vag magazine: laughing with or at feminists?

a question i get asked a lot when i mention this blog in conversations with friends and strangers is, "well, what is feminist fashion anyway?" and in some ways, that question is an unanswerable one. i like to think that my take on "feminist fashion" is an analysis of fashion from a critical perspective, trying to see ways in which the fashion industry impacts women involved in all levels, from the people who work in sweatshops to the anna wintour's of the world. but i'll stop myself there: while i'm not quite ready to put down a lot of my ideas in writing, this video piqued my interest and reminded me of why the idea of "feminist fashion" is so interesting:

Vag Magazine Teaser 1 from Vag Magazine on Vimeo.

Vag Magazine Teaser 2 from Vag Magazine on Vimeo.

those are the two teasers for a new web series:

VAG MAGAZINE is not your grandma's feminist magazine, though we support her as a woman. Go behind the scenes at this hipster third-wave feminist magazine with founders FENNEL, SYLVIE, and BETHANY, staffers HEAVY FLO (a hero on the roller derby circuit), REBA (truly a legend of gonzo feminist pop culture journalism), and MEGHAN (the lone holdover from fashion magazine Gemma, which the Vag founders bought out with the proceeds from their Etsy shop), as well as enthusiastic intern KIT, as they teach you how to be a better woman.

This six-part web series stars and was created, written, directed, and produced by comedians from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.

even after watching the teasers, and reading this description, the anticipation is killing me. i can't help but wonder... will it be my new favourite thing in the pop culture universe? or just another way of laughing at feminists, another reason why i'll have to defend why i choose to identify as feminist? if you couldn't tell, i feel conflicted. part of me is like "yeah! awesome! great! discussions about feminism's relationship to fashion! and hilarity!" and then another part is like "will this be another liz lemon brand of feminism, about thin able-bodied middle class straight white women who make jokes about how fat they are when in reality they are probably a size 6?" (for the record i do not completely loathe 30 rock, even though based on that statement you may be lead to believe otherwise)

i really like the jokes about what makes something a "feminist" garment, and it's hilarious for me to hear jokes friends of mine have definitely made before, about ourselves, and about other feminist-identified folks. what third-waver hasn't made jokes about hippies playing with moonblood and mocking "sisterhood" and universally supporting other women simply based solely the fact that they are women (insert debates about sarah palin here)? part of the humour fellow feminists and i have shared about this has definitely been a defense mechanism, and as a way of blowing off steam when confronted with shitty attitudes and politics. there is a lot of infighting within any anti-oppressive community, feminism included, but how can we address those problems in effective and healthy ways? one of my favourite ways of addressing fucked up and problematic things in pop culture is with humour.

lately it seems like there is a dearth in feminist humour; sarah haskins' hugely popular target women is now sadly defunct, and its replacement, modern lady, is just not up to snuff. could it be that vag magazine will be a place for feminists to get their laughs? i hope so. that said, there are already some things irking me about it; namely, the fact that the cast is mostly white and pretty high-femme, and that most of the jokes seem to be at the expense of these very "extreme" hyper critical feminists... but! i'll stop myself there. really, i can't judge the entire series after only having seen a whole minute of footage. and maybe i'm just feeling a wee bit hypercritical about the whole thing in general. i'll save my thoughts until i've watched the webisodes, which launch tomorrow, october 18th.

edited to add: twitter informs me that both myself and vag magazine follow feminist hulk, so my hopes are now indeed higher for this interesting looking series.

links:
vag magazine
vag magazine on vimeo
vag magazine on twitter
vag magazine wants to put the funny in feminism

13 ways of looking at liz lemon at tiger beatdown
ableism in 30 rock at deeply problematic

cultural appropriation: still refusing to see the truth

[a polaroid of a person outdoors, with long brown hair wearing a colourful native american inspired "war bonnet" and bright red lipstick. they are covering their eyes with the back of their hands and is expressionless. the text underneath the polaroid reads "Until mainstream society takes Natives seriously, it won't take Native issues seriously. Carticatures, mascots, costumes and cartoons don't need running water, after all." Sheena Rotman (The Signal)]
a page from kate burch's zine, head dress

in the year since i started this blog, the issue that has generated the most debate and discussion had easily been the critical fashion lover's guide to cultural appropriation. now that halloween is just around the corner, seeing images of white women in hypersexualized racist "indian princess" costumes is sadly serving as a reminder that this is issue will not go away without a fight. but we can keep the conversations going. sadly, today i feel disappointed, disenchanted, exhausted. it sucks that we still have to keep defending the very basics of why we think people should be thinking about cultural appropriation in the first place. here i go again.

