Women's Work

[hazelk]

Last year the post VVC reports talked about a fourth wave of vidding, in which we came out of the closet and became our own subjects, a trend that later culminated in Us. This year the talk is more of vids that focus outwards, vids as political statements specifically feminist ones. Women’s Work by Luminosity and sisabet is probably the most discussed example, the most controversial within fandom and the one most explicitly intended as a critque of media fandom as a whole rather than the failings of one particular show.



Most of the negative reactions I’ve seen have treated the vid as an attack on Supernatural and defended the series by claiming (in order of missing the point) that it also treats men as victims/monsters/objects, that women being depicted as such serves the story or that the show is just using standard horror tropes and can’t help itself. It’s true that the images shown in the vid are very selective. A visual thesis such as “Women’s Work” is not meant to supply a comprehensive review of the data, it’s not its function to cite every piece of evidence for or against but to show one side with sufficient impact that the viewer is forced to complete the argument from her own perspective. I also think if the vid had been intended as criticism of Supernatural and, by implication, its fans it would have ended differently, possibly with a shot that I’ve seen in several other vids of Sam/Dean shooting a girl in a white dress repeatedly through the head. The actual ending is more hands on, a man snapping the neck of one of the women turned monster. Maybe it does reflect on the show - if no such footage of the POV characters engaged in such an act exists, is it because the writers lacked the courage of their horror convictions and have left the dirtiest work to one of the few black characters? But I think that goes some way beyond any argument the vid makes.

The notes to “Women’s Work” make the point that the vid could have been made with footage from any source. I’m not sure it could have been made so successfully or in quite the same way. One thing the vid does to make it clear that it’s an argument on behalf of women victimized and made monstrous by media convention rather than a voyeuristic parade of them for further titlillation is to use footage that gives the women in the vid faces. The show does at least set them up as people before knocking them down. I wonder if an unrepentant torture porn movie like Captivity would do even that.

Could you make a vid like this one for Buffy? The clips are there, for all that the show was conceived to turn the tables on horror conventions it often works by first showing the victim/monster trope in order to subvert it. Buffy is typically depicted as losing a battle or even a war in order to make her eventual victory seem even more dramatic and on the soapy side goes through all manner of emotional torture before finally prevailing as cookie dough. You could make a vid drawing on the first part of each of these elements. I Want You (She’s so heavy) in Scooby Road lines up scene after scene of monsters out for Buffy’s blood and halcyon_shift’s rather brilliant Club Vivid offering to Britney Spear’s “Toxic” has the explicit mission statement of documenting the Slayer’s sucky relationship history but both vids end with an overall sense of her overcoming. It’s hardwired into the structure of I Want You (in the She’s so Heavy choruses) but "Toxic" also has a pervasive uncertainty about who has the power, partly from following the storylines through to their conclusions and partly from SMG/Buffy’s natural assertiveness.

Obviously having a female protagonist/hero makes a difference to how she is portrayed but what of other women on the show? Buffy is not the stereotypical final girl but she does survive while others die. They die for mixed reasons, some to prove the irredeemability of a villain (Jenny/Katrina) or life’s randomness (Joyce/Tara/Anya) others for the effect of their deaths on Buffy (Joyce) or Willow (Tara). Then there’s all the nameless potentials or victims of the week like the schoolgirls in Reptile Boy. To be fair the point of the potentials was their eventual empowerment and VOW’s were as likely to be men as women (Jesse, Gage, the freshman in The Freshman, the boy from the teaser to The Gift) but I’m beginning to sound indistinguishable from the SPN apologists now. I think a quite uneasy-making vid could be made about the non-Buffy characters, in fact there is one I can think of that already has that effect namely bradcpu’s Living Dead Girl. Like WW it’s an amazing piece of work considered purely as a vid but one that very explicitly recasts the show in horror terms from the music choice to the use of captions. It’s a Faith vid not an ensemble piece and a character study not a political statement (but with a different song it has the imagery to make one). It follows, when I think about it, a similar progression to that in WW from (apparent) innocent watching TV in bed and taking a shower to the monsters coming after her, to becoming one herself. It makes me scared of Faith in a way the show never did, she was a Slayer and I identified with her as I did with Buffy, but there’s one juxtapositon in particular of the Beast’s foot coming down and then Faith’s that switches that identification around and gives the subsequent demon heart spell imagery a whole different meaning, the making of a monster. In the final section there is some sense of Faith fighting back, being in control but I just wish it didn’t end back in the shower intercut with the little girl screaming. I like to think Faith moved beyond that on the show but the vid makes me less complacent about assuming that the ending justifies the means.

