Photo: photobucket

By ANNIE ATURA

April 28, 2010

The following interview is unedited. It took place at seven o’clock on April 27, 2010 in the Branford College Master’s House, minutes before the Ying Yang Twins took the stage at Spring Fling. When I entered, there was a massive spread of catering from Popeye’s on the dining room table. Yang was on the couch in the fetal position; he participated in the first part of the interview supine. Upon Ying’s arrival – he had been touring Branford with Master Steven Smith – Yang sat up. The interview was made possible by WYBC Yale Radio.

Annie Atura: So which one are you? Ying or Yang?

Yang: Yang.

AA: So what’s the difference? Do you complete each other?

Yang: Yeah. My brother’s more of the peace; I’m more of the war.

AA: So do you have any feelings about Yale? Education in general?

Yang: We all need an education.  That’s the feeling I have about it. As far as college, or anything like that, I never really got into that. My main goal was to just get out of high school. I ain’t never really plan no college or anything.  I don’t want to waste my own smarts. Because my family sure ain’t have no damn money to send me to college. So my main accomplishment was just to get a diploma. ‘Cause nowadays, you ain’t got no diploma you can’t even work at McDonald’s, dammit!

AA: What did your parents do?

Yang: Um, shit. My dad painted cars before I was born, and still paint cars. My mom at home. She don’t really have no choice. So now I take care of ‘em.

AA: Are you aware that there was controversy surrounding the Ying Yang Twins’ coming here?

Yang: There usually always is when we go to any college.

AA: Really? Why?

Yang: People always – sensitive people, you know what I’m saying, they don’t like certain stuff. You’re never going to get everybody to like everything. But the main thing that people have to realize when they – uh – pull those type of moves toward the Ying Yang Twins: we are the people’s favorite rap group. So we’re just like, all that other, uh, how do you say, um, when they try to start, that shit ain’t gonna work with the Ying Yang Twins. We provide a fun feeling. And then, how many other people in the world you think parents didn’t like the music they listened to. It ain’t just the Ying Yang Twins. People, the older people, like your parents or grandparents, whoever listened to every person that their parents couldn’t like every person, you know what I’m saying. Everything is a reenactment, over and over. But the thing that people have to realize is that everybody ain’t an uptight asshole.

AA: Well, do you think that your music is misogynistic?

Yang: Um … No. Because we make songs, we let it be known that we make songs for exotic dancers. You know, once we came out. So anybody that was against that, I look at it like this: if you’re not a stripper, if you don’t work at a nudie bar, then you ain’t really have a point to try to make a point against us. Because the same women that you might not be fond of if they work in exotic bars, they’ve got the same type of situation we all have. People have to take care of themselves. I don’t know anybody that lives anywhere in this nation or anywhere in the world that can live off love. Money pays bills. Everybody ain’t going to like everything. I already know that, so I’m ready for the worst. They call me Mr. Worst First anywhere I go.  You can’t really – you can’t make me see a closed door. A person that has something to say derogatory every time – although we have derogatory lyrics – in the situations that we represent, to those women, the lyrics are not derogatory. They are helpful.

AA: So: “For real bitch / Don’t take this shit wrong / Thinking I’m nice / I’ll break your jawbone:” that’s something that they would consider helpful?

Yang: I mean, it all goes along with what we promote.

AA: Well what exactly do you promote?

Yang: Um … We, our main objective as the Ying Yang Twins was to make hype songs for women that work in the strip club.

AA: So things that they could get excited about?

Yang: Yeah, versus letting them dance to fucking John Cougar Mellencamp.

AA: Mm hm.

Yang: Or Pink Floyd. You know what I’m saying?

AA: So you think women can get excited about things like, “Fuck you til you cry”?

Yang: Right! Because a lot of the women that know us – the women that work in the exotic clubs – and other women that don’t work in the club, they say, You  guys know how to explain, when you talk about us. So, when you make the little gesture about the bitch here, or, trick, or ho there, it’s not as bad as a illiterate person trying to use the same type of lyrics. In other words, you have to have smarts, in order to get smart with a person.

AA: So you think that you actually empathize with women?

Yang: Yeah. That’s right.

AA: How much time do you actually spend in strip clubs?

Yang: Um, that’s our whole career. Like, just like, all right, I’ll put it to you like this. Everything we’ve accomplished over the years we’ve been the Ying Yang Twins, since 1997, all right, over the years, it’s not any type of performance we won’t do. We do squeaky clean shows, we do X rated shows, that’s why every time we come to a college we ask what do they prefer. You know what I’m saying? We already know the stacked deck gonna be up against us but when, we’re not one of those groups that you’re going to be able to just – uh uh uh – downplay. You know why? What is this, New Haven, Connecticut, right? We’ve been at Spring Bling [sic] before, and kids, they be like, We drove all the way from Connecticut, listening to nothing but the Ying Yang Twins! So, you know, far as certain people not liking what you do, you know you ain’t never going to get everyone to like you. So what?

Ying: Well I don’t mean to come in, rude and everything,

AA: No, please!

Ying: But uh, they say we was at Yale. I thought all the deaf people was here ’cause they said Yale. Laughs.

AA: So what is it exactly that draws you to strip clubs?

Yang: Strip clubs – if you ain’t never been to Atlanta, there’s a lot of clubs all over this nation, but we have the best. They get all the way naked.

Ying: You say what drives us to strip clubs?

AA: Yes, right, he was talking about how much he enjoyed strip clubs –-

Yang: Right.

AA: — and how you make a lot of music for the women that work in strip clubs.

Ying: What do women do in the strip clubs? That’s what draws us there! They ain’t got on no underwear! Where your underclothes at! My bad, my bad! My bad, baby!

AA: So describe your ideal woman?

Yang: Ideal woman, what do you mean?

AA: I don’t know. To mate with.

Ying: Cool. Down to earth. Smoke. Drink.

Yang: Lady in the street but a freak in the bed.

AA: Really? That’s your ideal?

Yang: I mean, yeah. When I say lady I mean in every aspect of the word.  Uh uh uh uh.

Ying: I guess my ideal woman is my wife.

