids. Of course, I read my daughters stories, watch movies with them, and also, TV shows. I witness how the stories they listen to shape their imaginary play, how they dress, who their heroes are, the language they repeat, the art they make, and their own creative writing.
In her best-selling book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein writes extensively about children’s brain development, how babies don’t come into the world with fully formed minds that we, parents, are just supposed to observe and discover. Their brains are constantly being formed, rapidly growing and changing as they take in language, pictures, adult reactions, and all kinds of stimuli. Neurons fire in reaction, neural pathways are formed, and connections are created, assimilating the outside world to create the internal one.
So I’ve got to wonder: How might kids’ brains (and then, of course, adult brains) be different if the stories they were exposed to weren’t so dramatically and predominantly shaped by men?
If you ever doubt fiction is important in forming our deepest reality, beliefs, and actions, look at the most influential historical novel of all time: the Bible- not known for its female authors or kindness to women. We’re still fighting wars based on these ancient, repeated, and recycled stories.
One reason the stereotypes in kidlit are so sad is because we’re supposed to be experiencing fantasy, magical worlds. Yet, what we see, way too often, is the same sexism, depicted in cartoonlike proportions, that exists in the real world.
What would our world look like if most great artists, film directors, and novelists were women? And had been for thousands of years?
Here’s just one modern example of how reality shapes fiction and fiction shapes reality. Every year, Forbes Magazine does a survey on the richest imaginary characters. This year, the list includes tycoons like Scrooge McDuck, Richie Rich, Smaug (the dragon from J. R. R. Tolkein) Bruce Wayne (of Batman) and Mr. Monopoly.
Of the gender gap on the list, Forbes‘ Michale Noer writes:
“There are 14 male characters on the list and one female character on this year’s Fictional 15. Sadly, that’s not unusual. There are always women on the list, but too often, only one.
The highest-ranked woman ever was ‘Mom’ from the television show Futurama, who placed fourth in 2007, with a fictional net worth of 15.7 billion. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb Raider video games and movies has appeared on the Fictional 15 three times since 2005. There have never been more than two women on the list in a single year.
Our fictional reporters- the best in the business- have worked hard to rectify this gender imbalance, even breaking the Fictional 15 rules against folkloric characters (the Tooth Fairy appeared in 2010.) But the gap persists.
Some female characters are perennial candidates. Miss Havisham, the well-off spinster from Great Expectations, is considered every year and dismissed on the grounds that she simply isn’t rich enough. And at every fictional story meeting, someone is sure to nominate one of Disney’s princesses, usually Snow White or Ariel. One problem here is that you need to infer their wealth from the fact they live in castes and wear fancy dresses. They aren’t known for being rich within their fictional worlds the same way as C. Montgomery Burns or Bruce Wayne.”
Forbes‘ Caroline Howard gives this explanation:
“Why so few? The answer is quite simple: a small pool of candidates. For some reason, authors, screenwriters, directors, and comic book artists haven’t been creating many ultarich female characters. that is equally true for writers of yore, present and those tackling future or fantasy.
Kind like the real world. Look at the Forbes Worlds Billionaires list. A paltry 1.5 % are self-made women- 19 out of 1,210. And if we include heiresses and widows, that makes 103 ladies, or just 8.5%.”
Obviously, a crucial step towards ever achieving gender equality is imagining what it would look like. Does anyone know what that would be?
Gail Collins, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, has a hilarious essay in the book that describes how her Catholic education warped her perceptions of sex.
She writes: “I was possibly one of the least sophisticated teenagers in the United States outside of Amish country, and although I knew the mechanics of how babies were made, I had not yet really come around to imagining that people actually did that kind of thing voluntarily.”
Until Collins was well past puberty, she believed that virginity was the same thing as being unmarried and was completely mystified by whatever was going on between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. She warns that’s what can happen to a girl when she’s “taught about sex by women who didn’t have any.” That would be nuns, who, apparently, had all kinds of special insight into gender differences:
“Boys were not much more than little sex robots, and they could not be held responsible for their actions. Once, we were all called to assembly to hear Charles Keating, the head of the Citizens for Decent Literature (and future star of a huge savings-and-loan scandal), who told us the story of a young mother who went walking down the road with her two small children while she was wearing shorts. The sight of her naked legs so overwhelmed a passing motorist that he swerved off the road and killed both the kids. And it was all their mother’s fault. We were then asked to sign a pledge never to wear any kind of shorts, including the long Bermuda ones.”
In another great essay, novelist Min-Jin Lee writes that it wasn’t until her husband pointed out to her that she’d left sex out of her writing that she realized she had. Re-examining her literary heroines (and their creators) including Emma Bovary, Jane Eyre, and Hetty Sorrel, all scandalous for their day, Lee writes: “Looking backward at my betters made me realize that I was shy at best, cowardly at most. Okay, I was terrified to write about sex. Why?”
Lee, a Korean-American, traced part of her reticence back to a disappointing class she took in college called “Women’s Studies and Asian-American History and Literature” that didn’t inspire her quite as she’d hoped:
“Alas. In print and visual media Asian women were often hookers, mail-order brides, masseuses, porn stars, dragon ladies, submissive sex slaves, and yes, cartoon characters with long black hair, red lips, and racially improbable bosoms. Asian men were sinister gangsters, inscrutable businessmen, angry nerds, and scheming eunuchs. If Asian women were oversexual, then their brothers were asexual.”