[cartoon: in the first panel, a girl sits in a judge's stall with a gavel. a cat wearing glasses is dressed as a mariachi holding a bag that reads "taco taco." the judge rules "cultural appropriation." this continues with many foods, pizza, "hot stuff," "der very wurst," and a 3 potato salad. the last three panels are as follows: the judge watches patiently as cat sighs and reaches into a mcdonald's bag. in the next panel, the judge is eating fries and cat is eating a burger. the judge says, "it's so sad that the whole world eats mcdonalds." ]

my first reminder that the spirit of cultural appropriation is alive and well was when i was looking for a laugh: this week, i was disappointed with the latest cat & girl comic. i used to really enjoy their sardonic sense of humour, but this... it just kind of rubs me the wrong way. it almost seems to propogate this attitude of "you can't win" if you think critically about cultural appropriation. at the same time, i think i could understand why it would be funny to some people (perhaps it is a jab at the imposed dominance of american fast food culture on a global scale?).

but in the end, the imagery of the judge ruling wether or not a food item can be considered cultural appropriation only serves to remind me that it is really annoying/emotionally exhausting to constantly have to be on the defensive. to constantly have to explain the reasons why cultural appropriation, whether it be happening in a mall food court or on a fashion runaway, is potentially problematic and needs to be challenged. a common reaction when the subject comes up is "who made you the judge of everyone?" sigh. contrary to what many naysayers may believe, no, i don't sit in front of my computer actively searching for white girls wearing headdresses to argue with and judge.

created by elusis

rather, it's that images of models, of clothing catalogues, and of white girls in headdresses at concerts that attack and offend us: those of us who feel like these conversations are important to be having, that we have to ask these questions. i am fed up with it. fed up with seeing "Othered" cultures reduced to shitty stereotypes for uncritical (mostly) white people to buy into, as a product, and then to attack me when i ask them to think about what they are wearing, when i ask them why they choose to wear what they wear. is that such an offensive question? is it really us who are so hypersensitive and who take things "too seriously," or is it you who just wants to refuse to think for two seconds?

which leads me to katrina richardson's amazing article, Accosted by racist costumes. in it, she writes frankly and honestly about getting upset at an art festival after not only seeing two girls wearing headdresses, but walking into an art gallery called "The Eskimo Sisters." unsurprisingly, the gallery is not in fact run by Inuit women, or have any attachment or relevance to Inuit culture whatsoever (which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Eskimo, which for the record has been frowned upon by Inuit communities and was largely removed from popular nomenclature in Canada and Greenland since the 1970s but is still used in Alaska). rather, according to their facebook page,

Eskimo Sisters is a new space in Providence for music, art, delicious treats, sparklers, general silliness, general seriousness, kittens, puppies, and magical unicorns.

oh, and i suppose the magical northern "Eskimo" people fall right into that category, too! what a perfect name! /bitchy sarcasm. to top it off, the term "Eskimo Sisters" supposedly refers to two women who have slept with the same man. we all know how much we love our racial naivety with a side order of hypersexualization, don't we?

richardson ends up confronting the two girls wearing a headdress, and asking them why they are wearing them. her article is definitely worth taking the time to read it in its entireity, but here are two important quotes:

I understood why the headdresses seemed like an attractive accessory. People want something closer to the ethereal and the spiritual. To look ethnic and feel closer to nature. But is their whim to play earthy mystic for a night greater than mine to enjoy an evening without feeling accosted by racist costume?

she concludes her powerful article with this statement:

I may grow wiser and regret my actions, but even if those women do remain clueless and forget everything I said, I at least made them uncomfortable for five minutes of their night, and right now, that's worth it, to me.

for her sake, mine, and other people who have been taking up this fight, i hope she is right. her experience reminds me of a lot of my own, of my internalized racism as a mixed race french-canadian/abenaki kid growing up. of playing cowboys and indians and always being relegated to the role of the "indian." of my own family's erasure and active denial of our native roots.

image courtesy of native appropriations

mainly, it reminds me last night. i went to see xiu xiu, a free concert organized by the city's university radio station CHYZ 94,3 and i was sadly reminded why i have stopped going to live shows. the entire night, i was distracted by this blonde girl wearing a headband with a few feathers sticking out, and blue paint smeared underneath her cheeks. all her friends had the same paint across their face, and at different points they were passing around the "native" headband.

it reminds me of last halloween, when i spent a half an hour in the bathroom calming myself down after a teenage girl i'd met a few times through mutual friends jumped up on stage to dance with we are wolves dressed as an "indian princess."