AA: Would you date an exotic dancer?

Yang: No.

AA: Why? Why not?

Yang: Why? ‘Cause she gets paid to provide a service that requires a certain – uh uh uh uh um – sensitive situation, how I look at it. When someone’s together and they be intimate, that’s a private thing right? Ok. So that’s sacred, whether you be married or not. But if they got a club that I can go – now, say if I’m trying to talk to this lady. It take me six months to a year for her to get comfortable with me. But if she work in the club, I ain’t got to talk to her.

Ying: Takes her sixteen seconds.

Yang: Five or six minutes.

AA: And that’s unattractive to you?

Yang: Um, it’s not actually –

Ying: No no I’m not saying it’s unattractive. But if she’s doing that to me or him or him, how many other men within a day is she doing that to? So if you calculate that within the week, and then you calculate that within the month, and then you calculate that within the year – I don’t want my wife, or anybody who that I feel like this is my soul mate, out there showing my goodies, my goodies, my goodies not my goodies, you know what I’m saying?

Yang: The exchange rate is getting to know a person versus giving them a couple of dollars to take their clothes off.

Ying: Do you want your man showing off all your goodies?

AA: Well, it depends, right? I also don’t go to strip clubs.

Ying: Would you date a stripper? Would you date a male stripper?

AA: Well I don’t go to male strip clubs.

Ying: But would you date a male stripper? Even if you don’t go, even though you ignorant to the point that you don’t go, would you date a male stripper?

AA: Yes. Yes I would.

Ying: So you cool with a lot of other women looking at your goodies.

AA: Yeah.

Ying: No, for me it’s only me, myself, and I.

AA: How much of your day do you spend naked?

Ying: Say what?

AA: How much of your day do you spend naked?

Yang: It all depends on how long you want to be naked.

Ying: I’m just saying though how many people am I showing it to in a day?

AA: I don’t know, how many people are you showing it to in a day?

Ying: I’m not. I ain’t showing it to nobody but me myself and my wife, you know. I don’t even show my homeboys myself like that, you know. So to show somebody else –

AA: How do you feel about things like gay marriage? Are you comfortable with homosexuality?

Yang: No. I’m not with that.

Ying: No, I’m not with that.

AA: You’re not with that?

Yang: Opposites attract. That shit is a no-go with me. You know I mean, straight up. The female was made for the man, the man was made for the female, and that’s how that shit’s supposed to go. All together. There ain’t no way around that shit. You can’t – two of the same motherfuckers can’t reproduce, so that don’t help the world.

Ying: Well I’m not gay and I don’t, um, involve my circle, I’m cool, whatever you do, that’s your life. I have nothing against it.

Yang: I respect gays, ’cause most families have one in their family. I respect them. As far as being with that shit? No.

AA: Do you think they should be allowed to marry?

Yang: I don’t see it.

Ying: Uhhh – by by by by biblical law –

AA: Are you religious?

Yang: Religious is nothing but a pawn of slavery.

Ying: No I’m just saying, biblical law, it’s not supposed to go on. So human law it’s cool. I’m just saying at the end of the day, that person who’s planning to get married and do whatever they have to do to the opposite sex – I mean the same sex – they have to face the Maker at the end of the day. We don’t. So biblically we have nothing to do with that.

AA: So you’re religious (Ying) and you aren’t (Yang)?

Ying: No I’m just saying that’s just the way it goes.

Yang: I don’t choose a religion.

Ying: Biblically, it’s not supposed to go on. But by man laws, since ten years ago, it’s cool to go around and say I’m gay. Ten years ago you couldn’t do it. It was like, you say, I’m gay, and someone almost would whoop ya.

Yang: There’s some sensitive people in this world just like the people in California. All that shit trickles down.

Ying: Ok, ok. When do laws change?

Yang: All the time.

Ying: Laws change when gays become part of politics.

Yang: Laws change all the time, shorty.

Ying: They change every day, that’s what I’m saying. So now that you’ve got more gays in the lawmaking decision, damn right, it’s cool now.

Yang: I still don’t feel like that.

Ying: Shit. Really? Really if you want to tell the truth about it, biblically, they’ve been gay since the beginning of time! They just was keeping it in the closet.

Yang: They been Romans doing that shit.

Ying: Come on, there’s more priests and preachers that mess with little boys than we even fail to acknowledge. But we don’t want to acknowledge that. We done swept that up under the table. All right, let’s talk about these gays and homosexuals we got going on right now, but we ain’t going to talk about that priest that was messing with young Bobby when little Bobby was too young to know what was going on.

Yang: It’s like this, if you gonna point the finger at one thing you gotta point the finger at everything.

Ying: At everything. It’s been going on long before us.

Yang: Yeah so don’t try to. Like a lot of people try to take that shit and apply it wherever someone’s a little rougher than they would like.

Ying: Little Bobby try to build his life around – I’m not this way I’m not this way I’m not this way I’m not this way – and he try to build his life around that until when he try to face the way he is, he has to buckle his knees like a wimpy little girl. To the person that’s not even higher than him. He done have a child, he done married, he done do everything that he think that in G-d’s eyes is for him to do. And that’s why I’m like, why are you sitting around here making like it’s not ok to do this it’s not ok to do this, but when someone else come out and say, Well I’ve done it, that’s close to you, you like, Well I was like that too! I just didn’t really want to say nothing. For what?

Yang: Well you know like people like, that wait ‘til somebody else start something before they say something, those are bitches.

Ying: If you like penis, say you like penis. If you like kitty cat, say you like kitty cat.

Yang: With me? I’m not as sensitive as the world is. I’m not G-d, I’m not Jesus, and I’m not that sensitive, because there’s some ugly shit that occurs in the world every day. And we still be forced to have a look at it and deal with it.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

–

Correction: The initial transcript of this interview used the informal spellings “cuz” and “ax.” For the sake of consistency, the revised transcript uses “’cause” instead of “cuz” and “ask” instead of “ax.”

April 18, 2010

Sometimes Yale decides to speak up in the face of injustice, but right now it’s a little too quiet outside. This year, the campus has been disturbingly silent about the Spring Fling line-up, almost completely devoid of women and featuring at least one explicitly misogynistic group, the Ying Yang Twins.

