My quick thoughts about Battlestar: Galactica, which I have just finished catching up on:

Good:
1. So many strong female roles! A female president (even if she usually defers to the Admiral in matters military); several female fighter pilots; a female commander (even if she is morally, ah, misguided, her gender is clearly not the issue), at least one female surgeon…
2. Deft handling of the abortion issue.
3. One of the lead roles is a Latino - in a sci fi show?! Hooray! (I honestly can’t think of another show where this is true. Not one.)
4. The entire question of “am I a real being, or just a construct, a machine?” - applicable to any number of groups over time and extremely well done.

Bad:
1. Everyone’s last name is whitewashed, “normalized” in a way. While I respect the idea that race is less important than what colony you come from in this world, it seems to me that one could just have easily used last names which “read” as certain ethnicities, cross ethnicities (so, call Laura Roslin - oh - Laura Ramos; call the Adamas the Adachis; etc.). Then again, maybe I just “read” names like Roslin, Adama, Tyrol, and Biers as white, and no one else does?
2. In any case, why give Edward James Olmos such a very white son - especially since his actual son is also in the series, but playing another character? I’m not saying that Jamie Bamber makes a bad Apollo, but I feel like there’s a certain amount of “in space there are only white people or otherwise people we will now pretend are white because hey it’s space” going on. Would it really be so weird to have two Latino male leads?
3. There are no happy, normal family relationships until season 3, and that relationship takes a very gendered slant (Cally stays home with the baby and frets about the child’s health, while Tyrol tries to press them both into working too hard). I realize that we’re at war, etc., etc., but since the BSG world is clearly much more gender-equal than ours, would it be too weird to show us a family that works in that context?

Ugly:
1. There are only two black men with speaking roles. One is a Cylon working to harvest the eggs of (white) human women for their crazy breeding schemes, and one is traitorous (having been tricked by the Cylons). This does not seem… uh… equitable. Black women get by a little better, since they have both Dualla and Elosha, but that’s not a lot of screen time either.

All in all I think that BSG does unusually well with gender issues and clearly is making an effort when it comes to race, there’s still a long row to hoe…

I just watched a video about portrayals of masculinity in Disney movies.

I had a number of problems with the video. Not because I think that it makes inaccurate statements — I agree, at the very least, that Disney movies almost always privilege certain male body types and make statements about what is “masculine” that usually are about physical prowess and violence (I’m not sure I would agree that modern Disney movies encourage young men to think of women as sources of pleasure or servants, which is the video’s third and weakest point).

Unfortunately, the video chooses some exceedingly poor examples to make its point. It largely seems to rest on the character of Gaston, the hyper-masculinized villain of “Beauty and the Beast.” While Gaston is certainly presented as a “manly man,” he is by nature parodic. No one leaves “Beauty and the Beast” thinking that Gaston is the hero. When they sing about Gaston’s physical size, strength, and abundance of chest hair, the song is purposely ridiculous and over-the-top. His pursuit of Beauty is obviously “boorish, brainless!” — as Belle complains in a song. The Beast, who certainly does not come across as “effeminate” or “un-manly,” has a relationship with Beauty that centers around genuinely healthy and friendly activities: feeding birds, reading books. When the Beast turns into the prince, he is nowhere near as barrel-chested and stereotypical as Gaston.

On the other hand, the video has a point. Even if the prince isn’t as barrel-chested as Gaston, he’s still pretty dang barrel-chested. Although Gaston’s belligerence is bad, the Beast still can’t run from battle: he only comes into his own when he finally fights the bad guy for the girl. To skip to another movie, despite the fact that Mulan successfully pretends to be a boy and completes all the tests of physical prowess necessary, the fact remains that boys are being told that in order to be male, you have to have physical power. If Mulan had failed the tests of her strength, they’d know she was a girl. Even if the scenario empowers young women by telling them that they can do anything a man can do, it still labels the quality of physical strength as “masculine.” And as for falling in love? “Beauty and the Beast” is a rarity in that it allows the protagonists time to get to know each other and perhaps actually forge friendships rather than simply going goo-gah at first sight.

And of course, even these caveats are more complex than my initial analysis allows. The story of “Mulan” requires her to pass physical tests: one could argue that strength is a quality of soldiers, not men. This argument would be stronger if Disney more frequently presented admirable men with different physical appearances and interests. As for “Beauty and the Beast,” Belle also has to prove that she isn’t a coward: perhaps she isn’t forced to physically fight Gaston, but she bravely tries to convince the villagers not to attack the Beast’s castle: speaking to a riled-up mob requires its own type of courage. When the villagers reach the castle, the female servants are portrayed as playing just as large a role in the defense of their home as the men. And let’s not forget that the Beast attempts to convince Gaston not to fight. Only when he’s attacked does he resort to physical violence.