it reminds me of all of these times i end up feeling like shit, and have to convince myself that this is just me overreacting. all of these times i overthink the entire situation, wondering what i should do, what i could say, to simply encourage people to maybe think twice before they leave the house dressed up as an outdated racist stereotype.

so i'm trying to think of productive ways we can confront these issues, have these conversations with strangers, without emotionally exhausting ourselves or decreeing ourselves the Official Judge and Jury of all things Cultural Appropriating. here's my first idea.

this week, i got a lovely gift in the mail from kate burch: a zine called Head Dress. earlier this summer, kate asked me if she could quote me in it and i was very curious to see how it would turn out. now that i have a copy to myself, i'm really happy to have been a small part of what is a very informative yet simple to-the-point zine. when i asked her where i could suggest my readers buy it, she simply said that she wanted it to be more of a "public service announcement" than making money. so! print out a bunch of your own copies and drop them off where you think they might be most thought-provoking. a few ideas:

• thrift stores where you regularly see "hipsters"
• coffee shops in urban areas
• music venues/festivals where you have seen aforementioned cultural appropriating hipsters
  
• offending stores that sell clothes labelled "tribal" or "native" or "cherokee" (urban outfitters, forever21, bluefly, etc)

an urban outfitters totem pole jewelry stand. i shit you not.

• hell, you could even mail copies to offending designers if you wanted! at fashion design schools.

suggest more places in the comments!

as for distribution, i've got québec city covered (going to translate it this weekend), and kate dropped a bunch around nyc, so readers everywhere else! arm your photocopiers! spread the word. it's nice to think these conversations can leave the blogosphere and can perhaps influence critical thinking. where do you guys live? can someone promise to cover kensington market in toronto? mile end in montreal? bushwick in brooklyn? portland?

so that's what's on my mind lately... i'll leave you with an few excerpts from the most recent post at my culture is not a trend in response to hate mail they've been receiving.

Stop being angry about the distant past. The people who colonized you are dead. Get over it.

Okay, I’ll play your game.

Lets pretend, and put aside the past, the genocide, the theft of land, peoples and language - all things deemed to have happened “long ago.” I’m not going to address these at all.

So here we are- modern day, new slate.

The act of cultural drag is still a problem. This is because systematic racism of Native American people still exists, and is overwhelmingly aggressive. We are still encountering it every day of our lives - in textbooks, at school, going shopping, using government facilities, interacting with the police, with health care systems, with our religious freedom, with the colour of our skin - we are met with derision and antagonism for our mere existence. With words used to keep us in our place. This is not ancient history, it is the every-day existence of a people who are still alive.

...When you choose to dress up like one of us, you erase us. You transform a group of doctors, writers, trades people, teenagers, mothers, fathers, singers — individuals, into one absurd caricature unworthy of respect, identity - autonomy.

...If our countries start to think of us as human beings, then our deeper issues may one day come to resolution as well. Just because my mission seems trivial - what impact could fashion possibly have?- doesn’t mean I’m not actively fighting the system that imposed the ideologies in the first place.

LINKS:

Kate Burch's tumblr

Download at zine library here.

Accosted by racist costumes: Expressing displeasure with something no one else has a problem with means revealing yourself as "the other" by Katrina Richardson

"Eskimo Sisters" in Indian headdresses by Newspaper Rock: Where Native America meets pop culture

Eskimo on Wikipedia

Ohnotheydidn't's feminist livejournal community is currently having a discussion aboutcultural appropriation.

my culture is not a trend

OFFENSIVE HALLOWEEN SHIT I RECOMMEND NOT LOOKING AT:

Adult Indian Squaw Wig with Braids

inspiration: femme fatales by niagara

Run by Niagara

darksilenceinsuburbia posted this image quite some time ago, but it's only now that i got around to digging up a bit more information about the artist. a little bit of Litchenstein, a dash of Warhol, swirl it up with a love of ladies with guns in film history and there you have it: the art of Niagara.

her femme fatales evoke some of the most powerful women from the golden age of cinema, joan crawford, bette davis, clara bow... not to mention the "pretty faces" like veronica lake and jane russell. i'm personally drawn to the bold and tough attitude the women have, and totally have my own empowering feminist interpretation of them. here are a few of my favourites:

Bang Bang


Double Shot


I'm Pretty When I'm Angry


Don't Fuck with Me

Fuck Off Outta Here

Double Back

not to mention, the artist herself has quite an impressive and interesting story. she fronted the band Destroy All Monsters (who, as a fan of MC5, i am quite surprised i had never heard of before). here's a picture of her having quite a time in the late 70s:

plus, thurston moore of sonic youth helped to put together a compilation of Destroy All Monsters' music in 1994, since they had never formally recorded. here she is hanging with two of my favourite people, thurston moore and kim gordon.