Broads has ranked the line-up, assigning entirely objective scores (the more points the better on a limitless scale) based on feminist reputation and the bands’ thoughts on four key women’s issues: female leadership, violence against women, sexual empowerment, and reproductive health. Unfortunately, none of the groups has official statements on these issues, and all of them are too cool to talk to us, so we’ve delved deep into their lyrics for meaning.

Ying Yang Twins

Feminist rep

The Ying Yang Twins have a pretty seriously terrible reputation. In 2005, the duo’s scheduled show at Florida Atlantic University was canceled due to their misogynistic lyrics, and now Yale undergraduates Diana Ofosu and Chelsea Allen are organizing an effort to ask Yale to provide alternative entertainment during the Twins’ performance. “It is undisputedly true that in its 40th year celebrating co-education and African-American studies at Yale, a group that produces highly explicit, misogynistic music has been invited, paid and promoted to perform for the student body,” said Ofosu in discussion with Broad Recognition. After reading a few of their lyrics, we’re sure you’ll be able to see where it puts this campus in terms of progress.

Ban-able: –50

Female leadership

“Let me tell you what I can’t stand
When a woman play the role of a man.”
–“Naggin’”

Doesn’t get much more explicit than this: –50

Violence against women

“I dun call your bluff
Fuck you ‘til you cry…
If ya ass could run you woulda
But you put that there aside
That’s how my dick got between your thighs”
–“Pull My Hair”

Nope, I guess this is more explicit: –50

Sexual empowerment

“You like to fuck”
–“Whisper”

Articulating female desire! At least, out of context it is: +6

Reproductive health

“Imma beat that pussy up”
–“Whisper”

Beating pussies up is bad for their health: –40

Final Score: –184

Photo: Alex Klein

MGMT

Feminist rep

MGMT doesn’t really have much to say about feminism. In general, Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden don’t have much to say about anything. However, as proven by the response to Yale undergrad Alex Klein’s recent IvyGate April Fool’s prank article, “MGMT Cancel on Yale and Brown, Citing Ying-Yang Twins and Snoop Dogg,” they’re totally believable as a feminist force—a number of commenters bought the story that MGMT felt the need to distance itself from misogynistic lyrics.

“I, personally, find it hilariously incongruous that Yale is hiring the Ying Yang twins to perform during the 40th anniversary of co-education at Yale, and was surprised that there wasn’t a greater outcry after the announcement,” Klein, an Editor-in-Chief of IvyGate, said in an e-mail to Broad Recognition. “I had an inkling that people might buy MGMT’s feminist cred; the band are self-styled psychedelic hippies, uber-hipsters, and darlings of the young, liberal, urban musical demographic.”

So to clarify, MGMT doesn’t have a public feminist stance, but Goldwasser and VanWyngarden do have weird hair. Plus, as Klein explained, “I also knew I could photoshop a ‘This is What a Feminist Looks Like’ shirt onto their often-shirtless lead singer fairly easily.”

Stance is nonexistent, but their fashion statement reads loud and clear: +5

Female leadership

“Standing there with nothing on
She gonna teach me how to swim”
–“Electric Feel”

Education led by women: +15

Violence against women

“Cold blooded claws
Never offered anything at all
Past the point of love”
–“Pieces of What”

Ambiguous. Do the claws not offer anything other than love, or would they necessarily only exist at a point outside of love? To be safe: +0

Sexual empowerment

“Turn me on with your electric field
Do what you feel now”
–“Electric Feel”

Reciprocity, women acting on sexual impulses: +12

Reproductive health

“Control yourself…
A baby is born
Crying out for attention”
–“Kids”

Abstinence-only sex ed?: –10

Final score: +22

Mike Posner

Feminist rep

No one really has any idea who Mike Posner is. Appararently he’s in college. Apparently he’s into girls who sell drugs. However, some serious research (read: Google Search) indicates that the president of Human Rights First is also named Mike Posner.

Fortuitous name: +1

Female leadership

“And when you count my money
you look so sexy to me”
–“Drug Dealer Girl”

Into financially savvy/numerically literate women: +10

Violence against women

“Fuck the police”
–“Smoke and Drive”

Against law enforcement. And unoriginal: –3

Sexual empowerment

“I can see through what you telling me
You want me to fall in love to help your self-esteem”
–“Evil Woman”

Concerned with motivations of female desire +5

Condescending assumptions of female desire –15

Reproductive health

“Now kiss me through the phone”
–“Kiss Me Through the Phone [Remix]”

Guaranteed STD-free sex: +3

Final score: +1

Matt and Kim

Feminist Rep

Matt and Kim are the only band playing at Spring Fling with any sort of feminist cred whatsoever. Firstly, Kim is female. It’s questionable to assign points for boobs, but it’s definitely legitimate to assign points for the duo’s nude Times Square escapades in their video for “Lessons Learned.” A Pitchfork interview suggests Kim might have been a little hesitant to disrobe, but their defiant sexuality and their aim to give hope to all the skinny, weird looking people in the world is pretty great. Plus, feminist artist Erykah Badu dedicated a music video to them, which definitely counts for something.

Actual feminist reputation: +50

Female leadership

“She’ll try out on the day after today
And she dreams of the 5k…
Dwyer said you look talented to me”
–“5k”

Women excelling in athletics: +6

Violence against women

“Pitch fork, switch blade, salt water and this hose
I tend to believe my eyes before my nose”
–“Verbs Before Nouns”

No women in this, but definitely violence, which is bad: –5

Sexual empowerment

“Get up at five with babes in briefs”
–“5k”

Don’t call me babe: –3

Reproductive health

“Mother is a name at best
And father was a mess”
–“Frank”

Responsible family planning encouraged: +10

Final Score: +58

All in all, we have a wide range of perspectives on women’s issues. The Ying Yang Twins offer the most explicitly misogynistic lyrics and, with a score of –184, certainly warrant the actions of Ofosu, Allen, and their comrades. But most importantly, let’s work to keep MGMT out of our public school health curricula.