Comments

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

More thoughts later... for now I'll just say that it's interesting the way "Women's Work" has catalysed people to look more closely at the way their own favourite series treats women. I did it with X-Files, you did it with Buffy, and I think it's a sign that the vid has definitely transcended its focus on Supernatural and succeeded in its stated goal of making us think about the victimisation of women in the media.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

::Nods:: I missed a bunch of posts while on holiday and only just found yours on WW and the X-files. I think your idea for a Scully vid could realy work for the first half of the song. Less sure about the ending. Lum and sisbet's vid follows the lyric switching to first person to show women as monsters, I kinda of lost touch with the X-files after the movie what happens to Scully then? Mulder leaves and there's a baby, is she angry about that?

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

Not nearly angry enough, unfortunately. With the pregnancy and the disappearance of Mulder, Scully becomes all vulnerable and passive, and I really couldn't take too much of that. There are some great fanfics that give Scully her due in anger terms (most notably "Iolokus") but in the series she became more and more stereotypically feminine as it went on.

Happily there are other women in the series who, while not monsters by any stretch of the imagination, are definitely angry about what was done to them. So it would be quite possible to put Scully in a wider context and manage it that way. I think.

[yourlibrarian]

In reading this I was thinking about the VM vid you recced in your earlier post. Granted they were making somewhat different points but I actually found the VM one more powerful because I felt it said more about the state of women (real women, not women in film) and it was also shorter. One of the things that put me off about the WW vid was how long it went on. Maybe it's also that I didn't need to be sold on the concept, I've never been a fan of horror and watch SPN quite in spite of that.

That said I didn't feel it was any kind of attack on the show. If it feels damning it's because it should be, we're so inured to violence of any kind in the U.S. It's everywhere, from text to video games. I feel a similar vid could be made of virtually any television drama (sitcoms are still pretty gore-free).

What I'd find pretty fascinating is to see someone do a vid like this about a hospital drama. I've never understood why they need to be as graphic as they are and the amount of violence done to bodies in those shows is considerable. I've never understood the fascination with sickness and disease that goes on. (Lengthy tangent: about a month ago I was debating making a post about all the vomiting that constantly goes on in fic. Maybe I'm unique, but I've thrown up maybe 20 times in my life, not once due to emotional upset, and have rarely ever been around anyone else who did. What is with all the puking?) Yet given that Munchausen's Syndrome and MS by proxy exist, clearly illness has quite a hold over people.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I haven't watched either VM or SPN and that skews my perspective. I wasn't bored by WW partly beacuse almost all the images were novel to me (but I did recognise some of the actresses, which was interesting). Partly because where Martina seemd to only cover the victim side of the equation (I think there's something else going on especially with the ending but I can't parse what it is without show context) in WW there's a clear and gradual progression from innocent to sex object to monster (but they still die).

My feeling was that both vids were largely about the same thing, the way violence against women is used for entertainment (whose?) and that it's specifically sexualised violence. WW very explictly draws out the eroticisation of the women victim/monsters along with their objectification. There's a line in the Hole song "You should learn how to say no"that directly ties attitudes to these woman and attitudes to rape.

House seems to be the one hospital drama that gets vidded but I don't think many vids use the medical parts for much more than backdrop. I can see why it makes make a handy setting for drama, lots of individual mysteries to be solved and it thows people together in a high pressure (and high status)environment. I have enough of a medical background that gore just makes me dissociate so that side of things is either dull or improbable. Less creepy than CSI type shows though where they seem to be trying to make a moral point about the cases half the time.

[yourlibrarian]

I see what you're saying about WW, yes, it does do that and I guess that needs time to build. You're right, my familiarity with the images may have made the difference. With the VM vid though, perhaps because it centers on one woman, VM, and this somewhat exploitative storyline she's had over the 3 seasons, I see it as actually standing in for young women in general. Perhaps that's because I'm more invested in her characte?

And I guess with VM's vid I saw a different point, not women in entertainment, but women in daily life. In that, regardless of what else a woman is in her life, she can nevertheless at any time be a victim (and in a uniquely sexualized way).

Yeah the hospital thing was actually pointed out to me by my mother eons ago. She was noting that soaps in particular revolved around hospitals or had them as a regular setting. She found this bizarre and somewhat distasteful, and attributed it to the general emotional coldness in American life that permitted emotion only in situations involving death and violence.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Hey! It is my day off and I'm catching up on meta (yay! *waves to aycheb*) and it stands to reason the only thing I really have to say is about vomit. My life, yo.