she seems all around quite badass to me.

an "aboriginal friendly" canadian winter olympics: inclusion, tokenism and cultural appropriation

the olympics are almost wrapping up, thank goodness, because they are grating on my nerves more than ever. i've talked about it elsewhere how i really need to take a break from facebook because as much connection as it can offer me with faraway loved ones, it also fills me with violent urges thanks to the newsfeed. lately the status updates have been getting to me: everyone congratulating olympic athletes as if they are on a first name basis with them, as if another gold medal really means anything for "canada" or whichever country you belong to and are proud of because it produced good athletes. is that what people want to believe the olympics are really about? athletic performance, point finale? don't think so.

part of my reluctance to write about this is that i know the common reaction is that i'm an uppity lefty who just likes to tear down anything fun. "it's just sports! don't take it so seriously!" but then i realized that that is the main reason why i started this blog; in reaction to those who constantly say "it's just clothing! don't take it so seriously!" so read on at your own risk: i am going to try and make you hate the olympics.

okay, i'm sorry, i'm grumpy. let me begin by saying that there are many, many reasons why the olympics piss me off, but namely what has really been aggravating me these days is what is getting talked about and what isn't. i normally listen to cbc radio quite often, but my radio's been turned off almost constantly for the past week and a half. the only decent mainstream news reporting i heard was on the current when anna maria tremonti talked about what a post-olympics vancouver might look like. click the link to listen for yourself.

i tried to find a way to write about the olympics that i felt would suit the feminist fashion stance of this blog way back in october, but never ended up finishing it. today, triggered by a great article entitled "an indigenous olympics" by toban black my friend iris showed me, i'll just put it out there for you. it originally felt unfinished and disjointed, more of a rant than a cohesive essay of sorts, but i think if you read black's article first, it will put you in the right mindset to see where i am coming from. without further ado,

an "aboriginal friendly" canadian winter olympics: inclusion, tokenism and cultural appropriation

The first time I wrote about cultural appropriation and fashion was in 2005, when mocassin-style boots were appearing as a major trend for winter footwear. I wish I could dig up that article, but it seems to be lost somewhere in the archives of the newspaper I wrote it for. I wish I could find it since it would be a good starting point for what I think will be a recurring topic on this blog, as it is something of a touchy subject within the fashion community.

Unveiled earlier this month (October 2009), the Hudson Bay Company's 2010 Olympic clothing line is coming under criticism from Cowichan tribes who accuse them of producing "knock-offs" of the genuine Cowichan sweater.

According to Coast Salish artist Joe Jack, the Cowichan sweater emerged thousands of years ago as a way to battle the harshness of the North American coastal winters. The Coast Salish women had established a strong tradition of weaving woolen and cedar clothing for their families.

"Pre-European, and primarily before the easy access to domestic sheep wool, the Salish women wove clothing and blankets using the hair of a now extinct breed of small wool dog, mixed with mainland mountain goat wool, and goose down."

Over time, starting largely in the 1860s due to the extinction of the small wool dog, the style evolved into what we commonly know today as the Cowichan sweater. Practical and beautiful, the garment itself shows an incredible amount of skill and talent. Today, however, the Hudson's Bay Company is attempting to appropriate this rich cultural history of this garment and make a profit of it, with none of the proceeds going to the Coast Salish people it is appropriated from.

This is a perfect example of one of Black's points in his article; Black argues that the image that the Olympics present of the Native community is one that is muddled and watered-down. Yes, it is including native people in its clothing wear by borrowing from the cultural history and traditions, but it needs to do more than that. Who will be making these sweaters? Who will profit from them? And who will be able to afford to buy them and wear them?

Passing theatrical gestures to native peoples during the open ceremonies could be considered to be more respectful, but Olympics marketers otherwise have been mixing up North American native traditions into a soup-like caricature.

Theatrical gestures is right. Like Black says, by simply addressing the fact that the logo of the Vancouver Winter Olympics is from northern, Inuit communities while the games take place in a temperate climate where those people never lived shows us that this is tokenism. And let's not even touch the fact that most of the designs for the games that are "native inspired" weren't even done by First Nations artists!

It seems more and more like the "inclusion" of Native communities and organizations in the Vancouver Winter Olympics is nothing more than tokenism or branding. In this case the situation is pretty clear: Yes, we want to sell sweaters that look as though they were made by Native people, but we won't get Native people to make them or let them profit from them.

