GENDER AGENDA: MYTH aims to explore the gendered experience, for, as we all know, one of the greatest social myths is gender. But, other smaller myths affect our everyday too. For example, a specific aim of ours is to tackle the myth that feminism is an exclusively female ideology. Ultimately, everyone experiences gender, and this zine is intended to be a distillation of those experiences.
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‘The Personal is Political is Feminist’ was chosen for this edition to provide contributors with a broad framework from which they could explore what feminism means to them and how it manifests in their daily lives. Feminism is not just a political act. It is something we embody day-to-day; it is something which we encounter through our conversations; it is something eternally present in our psyche; it is something we feel and create and grow from.
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Gender Agenda 2023- online edition
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus, she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.
When I first encountered this quote, I felt as if I suddenly understood a hither-to-unnoticed aspect of life. Where I had heard of the ‘male gaze’ before then, I had never truly grasped the concept. Once I had, there was no going back. I saw the traces of it everywhere. It pervaded every film, book, and TikTok. All my clothes were ruined. My entire childhood was reimagined under its dominance. Perhaps this is because I was struggling with my body image at the time, but for me the gaze was malignant, and it had breathed its poisonous breath onto everything I knew.
As it is for most of us who experience it, my ‘awkward phase’ was long and unbearable. Average height, above-average weight, unruly ginger hair that I desperately tried in vain to make fit the 2016-poker-straightdip-dyed-musical.ly-user aesthetic, those ridiculous rectangular plastic glasses, such as all old Tumblr users should remember well. I was, in a word, ‘frumpy.’
It wasn’t until the latter half of year ten that I purged myself of awkwardness. And once I had, as every person who’s ever shed a couple of kilos and put some layers in their hair can attest to, I noticed a tangible difference in the way my peers treated me. anymore. I had a name and a face and I won the game the gaze insisted I play, losing again always stuck around.
In my final year of college, I outgrew my favourite pair of trousers, my long hair into a curly whatever-the-fuck, and stopped wearing lifted weights. Maybe I should have seen this as liberation, but more like deterioration. For months I felt trapped under my heaviness. I looked at others and I only saw my all-too-big reflection in their eyes. In conversations, I felt myself as an overwhelming presence, a ghastly monster that everyone was simply too polite to scream at. I longed for my eyes to be taken out of my head and placed above me so that I could always observe myself, know my every angle, and know what others saw. The limits of my sense of vision were a constant torture for me.
In my life, there was an omnipresent male and he watched me and all the women around me all the time. He was my surveyor, their surveyor. He was our prison warden or still is maybe.
Berger was right. I had turned myself into a vision: a sight.
And truth be told I cannot comfortably use the past tense here. I’m not sure there is a way for a mere individual to completely throw out years of social conditioning. The gaze still exists, and the surveyor still surveys because he is both within and without, micro and macro, individual and collective.
I think, if I were to dispense some kind of wisdom into this article of mine, just in case someone needs it, I would say: yes, I am seen, but it doesn’t end there. When I’m with friends they see me. But they also hear my voice, my bad takes, my laugh. When I’m with my boyfriends, they see me. But they also feel the warmth of my embrace, the softness of my skin. They get strands of my hair in their mouths and their buttcracks. They smell me on their bedsheets long after I’ve gone. People on the street, they see me. But after that glance, I am forgotten, simply a fleeting moment to them, a waft of air, a footstep. They see me, but they also experience me. They are not my surveyors; they do not scan me in search of flaws. Nor am I a still image. No, I am not a sight, I am a presence. I am a presence that is seen on occasion but, most of the time, is felt. And the person who feels it the most is me.
So, I hope this mindset will help me ignore the surveyor even when he continues to survey. I can give up on trying to expand my field of vision to include myself. I will never be aware of what I look like all the time. Am I even remotely aware of what everyone else looks like all the time? I believe my impressions of others are far more abstract than that. And that abstractness is countless times more powerful and beautiful than any single image, or 5 lost kilos, or 10 good hair days could ever be.