Are there problems with the Disney movies? Sure. They’re racist in varying degrees, certainly white-centric, promote certain body types above others, and are unfailingly hetero. But I don’t think that the situation is quite as dire as the video makes it out to be, or at least, not in the particular examples it cites.

On the topic of fairy tales, though, the best fairy tale you’ve never read: the ballad of Tam Lin. Why have you never read it? Because it’s about an unwed mother standing up to her family’s expectations and setting off on an adventure to save her baby-daddy. No, really. And this is a very old, traditional story — but it’s nearly impossible to Bowlderize, so you’ve probably never heard of it.

There have been, what appears to be, an influx of ‘security alerts’ at the Claremont Colleges, an increase that seems to be congruent with the recent escalation in threats of violence on campuses nation-wide after last week’s the shootings at Virginia Tech. Although the threats here have been mild – robbery, an attempted break in, grand theft auto, stalking, and a possible attempted abduction – they do garner attention from the students and administrators of a group of colleges that pride themselves on being extremely safe places for to work, study, and live. While Asian American and immigration activists vocalized critiques of the insensitive media reporting about the Virginia Tech Shooter’s race and immigrant status I can’t help but wonder why the Claremont Colleges isn’t engaged in a similar dialogue about race-based discrimination in crime reporting. With the goal of starting a discussion about racial-profiling at the Claremont Colleges, I intend to consider how we might go about identifying this tendency and examining why racial profiling is normalized at the Claremont Colleges

In the past week, three security alerts have gone out across the Claremont Colleges that give descriptions of suspects. The first alert described an incident where a man in a car summoned a student from the sidewalk and made several attempts to coerce her into his car. The suspect was described as “an older male with gray hair and a slightly receding hairline. He was wearing a short-sleeve blue and white striped shirt and a gold signet ring with initials.” The second incident describes an attempted break in to a residence hall. Although the suspect was confronted and claimed that he was “trying to reach his girlfriend,” the only available description of the man is that he is an “African-American male in his late twenties/early thirties.” The third report was for “suspicious behavior,” and describes several men in a car – who appeared to be following a student – simply as “of Hispanic descent.”

The suspect from the first security alert, it is safe to assume, was white, because his racial identity was not deemed to be of importance by either the student who reported the incident or the campus safety officer who took down her report. White privilege, after all, is invisible for a reason. In the second and third reports, how is it that all those involved thought it justified to describe the suspects only in terms of their perceived race? My best guess: Claremont College students (assuming that a student reported these incidents), who are overwhelmingly white, embrace the racist notion that all brown people look the same. Markedly, in the case of the second alert no one can claim that they didn’t get a good look at the suspect. In regards to the third incident, it is important that we examine racialized accusations not as inconsequential crimes, but as physical manifestations of enculturated racial stereotypes. This is not to say that stalking threats do not merit appropriate judicial response; rather, it is crucial, when presented with incidents such as these, that we thoroughly investigate the racist ideological roots at the heart of racial profiling.

In a culture that indoctrinates women (or rather all white people) to fear men of color as violent sexual predators, we create artificial “security alerts” that meaningfully impact the lives of women and men of color. When campus administrators (and society at large) tell women to “Trust [their] instincts, better to be safe than sorry,” without first asking why whites tend to label men of color as ‘suspicious,’ ‘threatening’ or ‘dangerous’, we can’t expect much more than the proliferation of racist ideology, racially-motivated discrimination, and in fact, an overall artificial increase in ‘security alerts.’ This is why our prisons are bursting at the seams with people of color; dominant white society has the ability to label people of color as lazy or troublesome at best and as threatening or violent at worst, without ever investigating the racist foundations of such “instincts”.

None of this is meant to undermine the importance of security alerts to the maintenance of safety at the Claremont Colleges (I myself often wish that safety threats against LGBT populations at the 5C’s were more widely distributed); rather, I hope that we might challenge ourselves and the larger community to investigate the racist underpinnings of crime reporting on our colleges, and its implications for the lives of individuals and anti-racist activism.

A quick post, while I’m traveling:

I’ve now passed three separate chain bookstores in the Toronto airport which have, in their magazine stands, sections labeled “Women’s Interest”. One opposes this with “General Interest” (a particularly disconcerting dichotomy, as it implies that women are a separate subset from “people” rather than a part of it), and the other two with “Men’s Interest”, which is at least an understandable contrast to make. There are, after all, magazines intended explicitly for women– Women’s Day, etc– and magazines intended explicitly for men– GQ, etc. What boggles my mind is the fact that magazines like Wired, Laptop, and Car and Driver all wound up in the Men’s Interest section, while the Women’s Interest section included only magazines like Good Housekeeping, Martha, Lucky, and other cooking, shopping, or housekeeping-related magazines. I don’t think Wired; even has a disproportionately male audience– do bookstore employees really think that technology interests men so much more than women that they’re willing to risk alienating potential buyers? I feel like I should grab a copy just out of protest.