You have more than once brought to my mind the Pratchett saying, "If you want something done, give it to a busy person."
Your best ideas for nano come when you should be working on your novel; your enthusiasm about learning Korean rises when you should be studying for the JLPT - I think I have discovered the key to your productivity! You should always be doing *something else*.
Actually, did we talk that much about gender in "The Fantasticks"? I think I was too overwhelmed by the play's other problems to think much about gender. One of its central ironies was how it was a play about the deconstruction of a typically problematic romantic narrative - and yet that deconstruction relied on highly gendered tropes. It challenged the boy meets girl formula by having the girl think she's in love with someone else, and having the boy think his girlfriend is shallow (I think?). So, it challenged "boy meets girl" but it relied on REALLY problematic notions of "boy" and "girl" to do so.
Also, it had a male narrator who doubled as the secondary love interest, thus precluding any possibility of an aesthetically balanced relationship between him and the girl due to their differing distances from the audience - and therefore reinforcing the initial romance, which was balanced in terms of the characters' youth, beauty, naivete and objective distance from the audience. This in turn reinforces the idea that the two young people were meant to be together, since it is the girl's infatuation with the narrator / her captor that disrupts their relationship. The boy's issue with the relationship ("girl is shallow and doesn't appreciate me") is held up as valid, whereas the girl's issue with the relationship ("boy is boring, pirate is exciting!" is seen as problematic. Her crush isn't the source of their problems, but it is roundly condemned.
Furthermore, the boy has to go out into the world to gain life experience, whereas the girl gains her experience through an older man. The list of problems with this dynamic:
1) Girls are vapid, shallow, and concerned with only romantic thoughts (which are of course androcentric)*
2) Women are only important in terms of their relationships with men
3) Women's goals and characters are contingent upon their sexuality
4) Men are the primary citizens of the world; women can only gain value through men as their adjuncts, not as independent agents
5) Women's relationships with men must be sexual in some sense; she could not have, for example, gained experience via a tutor or a professor but through a potential lover
*Holy shit I think another piece of the puzzle just snapped into place for me! The stereotype that women care / should care primarily about love and relationships is ENTIRELY a way of maintaining androcentricity! By positioning love, marriage, children and relationships as the apex of womanhood, a woman's self becomes subsumed by the interests of her male partner; her personal goals cannot be as important as a MAN. Women's interests are therefore less valuable because they're necessarily secondary: their interests can only feed back into men's interests, because all women care about is men / relationships / etc. LATHER RINSE REPEAT.
Also, a sexualized wall. I liked the wall, but seriously, if it had been played by a male character, it wouldn't have been a sexy wall.
no subject
Your best ideas for nano come when you should be working on your novel; your enthusiasm about learning Korean rises when you should be studying for the JLPT - I think I have discovered the key to your productivity! You should always be doing *something else*.
Actually, did we talk that much about gender in "The Fantasticks"? I think I was too overwhelmed by the play's other problems to think much about gender. One of its central ironies was how it was a play about the deconstruction of a typically problematic romantic narrative - and yet that deconstruction relied on highly gendered tropes. It challenged the boy meets girl formula by having the girl think she's in love with someone else, and having the boy think his girlfriend is shallow (I think?). So, it challenged "boy meets girl" but it relied on REALLY problematic notions of "boy" and "girl" to do so.
Also, it had a male narrator who doubled as the secondary love interest, thus precluding any possibility of an aesthetically balanced relationship between him and the girl due to their differing distances from the audience - and therefore reinforcing the initial romance, which was balanced in terms of the characters' youth, beauty, naivete and objective distance from the audience. This in turn reinforces the idea that the two young people were meant to be together, since it is the girl's infatuation with the narrator / her captor that disrupts their relationship. The boy's issue with the relationship ("girl is shallow and doesn't appreciate me") is held up as valid, whereas the girl's issue with the relationship ("boy is boring, pirate is exciting!" is seen as problematic. Her crush isn't the source of their problems, but it is roundly condemned.
Furthermore, the boy has to go out into the world to gain life experience, whereas the girl gains her experience through an older man. The list of problems with this dynamic:
1) Girls are vapid, shallow, and concerned with only romantic thoughts (which are of course androcentric)*
2) Women are only important in terms of their relationships with men
3) Women's goals and characters are contingent upon their sexuality
4) Men are the primary citizens of the world; women can only gain value through men as their adjuncts, not as independent agents
5) Women's relationships with men must be sexual in some sense; she could not have, for example, gained experience via a tutor or a professor but through a potential lover
*Holy shit I think another piece of the puzzle just snapped into place for me! The stereotype that women care / should care primarily about love and relationships is ENTIRELY a way of maintaining androcentricity! By positioning love, marriage, children and relationships as the apex of womanhood, a woman's self becomes subsumed by the interests of her male partner; her personal goals cannot be as important as a MAN. Women's interests are therefore less valuable because they're necessarily secondary: their interests can only feed back into men's interests, because all women care about is men / relationships / etc. LATHER RINSE REPEAT.
Also, a sexualized wall. I liked the wall, but seriously, if it had been played by a male character, it wouldn't have been a sexy wall.
... Phew. Were there any more?