The Final Ranking:

• Matt and Kim +58 (Cheer loudly! Enjoy your drunken, socially responsible bacchanalia!)
• MGMT +22 (As long as their hair is still long, we’re good.)
• Mike Posner +1 (Whatever.)
• Ying Yang Twins –184 (While they play out, let’s hang out. Elsewhere.)

March 13, 2010

Every time I hear Kathryn Bigelow’s name, I remember Barbra Streisand’s face. At the Oscars this week, it was Streisand who presented Bigelow with her Best Director Oscar. Botoxed and smug, Streisand’s face brightened at the opened envelope and her lips opened to intone, “Finally, the time has come.”  Then she uttered Bigelow’s name, having successfully affixed a permanent preface.  The next day, news wires and film blogs would declare, “First woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow.”

I think Sunday night was great.  I always enjoy it when women win honors previously monopolized by men.  And the journalists who noted that Bigelow’s was the first female win in the award’s history did so appropriately.  Streisand’s misguided commentary, however, imposed a feminist story arc onto the win that undercut Bigelow’s personal accomplishment— and introduced a tension between progress in gender and ethnic politics.

How nice of Barbara to share “Bigelow’s award” with all of us womenfolk.  After all, as the aging star perfectly showed through her personal theatrics, this win really belongs to her—and everyone else with a vagina.  Why else would she distract us from Bigelow’s personal victory in the very moment of its announcement?  A woman of such understated demeanor could have no ulterior motive.

Yet despite Streisand’s selfless sharing, it is unclear how, exactly, this Oscar constitutes a feminist victory. It is wonderful that the industry has opened up from its explicitly sexist early days to allow talented women to rise to positions of power, the sort of positions that allow them to produce Oscar-worthy films.  However, the trends of the Oscars are not necessarily indicative of trends in the workplace: the San Francisco Chronicle reports that there were proportionally fewer women directing top-grossing films in 2009 than in 2008, dropping down to the same percentage as in 1987.  Nor does Bigelow’s win provide a heightened platform from which to fight for women’s issues (as, say, a presidential win would).  Further, this win does not set a precedent that allows more women to achieve, like Elizabeth Blackwell’s admission to medical school; it seems highly unlikely that whatever old boys’ club mentality keeps women out of directing will dissipate because of this award. 

Framing Bigelow’s win as a feminist victory was particularly ill-advised in this case, given that African-American director Lee Daniels was also up for the award.  Political movements—even those without mutually exclusive goals—will always compete. The resources at stake are scarce; there is only so much political will to go around.  And when every victory by a member of a marginalized group is a victory for the movement associated with that group, any competition between people who are not middle class white men takes on undue significance.  Daniels could have been the first African American director to win the award for his film Precious, so when Streisand declared that “the time has come” with a triumphant grin, we knew it had come down to the black guy or the chick.  Of course, only one of the “times” could have arrived, and Streisand’s ecstatic preface made it clear she was more concerned with a supposed “feminist win” than a “racial equality win.” And her posturing asked us to choose as well.  Obviously, the Academy was not choosing which cause it cared about more; it was judging the artistic work of Kathryn Bigelow and Lee Daniels.  To paint this award as anything more is both incorrect and unfair.

Next time, Barbra, let the woman speak for herself.

Alexandra Brodsky is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

December 2009

Next week, Women in Management (WIM) will host Yale World Fellow Muna Abu Sulayman, the host of MBC show Kalam Nawaem, the most popular social program across all Arab channels. The show focuses on issues of culture and gender. Sulayman is also involved with the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation, for which she focuses on women’s empowerment issues, cross-cultural understanding, and education policy in the Middle East. December 7th at 11:30 am at School of Management, A30.

On the evening of the same day, author and MIT visiting professor Thomas Glave will speak at Labyrinth Books. Glave has written Whose Song? and Other Stories and the essay collection Worlds to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, winner of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award. His edited anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, was published last June. Time TBA, at 290 York Street.

Beyond campus: December is the last full month in the run of Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video, which has been on view in New York at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The exhibition was curated by Lauren Ross, and features work by Cathy Begien, Jen DeNike, Kate Gilmore, K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood, and others. It derives its title from feminist artist Lynn Hershman’s essay “Reflections on the Electric Mirror.” Go with a friend, and argue once again about feminist art, what it means, and why it does or doesn’t matter.

Photo: The ArtReach Foundation

December 2009

Nestled in the underbelly of the Yale Divinity School lies an insightful exhibit: “Breaking the Veils: Women Artists from the Islamic World,” which will be displayed at Yale until December 11^th as part of the show’s three-year US tour.  The show offers a wide range of artistic styles: from photorealistic paintings and candid photographs with expressly political aims to more abstract arrangements, such as Suha Shoman’s The Legend of Petra (1992), one of the first paintings to incorporate sand as a medium along with oil and acrylic.  These pieces inconspicuously line the hallways, so that the exhibit is fragmented by doorways leading to classrooms and offices— a strange contrast.

The exhibit is composed of the work of fifty-one women from twenty-one different Islamic countries.  These powerful pieces are both visually and conceptually striking.  As the statement on the wall at the beginning of the exhibit claims, “Art transcends differences of culture, history, gender, and religion.”  The art creates a window into a different culture, illuminating the feelings of a group of people who are often misunderstood, especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks of 9/11.

In its illustration of the zeitgeist of the present-day Islamic world, the exhibit presents an ambivalent perspective.  It is a picture of hope for the future advancement of women—socially, economically, and sexually—but it is tempered by a fear of change and a longing for the traditions of the past.  Palestinian Mounira Nusseibeh’s painting Four Arab Women details this alarming contradiction.  Four women wearing deeply textured, faded gold veils, leaving only their eyes in view, are huddled together, staring at a monolithic black wall.  These women may be seen as forcefully kept inside, longing to see what lies beyond the wall, or retreating, desperately seeking protection from the future.

