y’all notice how black panther quietly but fervently rejects western assumptions about women in non-western countries by not only displaying Wakandan women in a variety of influential positions but by making clear that only outsiders question them
women are shown in all levels of Wakandan society – Ramonda as a trusted advisor for her son, Shuri as the country’s leading innovator, Okoye and the Dora as respected warriors, Nakia as a spy and philosophical compass, unnamed women who serve as tribal representatives and spiritual leaders. it is not at any point suggested that their gender is a barrier to achieving anything in Wakanda.
there’s a moment during T’Challa’s crowning that’s small but very good, when M’baku questions letting a child handle the country’s technological advancement. he specifically calls her a child, not a girl, questioning her youth and perceived lack of respect for tradition but not her gender, which flies in direct defiance of many western assumptions about how masculine non-western men like M’baku treat women and girls.
that moment, as far as I recall, the most any Wakandan man ever directly disrespects a woman. a lot has been made of how much faith T’challa places in his female relatives and warriors, so I won’t rehash that, but it’s Good.
Ross briefly insults Okoye with his assumption that she doesn’t speak English, but 1.) the narrative and the audience both understand this to be an ignorant statement on Ross’ part for which he is promptly put in his place by Okoye herself and 2.) Ross immediately learns and does better. when he wakes up in Wakanda his disbelief is only for the level of the technology, not that a teenage girl is the mastermind behind it, and during the final fight he defers to Shuri’s guidance despite his piloting expertise.
a lot of words have already been written about Killmonger’s treatment of black women: the casual murder of his partner, his disregard and abuse of a spiritual leader, the slaughter of a Dora. it’s just one of many parts of his ideology that mark him as fundamentally misunderstanding Wakanda and being an Other in the kingdom.
Wakanda is a futuristic fantasyland that makes absolutely no narrative room for men who don’t respect the authority of women.
Just had a thought for an action hero thing: 30-something woman hero is doing her ass-kicking thing. One day, her boss shows up at her door, and tells her she has to stand down, or there will be consequences. “Honey, it’s not that you’re too old. It’s just the public don’t like to see a woman of your age saving the day. It feels emasculating”.
So woman is stripped of her support team, fellow agents, and is pretty much put on the shelf. She tries to do heroing, but keeps getting cockblocked by younger women or superhero men she used to work alongside.
Just when she’s hitting rock bottom (and sitting in her house wearing pyjamas and eating ice cream), there’s a knock at the door. Judi Dench is standing there, and our heroine assumes it’s a charity collection.
“Oh no, dear,” Dench says, smiling. “We’ve come to recruit you.”
“Recruit me? For what?”
“To do what we do best: save the bloody world.”
And all at once she’s part of a covert ops team made of all the older women who have been retired and who currently are holding the reins of managing the world.
Of course, a few older women heroes and vigilantes don’t take the offer. Some are too embittered by the rejection they’ve faced and decide to show the world exactly why they’re still to be feared.
Enter Judi Dench’s arch-nemesis, Dame Helen Mirren.
I need this like air
Look – here’s your casting call:
Sigourney Weaver – 67
Pam Grier – 67
Lynda Carter – 65
Linda Hamilton – 60
Angela Basset – 58
Michele Yeoh – 54
Ming-na Wen – 53
Famke Janssen – 52
Halle Berry – 50
Tia Carrere – 50
Carrie-Anne Moss – 49
Lucy Lawless – 49
Lucy Liu – 48
Uma Thurman – 47
Angelina Jolie – 41
Milla Jovovich – 41
Sarah Michelle Gellar – 40
The Recruit:
Jessica Alba – 36
Emily Blunt – 34
I need this to happen!
This is awesome. So awesome. I want it for Yuletide, only nominations for this year are closed, so it is going on the list for 2018.
People rarely think about the engineering of gala gowns, or of fashion at all. This is part of a larger problem of treating traditionally feminine interests as non-science-related. Baking is practical chemistry, knitting is manual programming, makeup is about crafting optical illusions, and adjusting pattern sizes relies on algebra.
But gala gowns never appear alongside the ubiquitous thrown baseball in physics books, or pop up as exam questions. As copyright library Nancy Sims pointed out to me on Twitter, while plenty of spacial reasoning tests ask which pieces fold into a cube, none ask which set of pattern pieces would fit together into a pair of pants.
A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:
When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).
But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.
So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)
So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.
But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.
So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.
“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”
Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.
Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)
(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)
Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”
And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”
Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”
And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”
“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”
So. There.
If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.
This is actually the reason research and teaching are linked, in the Western tradition at least: because researchers & (nonfiction) writers do better work when they keep being forced to explain themselves clearly.
Wanderings and Perigrinations 