*sigh*

Lengthy tangent: about a month ago I was debating making a post about all the vomiting that constantly goes on in fic. Maybe I'm unique, but I've thrown up maybe 20 times in my life, not once due to emotional upset, and have rarely ever been around anyone else who did. What is with all the puking?

I work with extremely troubled adolescents in a treatment facility and I am surrounded by puke. Puke is a part of my life. They cry until they puke, I have seen a little girl *laugh* herself sick (this is not a normal emotional response by any means) and I keep having to explain to the rec coordinator that we *can't* go play kickball immediately after dinner unless she wants to help me clean up the mess.

I don't know why I felt I had to share this lovely bit of information with you, other than I kinda forgot how for most people vomiting is kind of an Event, like "Remember that one time I had food poisoning and prayed to die?" in that it can inspire war stories and doesn't happen all that often.

Perhaps characters in fic have a lot more in common with massively wounded teenagers than previously suspected?

[yourlibrarian]

for most people vomiting is kind of an Event, like "Remember that one time I had food poisoning and prayed to die?"

LOL, I have just such a war story -- 20 years and I can remember it clearly.

Puke is a part of my life.

My sympathies. I don't even tend to be around heavy drinkers so while I can understand that sort of puke event happening often in fic it's not like it's part of my experience either. Which, er, I'm kind of happy about.

Perhaps characters in fic have a lot more in common with massively wounded teenagers than previously suspected?

Well considering what authors put them through, that connection makes sense!

[bradcpu.livejournal.com]

I was unable to finish watching Women's Work because all of the unrelenting, graphic violence against women made me nauseous. The odd thing is that, after I posted in my LJ saying as much, I was emailed by someone who said their boyfriend had the same reaction to my Faith vid. It never occurred to me that might happen. That led to a discussion about the portrayal of violence in the two vids and how it differs - which, I suppose, might extend to the two shows.

Certainly I'm a bit desensitized to the violence in my own vid, but I think the biggest reason one affects me that way and the other doesn't is because Faith has power and is the aggressor. Now, the power itself and how it and her calling are forced upon her do make her a victim of men, but honestly that's just a lot easier for me to *watch* than a long procession of (often innocent) women being maimed and brutally killed.

So the bottom line is that I still think Women's Work is a brilliant concept. I just can't watch it.

By the way, thank you for your wonderful comments about Living Dead Girl.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

It's always interesting how different aspects of vids affect people. Like I was saying to yourlibrarian above, I have a vaguely medical background and graphic violence tends to make me dissociate from what I'm watching. The main thing I get from WW is the anger in the lyrics about how the women are being treated and represented, that they're both the victims of the violence and at some level being blamed for it.

I did really wonder how the vid might come across to a man watching because it does play (to me) as an accusation. Not of men specifically, more of that infamous abstract entity, the "male gaze" but it seems also that there are men present throughout, just out of view, the hands holding the knives snapping the necks etc. I think the thing with Living Dead Girl is that in a way it puts me in a similar position to a man watching WW, it's not that Faith is portrayed as a victim it's that she's portrayed at least for parts of the vid a monster or as possesed by one and there's something monstrous in identifying with that side of her. It's definitely something the show played with given the whole dark-source-of-the-Slayer powers storyline, it's also something I've argued around a lot but your vid makes the point (to me) in a very visceral way.

Also thank you for taking the comments in good part. I love vids that make me think but am never quite sure about the ettiquete of babbling about them the way I would a movie or a show. Would it be OK if I friended you?

[bradcpu.livejournal.com]

it does play (to me) as an accusation.
I can see that. I suppose I might have felt more "accused" when watching it if I had any association whatsoever with the fandom. I've never actually seen SPN, so I didn't really relate to it on a fandom level. It was just images. Really sickening images.

Also, I don't have *any* guy friends in RL or online who watch the show (conversely, I have lots of guy friends who are Buffy fans). That's part of the brilliance of Women's Work: that it takes a somewhat subversive approach in using what seems to be a favorite fandom among women, especially among vidders.

there's something monstrous in identifying with that side of her
I think we all have "demons" to deal with. Like many such concepts on BtVS, Faith's struggle with her demons just played out in a kind of literal fashion. I always saw Faith's story as more of an inward heroic journey, but one that was no less heroic. If anything, it was easier for me to relate to her struggle than to Buffy's.

I was just wondering yesterday why I haven't friended you yet! *friending*