The exhibit itself is a performative representation of the new opportunities available to women in Islamic countries.  The role of artist has presented itself as another means for women to break out of traditional stereotypes, a fact reflected in many of the artists’ exploration of groundbreaking ways to depict their subjects. This new freedom is particularly visible in their use of abstraction and expressionism.  The modernism of Rabha Mahmoud’s vibrantly colorful Omaniat 3 (1992) depicts life among constantly moving women.  The picture itself gives no hint of where these women might be, but the sweeping brushstrokes and the vivid colors express the move forward into the future.

One of the most beautiful paintings is Blue Paradise by the Iraqi Saud al Attar, which depicts a serene, dreamlike scene.  The scene draws on Islamic design, Assyrian art, and traditional folk art, in an expression of the importance of the homeland.  Saud al Attar says that she drew her inspiration from the death of her sister in the bombing of Baghdad in 1991. Like many of the other artists, al Attar’s story alludes to the violent tragedies that many of these women have endured—tragedies which have lead them to explore issues of tradition and myth, sexuality and law, in an attempt to shatter oppressive stereotypes.

Breaking the Veils will be showing at Yale through December 11. The exhibit is making a 3-year U.S. tour which runs through May 2011; for locations, visit artreachfoundation.org/veils.

Christopher Peak is a freshman in Yale College.

Photo: Yale Repertory Theatre

by ANNIE ATURA

December 2009

Eclipsed is an excruciating tearjerker, which suggests that playwright Danai Gurira felt an urgency of message.  Yet it’s also an adamant purveyor of futility and moral vertigo. Gurira says, “I went to Liberia to allow the women who endured a treacherous war to speak to me and eventually through me.” This claim is disturbing enough in itself, but its presumption is compounded by the play’s shallowness.

The playwright evades moral judgment by providing facile pop-psychology explanations for each woman’s proclivity for extreme jealousy, compassion, and fear.  Why are the wives depicted so bewildered and vulnerable?  Well, each of them has been raped, each of them has been forcibly separated from her family, and each of them has, through yet another rape, become the de facto wife of a general. Who can blame them, then, for any clichéd neuroses they have developed? The women are laughably paradigmatic, suspiciously distinct, like sitcom characters. Each is a walking case study in dealing with the aggressor, and as such they function as a manifestation of the playwright’s musings, not as a way of questioning them.  The play is a snapshot, not a story.

The women are laughably paradigmatic, suspiciously distinct, like sitcom characters. Each is a walking case study in dealing with the aggressor…

None of the women portrayed prove capable of seeing their abuse as a product anything but fate. Yet they recite pat affirmations of love to one another, which pass for insight in the context of the play.  We are meant to believe that the women have been totally closed down by their circumstantial domination, and also to believe that they lead richly emotional lives. They are apparently incapable of seeing men as people, but also incapable of selfishness. None of them has the least bit of trouble with unethical behavior in the abstract, but each leaps to love when presented with a struggling creature in the flesh. Why do they continue to respond predictably to emotional stimuli?  The exposition of each woman’s story reaffirms the playwright’s apparent conviction that only the sentimental, feminine attachment to cute babies and mamas is capable of ending the cycle of violence.

The conceit of the play is in itself problematic.  Four women are stuck in a compound in the service of a warlord for whom they act as “wives” for the duration of the war.  No man enters the stage; we meet only these four wives, together with a very womanly and bizarrely calm peacekeeper who blows onto the scene unexplained.  The absence of men is probably the most telling aspect of the play.  The playwright excludes the domineering men to enhance the audience’s relationship to the women, who exist in a hermetically sealed universe and purportedly understand one another more deeply than the men in their lives ever could. Yet this separation highlights not only the men’s failure to understand the women, but the women’s utter lack of effort in making themselves understood to the men who control them.  The wives spend the play waving their arms and squawking at one another in a crude, accented English.  They yelp about violence and injustice in an embarrassingly essentialized “compound” in which even the director has trouble finding excuses to keep their hands busy.

The characters’ only hope, their only ethical touchstone, is their quintessential and unremitting maternal instinct…

The human rights abuses committed against these women are plainly repugnant.  The women’s motivations are made embarrassingly transparent (not all insecurities are so simply accounted for), and certainly aren’t selectively opaque to men.  The playwright presupposes that women must work exclusively with one another, because interaction with men may only be undertaken on men’s terms.  This premise renders any broader effort on the women’s part futile; they are at their best comforting one another and standing in the way of the guns.  The play implies that men are dumb and soulless, the perpetrators of evil, shells of humans with frightening penises protruding.  They won’t stop raping our daughters until women find a way to stop them. If so, it’s understandable that the women may only respond by compromising either their integrity or their physical safety.

The characters’ only hope, their only ethical touchstone, is their quintessential and unremitting maternal instinct: the stoic elder takes care of the other wives, the peacekeeper is actually motivated by a search for her kidnapped daughter, the chatty airhead actually has a baby, and the newcomer abandons soldiering because she can’t bear to watch her comrades rape enemy girls. Only one woman isn’t looking out for little ones: the evil, brainwashed convert to the dark side, a bony woman who wears the colors of Old Glory, quotes Tupac, and unabashedly “loves on” certain powerful men in order to curry favor.  The play offers women as a beacon of hope only because of their primal impulse to keep peace in the hearth.  This impulse is cute or moving, and there were plenty of sniffles and bravoes in the seats around me.  Yet nurturing shouldn’t be proffered as some antidote to masculinity. Rather, it should be considered merely human.  Empathy is merely human. And, above all, instinct should not function as a last-ditch stand-in for ethics– much less when that instinct is exclusively and problematically attributed to one sex.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. 

November 2009

This month, RALY will present a screening of the documentary The Coat Hanger Project. Director Angie Young will hold a Q&A session after the screening to discuss the film and its subject: the current state of the reproductive justice movement. Publicity for the screening has cited the World Health Organization statistic that an estimated 80,000 women worldwide die annually from unsafe abortions. November 4th at 6 p.m. in the Silliflicks Theater.

As part of the LGBTQ Co-op’s Seventh Annual Trans Awareness Week, multidisciplinary artist and transgender individual Yve Laris Cohen will give a talk entitled “My Trans Body and Things I Make.” Originally a ballet dancer and a woman, Laris Cohen strives to improve public understanding of transgender issues through his research and art. November 6th at 8 p.m. in Linsly-Chittenden 102.