Twenty years later, after her conversation with her husband, Lee googled “Asian women” and got 14 million hits, mostly sexual references in the same genre as her college course.
“I may see myself as a forty-two-year-old writer, mother, wife, and former lawyer, but fourteen million hits trumped my subjective reality.” This distortion changed Lee as a writer. From then on, “When relevant, I wrote about sex, even Asian pornography and date rape, because I wanted to be honest about what was significant inside and outside my world. For most of my adult life, I had been uncomfortable with my body- my racial and sexual envelope. This time, in my pages, I thought, maybe I can talk about how it is for me, and I wrote it down. If I had been angry about the lack of self-determination of Asian women’s bodies and lives, I had been staging a feeble and arrogant protest by refusing to write about sex.”
One of my favorite pieces in the anthology is by critic, novelist, and New Yorker contributor Daphne Merkin. Her essay– about how she abandoned a prestigious literary fellowship to pursue the magnetic lust of a summer romance– shows how sexual obsession colonized “all the available mental space in my head.”
My story is called “Light Me Up.” I wrote it because so many love stories, especially those with female protagonists, end with ‘happily ever after,’ when the girl gets the ring. I wanted to introduce a newlywed couple and then throw some scary challenges– involving sex, money, and a new baby– their way.
You can read an excerpt from Sugar In My Bowlhere.
Feministing.com reports on New Yorker reader Anne Hays who “is demanding her money back after a recent edition of the magazine only included two bylines by women, out of 76 pages of content. She plans to return every edition of the magazine that contains fewer than 5 female writers.”
After reading the eloquent letter to the magazine, a friend of mine laughs, noting that one of the few female bylines Hays references belongs to Patricia Marx, who “writes frenzied reports of NYC shopping.”
Nice to know the magazine famous for jumpstarting the careers of so many well-respected male writers delegates a bit of precious space.
To put on this show, the jury reviewed works by 150 artists who responded to an international call for submissions. In the end, 20 artists were selected: 6 from the Bay Area, 4 additional U.S. artists, and artists from Japan, Kenya, Brazil, the Netherlands, China, India, Iran, and Canada. The subject matter ranges from teen community leaders in Richmond to opera singers in Brazil to seaweed farmers in Zanzibar.
www.sfartscommission.org
Seaweed Farmers of Zanzibar, Joanna Lipper
This is an absolutely stunning exhibition. Looking at the gorgeous photographs, I felt as if I were visiting all the countries featured, getting an intimate look at women’s everyday lives while I traveled around the world. You will leave this show inspired and impressed by the strength of these women, and convinced that investing in them will help to change the world.
Here are some stats on the global status of women, dry numbers that these photographs illustrate in a deeply personal way:
Women make up 70% of the world’s poor, those who live on less than $1 a day.
Women work 2/3 of the world’s working hours, yet earn only 10% of the world’s income.
Women are responsible for producing 60 – 80% of the world’s food, yet hold only 1% of the world’s land.
Worldwide, over 60% of people working in family enterprises without pay are women.
The total value of women’s unpaid house and farm work adds 1/3 to the world’s GNP.
One of the winning photographers, Joanna Lipper, along with being a filmmaker, author, and a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute For African and African American Studies at Harvard University, is also a Fellow of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization I co-founded that trains young women to be leaders and change agents.
www.sfartscommission.org
Seaweed Farmers of Zanzibar, Joanna Lipper
Lipper’s series is Seaweed Farmers in Zanzibar. Her photographs are so serene and beautiful, they look like paintings, evocative of art from past centuries of other women working, like Van Gogh’s Two Peasant Women Digging. The aqua colors of the sea against the horizon are mesmerizing, and the photos have an incredible grace; the women working together and the water’s movement looks like a dance. The lighting in the photos is beautiful, showing the passage of time, is reminiscent of a series like Monet’s haystacks.
Lipper says that her art, and the whole show, presents “photographers as social activists, provoking engagement on an individual level.” Because this is a free exhibition in public space, the nature of the show further underscores the political nature of the art; everyone has access. The show’s existence illustrates not only that art influences politics, but also that we are all interconnected– to each other, to the economy, and to the environment.
Lipper explains that what’s valuable about the seaweed that these farmers work so hard to obtain is the algae it contains. The seaweed is sold to local brokers an then exported to Europe and Asia where the algae is extracted. Not only is the algae used in products like shampoo and mascara, but preserved algae turns out to be one of the best alternative green biofuels and best aborbants of carbon dioxide.
Lipper goes into further detail of the seaweed farmer’s world role on her site:
Zanzibar is at a disadvantage when it comes to profits derived from Seaweed cultivation because the islands lack the large-scale infrastructure and hardware needed to process seaweed and extract valuable algae. Therefore the raw materials are shipped abroad. Without microfinance loans, improved education, and community organization amongst laborers, there can be no further growth for seaweed farming as a cash-generating economically empowering occupation for rural village women and this form of labor runs the risk of becoming obsolete in Zanzibar.
Other incredible photography includes work by Brenda Paik Sunoo who photographed the “diving grannies” Vietnamese women in their eighties who hunt for Octopus. The salt mining pictures were also breathtaking, all black and white, women mining pillars of salt. There was a series of photos of girls in Tehran that made me feel as if I were inside their house and part of their family. There was a moving portrait of a woman soldier from the Middle East.
There is a Community Choice prize you can vote for here. The International Museum of Women is an online art gallery and all of the photos can also be seen here.
www.jezebel.com
www.sfartscommission.org
www.sfartscommission.org
www.imow.org