By Solveig Palazzo
Introduction
Very often I am disappointed when I go to the cinema, because I had great expectations of the movie I was going to see. But last month when I saw the French movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire (the original title is Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu), I was astonished by this masterpiece. Moderate and simple, but tremendously vibrant, taking place in the 1770s but resolutely present, sensual and bashful at the same time, the film directed by Céline Sciamma is moving from the beginning to the end.
The plot
On an isolated island of Brittany in the end of the 18th century, an artist named Marianne is asked to make a portrait of a young woman called Heloise, who is about to get married to a Milanese Lord. But Heloise refuses this wedding, and hence, refused to be portrayed. Marianne will pretend that she is a companion lady in order to observe Heloise and paint her without her knowing it. But soon, confusion develops between the two women, and deeper feelings grow. From a frozen and cold atmosphere to thaw and burning, the frame evolves through different vibes without being caricatural.
A lesbian love story
The main theme that arises when we think of this movie is the subtle, tender and intense love story between Marianne and Heloise. It feels good to see a lesbian relationship onscreen without having the (outrageous) bias of the male gaze. Indeed, the director Céline Sciamma is a woman, and almost all the actors are women in the film. We can see men, whose lines are very limited, at symbolic moments of the movie: in the beginning and at the end, as if the story between these women was a fortunate parenthesis in this male dominated world. The only man that is explicitly mentioned is Heloise’s fiancé, but this consideration soon fades away, leaving space for the tension between the two main characters. The film is very aesthetic, and the shots are often very long, taking time to enhance the glances and the skins, the clothes and the landscapes, the difference between the confined atmosphere of the house and the unleashed and raging wild of the sea. Silence is everywhere, but everything is said. In a very simple way Sciamma shows us the emergence of tenderness and passion, without making it seem artificial.
Female gaze in arts
Arts are very present in the movie, starting with the main theme: a portrait. Marianne is an interesting character: indeed, she is an artist which was scarce at the time for a woman. She reveals that she had had naked models, adding to her rebellious personality. She also plays the piano, and an important discussion between Heloise and Marianne takes place when Marianne plays in front of Heloise. They are both transported by the music and they appropriate it. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has a significant value in the movie where music is rare and infrequent. Furthermore, Marianne sees Heloise through her creative mind and is inspired by her.
Feminist matters
Many aspects of the film are related to feminist matters. Apart from Heloise and Marianne, a third character is very important: Sophie, the domestic. Indeed, Sophie is a young girl evolving separately and with the main characters. She is living in the house with them and raises the topic of abortion. The word is never clearly used, but several scenes show the processes women at this time had to go through in order to be free to dispose of their own bodies. In addition, the film clearly shows a community of women, the sisterhood that relates them to each other. In a magnificent scene, a group of women sing around a fire. A great feeling of empowerment is associated to this moment, almost sacred. Besides, the question of Heloise’s refused imposed wedding with a man she never met, not having the choice of the life she wants to live, and a form of resignation express various forms of domination women suffered from at the time, and still today in a comparative perspective.
A new representation of sexuality
Some sex scenes are indeed suggested in the movie. It has nothing to do with what we could have seen and probably being shocked in La Vie d’Adèle (male gaze again and projection of heterosexual fantasy on what lesbian sexuality is). The scenes show a form of lesbian sex which of course doesn’t mean to describe them all. But still it shows bodies and breathings and caresses with very relevant privacy. Once more we get out of the heteronormative sexual intercourses in cinema, and we get to see a representation of sexuality through the eyes and the camera of a woman. It makes a big difference.
Leading figures of the contemporary and feminist French cinema
It is not the first time I am amazed by Céline Sciamma’s movie. Indeed, in 2007 she had started to question other-than-straight orientation with her film Water Lilies (Naissance de pieuvres) in which one by the way Adèle Haenel, who plays Heloise in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, was already breath-taking. In 2011, Céline Sciamma interrogates gender identity and expression with Tomboy, the story of a ten-year-old girl who says to everyone in her new neighbourhood that she is a boy. Sciamma is one of the most important film-maker nowadays in France, enlightening fundamental issues on gender, sexuality and feminism. The two main actresses in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel. They embody a new cinema, empowering and challenging norms, which is crucial now more than ever.
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