OBIE Award-winning playwright Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, directed by Liesl Tommy, explores the lives of Liberian women struggling to survive in the midst of civil war. Through November 14th at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

The Yale Center for British Art will host “Women’s Social Networks and Friendship Circles,” a thirty-minute gallery talk led by Courtney Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in History and Renaissance Studies here at Yale. November 17th at 12:30 p.m. at the Yale Center for British Art.

“Breaking the Veils,” an art exhibition featuring 51 women artists from 21 Islamic countries, will showcase works meant to counter stereotypes about women’s lives in the Islamic world. Through December 12th at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Presca Ahn is a senior in Yale College. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Broad Recognition.

Photo: Access Hollywood

by SABINA FRIEDMAN-SEITZ

October 2009

“My dick is bigger than his,” quips demon-infused Jennifer in Diablo Cody’s new horror/comedy flick Jennifer’s Body.

Jennifer’s one-liner reveals the real point of this attempted feminist re-write of the horror movie script: that, in order for a girl to “take back the knife,” she has to grow a dick—one bigger than those of her opponents. As with Cody’s Juno, an attempt to send a feminist message to teenage girls actually violates feminist values; the female protagonist of that movie, Cody’s first, lives out the happy alternative to abortion, carrying a fetus during high school for no explained reason.

The villain of scary movies is usually male, and the scenes of violence are usually played out on the bodies of female victims.  Virgins tend to survive, while promiscuous girls pay in blood for their sluttiness (see: Halloween, Scream, House of Wax et al.).

Jennifer’s Body tries to reverse the trend. Here, the slutty girl is the one who does the killing.  Jennifer, played by Megan Fox, is the hot girl at school.  She becomes inhabited by a demon when an indie band, mistaking her for a virgin, sacrifices her to Satan to assure their fame and success.  Because Jennifer isn’t “even a back-door virgin,” the sacrifice doesn’t kill her. Instead, a demon possesses her body and turns her into an all-powerful succubus.  This should be the beginning of the reversal of trope; instead of saving the virgin and killing the slut, the boys are trying to kill the virgin, and Jennifer ends up becoming (quasi-) saved because she is a slut.  But this is where the film’s feminism goes awry. Jennifer cannot become a sociopathic man-eating killer on her own.  The musicians make the first fatal stabs in the story, and it is their penetrating knife strokes that transfer their male energy into her body.

[Jennifer] embodies the proverbial “man-eater”: the oversexed woman who stomps over blameless men, but relies on them for her power.

Although Jennifer retains the tits and ass of Megan Fox (which have been splattered across Maxim and the internet for the past year), she wields her power like a penis.  What’s more: in order to keep her skin beautiful and her sexual magnetism alive, Jennifer relies on the flesh of the boys on whom she preys. She embodies the proverbial “man-eater”: the oversexed woman who stomps over blameless men, but relies on them for her power. It seems at one point that she may switch over to girls, when she threatens her friend Needy. But it turns out that this plot point is just an excuse for Jennifer to say she “goes both ways,” thus reminding us of the gratuitous girl-on-girl action in the scene before. That piece of lesbian exhibitionism is a perfect example of how this film needlessly sexualizes everything.

Jennifer’s last victim is Needy’s boyfriend, and the two girls battle it out after that. Before she can stab Jennifer, however, Needy has to be masculinized: Jennifer looks at the blade in Needy’s hand and scoffs, “Do you buy all your weapons at Home Depot? God you’re butch.” Jennifer, in turn, must be feminized before she can be the victim; Needy accomplishes this by asserting that the weapon is for “cutting boxes.”  It’s a fitting end. In the phallo-centric world of this film, Jennifer is a dick when she kills and a box when she is killed.

Sabina Friedman-Seitz is a junior at Wesleyan University.

April 2009

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Dean of Graphic Design and Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art, is one of today’s most prominent feminist graphic designers. In 1971, she founded the California Institute of the Arts, the first women’s graphic design program; she also founded the Woman’s Building and its Women’s Graphic Center in Los Angeles in 1973.

De Bretteville came to Yale in 1990. Since the late 1950s, under the strong influence of Paul Rand, the Yale program had been a “bastion” of modernist theory. When de Bretteville was selected as the new Dean, Paul Rand resigned on principle and wrote a manifesto in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design in response. Rand wrote, “To make the classroom a perpetual forum for political issues, for instance, is wrong; and to see aesthetics as sociology is grossly misleading.”

De Bretteville has become an outspoken designer and educator and an influential theorist of feminist design, which she defines as “graphic strategies that will enable us to listen to people who have not been heard from before. Feminism is about enabling those voices to be heard.”

On April 2, de Bretteville sat down with Broad Recognition Arts Editor Jessica Svendsen to discuss “feminine” typefaces, feminist form and content, and the difference between a female designer and a feminist designer.

JS: Type designer Tobias Frere-Jones recently said at the Yale Art School that historical resonances and aesthetic characteristics can shape a typeface. He, and others, have described Gotham–a typeface commissioned for GQ Magazine–as a masculine typeface. Is there a feminine typeface?

SB: This is a huge question. It sounds like a small question, but this is a huge question.

JS: In my typography class last semester, two typefaces–Joanna and Mrs. Eaves–were described as feminine. Doesn’t such a characterization reinforce gender stereotypes or the gender categories of “feminine” and “masculine”?

SB: It depends heavily on gender stereotypes that I am not interested in fostering. I don’t think it serves anyone to do that. I think a better way to describe a typeface would be to talk about its decorative aspects, basic structure, figure/field, how each element relates to another element, how they can be different or the same. I think there is a whole range to talk about formal aspects of anything you look at without having to knee-jerk back into gender stereotypes… [T]here has been a lot of very solid work that looks at how certain attributes that are formal have been ascribed to gender stereotypes and then devalued accordingly. So, why in 2010, why would we ever want to participate in continuing that?

JS: So what do you tell a student who describes a typeface as feminine?

