Tag Archive: women of spirit


The Female Gaze of Film and Stage (WOW): #Snippetgood (3)

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April 11, 2017

 

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Panel: Chi Vu, Amos Gebhardt, Candy Bowers, Lisa French

Writers are men, Directors are men. I realised ‘That’s where the influence is’. No one asked me to audition for those roles… I had to write my own where black characters are at the centre – not “other” or sidelined… sick of the male storyline, had it for 100 years, can we hear 100 years of women’s stories now?

Candy Bowers

Have to resist the ‘gaze’.  Hollywood is the value-driver of who we are to love, to empathise with, who to victimise, who to villainise… there’s a distance from male/female to this non-conforming space. You can have a binary conversation about art-making. Alternative gaze: all women, women of colour, all oppressed by these stories… perspective as an artist is gender fluid.

Amos Gebhardt

I’m Vietnamese. I was born here but Vietnamese is my first language.  I was thinking and dreaming in Vietnamese until I was 12.  I’m bilingual, not two monolingual languages in one person.

Chi Vu

We know the tropes of the male gaze. Their product and process… set, thinking, psychology… very fast. That’s male. It would be great to see something more embodied, with more emotionality, given space.

Amos Gebhardt

Female gaze can be a starting point – not codifed though – but to open space for exploring other view points. Where there is a minor character we are invited to dislike, someone else liking them draws you closer to them… the audience member flips perspective.  The “alternative gaze” is not a fixed gaze but fluid.

Chi Vu

Of those coming through NADA 90% are white.
How do we create beyond our colonisation?
We’re yet to see the fullness of what’s possible.

Candy Bowers

I know this movie was directed by a woman because my emotions are being prioritised over what’s getting done.

Lisa French

When we create new worlds we can create safety. [eg. sci-fi/fantasy]
Allows space to take greater aesthetic risk – culture, gender, etc…

Chi Vu

This  is what success looks like: I’m the only black woman in the room.  Wardrobe can’t do my hair and makeup. We need cultural safety and support.  I need people expert in ‘me’ around me.
When it’s there… feel more free.

Candy Bowers

Language exists in a moment.  Not forever.
Female and Asian… don’t always want that label.

Chi Vu

Feel held if filmmaker is listening.
Spiritual dimension and depth of characters on screen.

Amos Gebhardt

Fear and freedom.  We’re all trying to get a gold star.
It’s a risk to try something new. In the end the final panel is 4 white men.  Don’t want to have to try and impress them anymore.
Activism is built into the struggle.

Candy Bowers

There are different well-worn roads, the Hollywood Highway.
Going a different way there can be a small or no path.
It takes longer. There is no one around you.
If you’re lucky, you might meet someone else stumbling around,
then it might go faster. It takes courage to go off the path.

Chi Vu

The female gaze is the collection of all other gazes.

Lisa French

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The Dependency Myth (WOW): #Snippetgood (4)

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Panel: Kath Duncan, Hannah Murphy-Walsh, Pauline Ventuna
and Jax Jacki Brown

 

The assumption that people with “disability” need help doesn’t allow for mutuality. Just like everyone else there are all kinds of relationships and power exchanges – ours just might be more obvious.

Jax Jacki Brown

I became a wheelchair user at 14.
Learned at the Rehabilitation Hospital about independence,
being able to direct your own care) is tied to adulthood.
Losing physical ability means becoming infantilised.
Affects our ability to be able give to society
and whether society values that.

Pauline Vetuna

It’s bullshit. Not an idea we need to address.
Need other human beings, need agency… everyone does.

Hannah Murphy-Walsh

I’m comfortable with the word ‘disability’ and identifying with it but it took time.  Acquired injury stigma was an internalised stigma.
Disabled people are marginalised externally –
being disabled is not the problem but all the shit that comes with it.

Pauline Vetuna

Societal space see us as tragic or inspirational – we don’t get to be full human beings.

Jax Jacki Brown

When dependence is seen as bad then
independence is seen as good – we need interdependence.

Kath Duncan

With my cultural background I just ‘get it’.  Independence is also a myth, not just dependence. Independence is valorised e.g. paid work, not seen as contributing.

Pauline Ventuna

People assume we can’t/don’t contribute in meaningful ways.  We’re seen as less than other people.  People assume my partner must do all these things for me but we work it out… negotiate like any other relationship.

Jax Jacki Brown

Agency gives us the right t withdraw as well as the right to contribute.  I’m very dependent, rely on my friends for everything.  I have something to give, so do they.  We don’t get lost in the bottom line.  Slow down. Recognise. Make a human connection.

Hannah Murphy-Walsh

A user-based system is best for the strongest advocates, everyone else falls through the cracks… as much faith in the NDIS as any other government scheme.

Hannah Murphy-Walsh

If the choices are infiltrate or dismantle I’m a ‘dismantler’. I don’t see this as an individual problem but a human rights issue.

Jax Jacki Brown

We need to shift the way people see disability.
I still have to point out blind spots to my own community.
We need to manage ableism the same way we manage racism.

Pauline Ventuna

The standard needs to be universal access –
a change for one is a change for the group –
makes it better for everybody.