Often, people dismiss claims of cultural appropriation as trivial and unimportant; "there are bigger problems to address here" or "relax, it's just clothing" are the most common responses I've encountered. However, the cultural appropriation in and of itself does not exist in a vacuum. In this situation, I would argue that the attempted cultural appropriation of the Cowichan sweaters is indicative of larger, more important systems of oppression that are at work. The fact that the Vancouver Olympics Committee thinks it would be okay to take something that is specific to the Coast Salish people, find people who could make it cheaper, and sell it for more money illustrates very clearly that VANOC has very little respect for the host nations it claims to be working with.

WHY THE OLYMPICS ALREADY SUCK

For most people, it is not surprising that the style choices made by HBC and the VanOc comittee are controversial ones; ever since Vancouver won the games in 2002, nearly every decision that has been made (various censorship issues, the debate around female skiers, the Sea to Sky highway, development that displaces the homeless, the Native communities who are against hosting the Olympics on stolen land, the increasing corporate sponsorship, to name a few) has resulted in public outcry.

In my post-colonial theory class two years ago, we discussed the problematic nature of the mascots which are awkward mishmashes of various traditional Native mythological creatures: a half-whale half-bear hybrid (Miga), a whale-thunderbird-bear hybrid (Sumi), and a sasquatch (Quatchi). None of these characters are taken directly from First Nations people. Rather, a designer just threw a bunch together and this is what we are left with.

But back to the Cowichan sweaters. At this point, it almost seems like they are trying to piss off as many people as possible in as many different ways they can think up. Of course, even the clothing they chose for the Olympics would have to be controversial as well. (For more information about why so many people are opposed to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, check out No2010.ca)

How ironic that it is the Hudson Bay Company who is responsible for the appropriation of the Cowichan sweater. A brief brief primer for those of you who aren't Canadian: the Hudson Bay Company was established in the 1600s, when French and English colonizers/settlers arrived in Canada, or what was soon to be established as Upper and Lower Canada (today, the provinces of Ontario and Québec, with a little bit of power in the Maritime provinces). The Hudson Bay Company established formal fur trade between the trappers, who were often Métis (French and Native American mixed-blood) who hunted animals in difficult to access areas and sold the pelts back to the HBC who would use them to keep the colonizers warm in the harsh climate. There is a much longer history but that's just a brief bit of context for you.

For some more good 'ol fashioned racism courtesy of the Hudson's Bay Company, watch (and cringe) at this commercial.



It is so easy to deconstruct as this idea that white people arrived to this uninhabited land and worked hard and conquered it. We see a glimpse for maybe two seconds at the beginning of the commercial of native people with the Cowichan sweaters hanging; it seems as thought it was shown more for product placement than an acknowledgement of the fact that Native people were here first. All we see are these white pioneer men conquering the empty land and "thriving" in the elements... but that's a whole blog post to itself if I go on.

To end, then, my point is namely that like with any international event that puts a country's history on stage, we have to be critical of what we are being presented with. We have to ask questions that dig deeper. Who is being talked about, and who isn't? What happens before and after said event?

In response to the public outcry around the Cowichan sweaters, the HBC released a statement saying that the hand-knit sweater is a "nod towards this icon of Canadian fashion, while adding our own contemporary twists including type of wool, colour, pattern complexity and logos." Basically, to me, this reads as "We like the look and style of your sweater, so we are going to steal the basic idea of it, get white people to make it even though your ancestors are the ones who created this style of sweater, get them to make it for cheaper and sell it for more money. Oh yeah, and you won't get any money out of it either."

This is my main point of contention with a lot of fashion items, accessories and styles that have a deep cultural history. The idea that one culture can potentially claim "ownership" and can then be stolen from is a very large debate and one that cannot be fully taken up here. But, in this case, I feel like the official Olympic line of clothing is indicative of much larger problems that unfortunately aren't being talked about.

If you're interested in more writing on the topic of cultural appropriation in the Vancouver Winter Olympics, i highly recommend checking out the Urban Native Girl's blog as well as Racialicious.com. for more discussions about feminism and the olympics, check out the pursuit of harpyness. Thanks for reading.

Sources: Cowichan fakes won't win gold from the Victoria Times Colonist

Olympic sweater not a Cowichan, Hudson's Bay Company says by Bruce Constantineau

The history and artistry of the Coast Salish Indian Knitting by Joe Jack.

Podcast of the Cost of the games for Aboriginal communities by Anna Maria Tremonti.

Podcast of the Olympics and Civil Liberties on the Current

The Olympic Resistance Network

i am somebody

i found this far too beautiful not to share with you guys. watch it! you won't regret it.