SB: I would ask: “Is your language rich enough to find other ways to describe what you are looking at, rather than to have to use gender as a referent?” Surely it is not the only signifier out there. Please. I think you free it up. If we were in the time when using historically ascribed attributes that have been bundled under the feminine, with freedom for not being stayed glued to the feminine, and the feminine being a free-floating signifier, I’d be fine with it. But when you say it, and suddenly every female in the room has to press those adjectives against herself and see if that is in accordance with how she understands herself, I don’t see that as useful. And every man, someone who is genetically and physically male, has to see a connection to that action or it cannot be his. So this is not useful. If we were looking for a more democratic society, one in which there is equality, a non-hierarchy of gender, this doesn’t foster that kind of society. So in that respect, I think: “Hey, make up some more metaphors of your own. Find some other language to describe what you see.”

JS: What does it mean to be a female designer in a mostly male institutional history and culture?

SB: It has meant different things over different periods of my time here. When I first came here, I know how many women were just ecstatic that I came here. I didn’t come here to be the first female tenured professor. My goal was not to be the first tenured woman at Yale. I came because I thought this area of study was lagging behind and needed to be refreshed and realigned with the present, in a way that would be helpful to the students who came here. This meant that many aspects of the tradition of this department, that I wanted to honor it, so I wasn’t come here to throw away the past and start a new society, I was looking for: what are the values we want to keep and what isn’t here that needs to be added. In fact, at my interview, I said precisely that. I said I would bring what is absent from the Yale environment that I think would balance it and make more egalitarian and reactive to the world in which we live. And the interviewers said, “Well, what would that be?” as if they had everything already. It was a little bit like, where shall I start? And of course, I would have to start with women, because in fact, there was a paucity of women who had ever taught here. There was one female faculty member. There were many women who have studied here, that said publicly, that it didn’t matter to them that there were no female faculty members. Whereas, for me, it mattered because the absence of women left an imbalance that fostered a lot of stereotypical behavior on the part of the male faculty and the male students, that wouldn’t have been easy for them to simply to do if there were more women around, who were in positions of authority to help with those circumstances and to also provide a more diversified power source.

One of my teachers, actually, pulled me aside and kissed me in the darkroom. And I had come from Barnard, an all-women’s college—I was called “Ms. Levrant” there. I was actually very young when I came here—I was twenty. It was just so not what I would ever expect in that kind of situation. I modeled, because I was very skinny and I needed to get a job. Of course, I’ve had people do that in those venues. I expected it there. But I didn’t know how to handle it there [in the darkroom]. I was just completely taken by surprise. So in that surprise, I was trying to point out the hierarchy that existed, which means that you don’t do this. If my classmate did this, I would know exactly what to do. I would know precisely what to do because I am more used to it, but I had never thought [that would happen]. And that shows what kind of naiveté I had from Barnard… The hierarchy between genders was not my primary thought at Barnard, even though it was a women’s college. It never even came up, at least among my colleagues.

JS: You talked about how you introduced female faculty when you came here, but what was the reaction to your theoretical approach to teaching?

SB: So let’s go back to the question you’re really asking: what was I thinking?

My thinking has changed over time. I came here with a real desire to be both a citizen of the town as well as a teacher, head of this department and area of study. I took that very seriously. My first acts were to understand what was going on here, at the town at the time. I looked to Hill Health Center, for example. The students decided to do a pro-choice billboard. The students were able to use a billboard on I-95. The students decided to do this themselves, it was the thing they wanted to do. It wasn’t as if we told them, “Hey, how about doing a pro-choice billboard?” They looked in the newspaper, at things that were going on, and one of the things that they discovered was that the percentage of people that were pro-choice was not common knowledge, and they looked for a way to express a public study of the discrepancy between the media representation and the opinions or perspectives of the majority of Americans.

That group of students became a collective, called Class Action. It still exists 19 years later. They did another billboard that dealt with the issue of battered women. They have also done interventions about gun control. It has to do with what the group feels the issue is of that time. It is totally student-run. It is now a student collective that is now only loosely connected with us…

[One year] a bunch of students were upset that the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) was having a conference in Florida, and they had, I think, one woman speaker. So they created a poster that pointed out the paucity of women speakers at the conference. And they wanted to post them all over Miami. We were connected with a group who would put up the posters in the middle of the night. I told them that it is illegal to do this. Every piece of public property is owned, therefore, if you put something up, you are vulnerable to being arrested for defacing public property. Therefore, it cannot be something from me to you. “I am helping you from me, as a person, not as a professor.” So they put it up. And immediately I got a phone call from organizers from the conference –Chee Pearlman—“Your students have pasted, all over Miami, these posters that say we have only X percent of women.” I said “If you had more women, you wouldn’t these posters. You can’t blame me that you don’t have enough women. It has nothing to do with me. This is young people’s response to you not representing women’s productive view in your conference.”

… The goal of having no gender hierarchy is really more of what I am working for. That is the ethos of the department. The school carries it as well. I cannot speak for the larger university.

Calling typefaces feminine is an unfortunate distraction. That’s not where our energies should be going, in my perspective. I think trying to get a kind of lack of hierarchy in gender, to understand that it is constructed, to not participate in the reconstruction of stereotypes, is much more valuable. Energy is real. You have to choose your battles.

JS: I can understand the connection of feminism, politics, and expressing gender in terms of content, like the way you described the billboard campaign. But I am also interested in how a gendered perspective is manifested in form, and you have talked about how breaking down the modernist grid, allowing for multiple perspectives or subjectivity, is one way to enact feminist design.

SB: Yes, I said that, that’s true. In 1973 and again in 1981. But not until we have gender equality, do I want to forget the word feminist. It is really to infuse that equality into feminist thinking, that I think is important. Because, in fact, there are a lot of young women now, who think of gender in stereotypical ways, even after the work of Judith Butler and Monique Wittig, just beautiful work, that has tried to unpack that in such a way that we really question the category women, and we open it up.