Jax Jacki Brown

The conflict across abilities is unnecessary –
adaptations can be ignored or used.
We all move through and take up space differently.

Kath Duncan

The idea of ‘needing to be fixed’ (influences of society and culture) – body or mind is a bad starting point.  Meeting their perspective of normal and being as close to normal as you can.

Jax Jacki Brown

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Women of the World (WOW): #Snippetgood (5)

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JUDE KELLY

My grandmother did two things for me: let me use teatowels as costumes (we had no dress-up box) and encouraged my singing… she taught me that I was entitled to dreams and hopes and that those hopes and dreams were valid.

What have we done to make the
umbilical cord of history so thin?
[of voice/story]

We have a WOW because we want to celebrate what women are doing.
It starts with a “Think In” – what does WOW look like where you are?
They are a network of caring.  Two things you can say about women:
they are tired and they’re frightened.

When Somaliland’s First Lady wanted to
build a maternity hospital
the builders said they didn’t have time.
She answered: “Teach me to make a brick”.

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HANA ASSAFIRI

Social justice is not discretionary.

The future is ours to make.

Intersectionality is embodied in the margins.
Social context, empowerment, employment and education
are where social change meets intersectionality in a practical way.

Where we feel an intuitive connection
we have an intuitive intelligence. We need
to back ourselves on what we feel and what we know.

Communities are strengthened through diversity.

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MARIA KATSONIS

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” – Joan Didion

I have to be authentic to who I am.

The nature of my ambition has changed.
I believe in the power of one to affect social change.

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TANIA CANAS

We are theory and theory is ours.
Arts, politics… theory is everyday life.

Education in Australia separated self and theory.  
Theory became externalised from the body.
It went from everywhere to nowhere.
Not ‘by us’ but ‘to us’. Not changing, but static.
Institution imposed a hierarchy of knowledge.
The indigenous people of Central America knew  astrology, geography, how to make chocolate.  They wrote in hieroglyphics and were writers, philosophers, theorists… there has been a genocide of knowledge = epistemicide.
They have colonised not just our bodies but our minds.

In my culture, cooking is at the centre of community.
With white feminism – I didn’t want to learn my mother’s cooking.
Now I am looking to bruja feminism, because the white feminism didn’t
acknowledge my ancestors, my mother or the role of hospitality as resistance – my mother cooked for the group that met at the house.

Not buried, didn’t die, not lost –
these ways of knowing are resistance.

It’s not known or recognised how strong women of colour are.
You will be marginalised: you need to ask:
will I notice, will I do something?
It’s hard. That’s why we need you to be there.

Research is embodied.  We write struggle.
When we theorise, we write with our bodies.
To write/use a theory, you need to embody it. Resist epistemicide.  
You write and exist in the in-between. Don’t lose yourself.

 

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Women of the World (WOW): #Snippetgood (1)

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March 23, 2017

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ELAINE BROWN

There is no such thing as a part-time revolution.

We’re not here for black liberation but for all liberation.

We didn’t come here for a better life,
or religious freedom [like migrants to US],
we came kicking and screaming.

We provided the conditions for people to bring about the revolution –
gave them free education, a free breakfast, access to a free clinic…
they have the human right to food, to health care –
we gave them the experience of something worth fighting for.

Are we breaking the glass ceiling to be oppressors ourselves?!
No. We have a common enemy.
Can’t see ourselves in competition with anyone else.
What is our agenda as women?
To find solidarity with the others who are suppressed.

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PAOLA BALLA

Learn how to situate yourself.

Do not let your feminism drive your racism.

Mind and heart, mine is a matriarchal tradition – 
you experience yourself as a part of others.

Activism is radical self-care.
It is a form of activism to thrive, not just survive.
Art is not living but living can be art.

“The world will crumble one day.
It’s ok. We know how to be poor.
We know how to live without electricity…”
– Rosie Egan

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NAYUKA GORRIE

(of WOW/speakers)
To see your reality reflected back you.
Very powerful.

How much of my gender came out of a book? A ship?
The convent that beat my grandmother?
We need to consider: how is gender colonised?

Your black body is never quite yours in this country.
Hyper-sexualised vs. not attractive at all. Strong vs. not strong at all.
Used for labour (work) vs. in labour (baby)
A shaved head means either a Britney melt down (dysfunctional)
vs. fundraising for cancer (held up as a role model) –
What other personal reclamations can I make of my own body?

Keep this flesh vessel tight [runs regularly].
Doing well is resistance.

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The place of women’s work

Filed under: influential reading material, radical discipleship, the art of discipleship — 1 Comment
December 14, 2012

Grab some paper & pens (a long roll and colours might inspire some creative enthusiasm)

draw a horizontal axis through the middle of your sheet – this is for time (your age, the year, whichever you prefer…)

draw a vertical axis on the left hand side of your sheet – this is for showing paid work (above the line) and unpaid work (below the line) and should provide an exercise to map how much you’ve had going on at once…

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(apologies mine isn’t pretty, some of them were….)

 

Reflection Questions:

1. At different stages, what have been the priorities that have directed/influenced your work choices and balance between paid work, unpaid work & rest?

2. When you look at your journey, where have you found fulfillment?
In which role or balance of roles?

3. Does the work you do influence the way you feel about yourself?

 

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