When you look at the word democratic as a part of feminism, that equality and that ability to argue with each other, come into friction with each other or come into connection with each other, on an equal plane, that is inherent in the ideal of democracy. If you try to transfer that into a feminist perspective, it holds that same meaning that we can talk with each other, agree or disagree, and work it out, as a part of self-criticism, as well as a criticism of feminism, as well as a criticism of modernism, how a democratic and more equal society is created so that whatever kind of gender—there is as much difference within each gender as between the gender. You come from that perspective, it makes it very hard to talk about men and women all the time, around it. But I do think the word feminism is important because it carries with it an activist buzz. It really belongs to paying attention to how women are being treated, which, until we are treated absolutely equally, then I cannot let go of the word.

JS: Many women designers acknowledge the glass ceiling and everything that surrounds them being a woman designer, but they are not necessarily feminist designer. Can you clarify the distinction between a female designer and a feminist designer?

SB: A female designer is often talking about herself, as many of the women who voted for Hilary in the election. These women talked about the experience with misogyny as their reason for voting for Hilary, rather than looking at what Hilary might do as President. That was not what they were looking at; they were looking at their experience, and where they felt dissed. Voting for a woman was acknowledging themselves. That is similar to women designers who acknowledge the glass ceiling are really looking at.

I think to be feminist is to really care about women in general, not only designers, not only at privileged institutions like Yale. Thinking about women who don’t have anything, and what are the forces at work in our shared globalized culture that keep women from actualizing their potential. That is not what those women are talking about. They are talking about their potential and their actualizing. That is the difference between being just a woman designer or being a feminist designer. It doesn’t mean that you are always working on feminist content, it means you think about, more broadly, women as a category and how that category is used against women, wherever they are, on a socioeconomic level in a globalized world. That, to me, is feminism. It was never about me, whatever “me” or “I” is. It is about “we.”

… It is a different kind of perspective. I have a history that makes for that. Some of it is actually theoretical and part of a feminist consciousness and why the feminist movement was absolutely arresting. It was like, immediate. I was part of the resurgence of feminism in California, at a time in Los Angeles, when we all came into our own. I came into my own in my work. I became a mother. I became a feminist, all at the same time. All at the same time. It was an incredible overlay of things. I came into my own work, I came into the feminist movement, I became a mother, I lived in a new city that was more foreign to me than any other city. I lived in Milan, New York, but L.A. was something else. All of those things shaped an experience that is going to change over time, but coalesced in a very particular kind of way.

JS: There is one thing I would like to return to. You mentioned the Miami poster campaign, and many people associate feminist graphic design with more confrontational or aggressive tactics, like the Guerilla Girls or Barbara Kruger. What alternatives are there for feminist design?

SB: I am one of the alternatives. I chose to focus on what we don’t have and how to get it, not on what is oppressing me or oppressing us. Some people are filled with a tremendous amount of anger and the way to express it is through their work and through their work about what is oppressing them. I think that that is very important work. It just happens to not be my work.

JS: You ended one of your publicized conversations with designer Ellen Lupton with “Good design is feminist design.” [SB laughs] Is that still the case? Do you have a changed perspective over the years, especially as feminism has changed?

SB: Yes, because it is also how the notion of good design has changed. Both have changed. I just felt that Yale was known for good design, which was very much aligned with modernist design at that point. So I was trying to open up the design, trying to open up the feminist design. A statement, like that, out of context, requires a lot of unpacking. Both around what is “good” and what is “feminist.”

I had an interesting conversation with some students the other day. It wasn’t about feminism, but it is like this: two students were doing work that had images of like, kittens and sunsets and palm trees, but they came off of Google images—they were getting them off the net. I was trying to locate what it is that those images were serving. One of the other students, who was older than the two students who were doing it, said, “It’s generational. The response to that.” I said, “I don’t think that if that’s operative, it is not all that’s operating.” It turns out that one of the students was doing it as a reaction against good design, clean design. Here we are, 2009, and someone is choosing, what I call trashy, low, images to signify “sweetness” as a reaction. My comment was: “You are here at Yale to do your own work. You don’t have to react against something. Go for something.” Because to spend your time against that now, unless you do it from an extremely informed, thoughtful, broadly-researched base, is a very knee-jerk, against, kind of activity. It is not that you cannot use kitty kats and sunsets. It is more: Why are you using [these]? I want to here from you, why, something other than “I am against good design, clean design, all that design I learned at RISD.” I want more. I want to hear more. Talk about it more. Tell me more.

JS: How would you “unpack” feminist design in 2009?

What stays constant is trying to have a vision of what is desired: in this case, for me, it is a non-hierarchy within gender; an understanding of its constructed nature; a questioning of the category woman. That was not as clear in 1973, it was clear in ’83, because Gender Trouble had come later. When I read it, it was like a revelation. Monique Wittig and Judith Butler were like a revelation to me. Since I came from parents who work in factories, I did not even know where suburbia was, let alone, who was living there. So Betty Friedan made no sense to me. But whereas these women did make sense to me. I could locate what they were talking about among the people I knew. I come from four generations of working women. I do not know the other kind of life. Betty Friedan was angry at me, but I wasn’t angry at Betty Friedan. She thought I was sending women back to the bedroom, to do sheets, to iron sheets, but I said: “That is not what I’m talking about.” But she couldn’t understand it. I gave a talk in ’71 and she was in the audience, and she just completely couldn’t get behind what I was talking about. Because I was thinking about what is attributed to women, and how do we free up those attributes from gender. I don’t see why gender and these attributes have to be attached.

Jessica Svendsen is a senior in Yale College. She is the Arts Editor for Broad Recognition.

April 2009

Lover, I’ve made you a paper lilac
after spending some time at the tree.
I think the construction is right,
a few scraps, wound into strands, making
a coiled vine that accumulates into bunch blossoms.

When you come to get it,
I will insist that you take my top off
and you will attribute its fragrance to my skin.
We are good liars and good kissers.

Eventually, I will go with a stranger
to the tree and lie there with him,
not picking the lilacs, which will feel very romantic,
not promising to fashion anything in his image
or the image of nature, not comparing this lilac
to the one before it, only reckoning how much longer
the sun will be up, and reveling in how dusk
takes the color off flowers and puts it behind them.
The night lands. It is not like red, or even black.

Rebecca Dinerstein is a senior in Yale College.