feminism
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the mark of a good documentary is that it teaches you something new, then the awkwardly titled Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women was a very good documentary indeed. For instance, before watching it I had no idea that the famous “women’s rights are human rights” speech given by the possible 2016 presidential candidate was “the beginning of the cry for women’s rights across the globe”; and it was certainly a surprise to discover that the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan was not merely in service of a “war against terror” but rather “a war against the barbaric treatment of women”.The format Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Earlier tonight, I read - on Twitter, so I’m not vouching for its accuracy - that more people have now signed a petition to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson at the BBC than to take stronger action against female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. FGM, as actress Zawe Ashton (Fresh Meat) quickly finds out in a moving documentary for Comic Relief, is a hard thing to talk about, because vaginas are hard to talk about. But as she looks further into the practice both in the UK and abroad - speaking to survivors, activists and even a "cutter" - Ashton discovers that education is already beginning to make Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For the headliners of the Women Of The World Festival at London's Southbank Centre, there is less feisty feminism put on for show than you might expect. It's a nod to how far things have progressed - that other than the obligiatory thanksgiving for "being a loud woman on a stage of loud women plus a man who loves women", it's strength of self belief in the artists of tUnE-yArDs that lets us know what they believe in - and it's truly inspiring. It's testament to their credence that they are this strong in themselves, their musical talents, their creativity and their confidence to be able to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There came a moment, around three years ago, when MyAnna Buring suddenly seemed to be in everything. "I'm so sorry!" she shrieks (ironically) when I point this out to her. She had given warning of her arrival by appearing in Ben Wheatley's Kill List and, rather more prominently, as Tanya (who as you'll know was a vegetarian vampire from the Denali coven) in the concluding pair of Twilight films. Then Buring popped up in BBC One's Blackout, was Edna the Maid in Downton Abbey (where she brazenly set her cap at Tom Branson), flitted across our screens in ITV's The Poison Tree, and materialised Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Woman to Woman, the second solo album from Denver songwriter and former Paper Bird front woman Esmé Patterson, has an origin story almost as interesting as the music. Teaching herself to play Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta” during some down time on tour, Patterson found herself getting frustrated at the song’s depiction of a passive bar-room girl so in awe of the great songwriter that she drops everything any time he passes through and “don’t cry” when he’s gone. She put down her guitar, picked up her pen and the result was “Tumbleweed”: a funny and furious riposte in which Patterson, playing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The single spacious room that is the central location of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters has seen plenty of ghosts. It’s part of an old Zagreb mansion, and through the course of the play witnesses the diverse events of Croatian history of the last 70-odd years played out in miniature. Three overlapping time-schemes chart the full rotations of surrounding society: from the war-end move towards Communism in 1945, through 1990 eve-of-break-up Yugoslavia, and on to 2011, not long before EU accession. We may not literally see anything on either side of these three eras, but the action is implicitly Read more ...
David Nice
It was only six months after rendering the total amorality of ambiguous Lulu in Pandora’s Box, based on Wedekind’s two "earth-spirit" plays, that GW Pabst and Louise Brooks moved on to Diary of a Lost Girl. It revisits many of the same themes, but through a different filter (and a very much inferior literary source).This time Brooks’s character is decidedly more sinned against than sinning, the only excuse perhaps for an uncredited piano accompaniment which is way too innocent for the subject-matter. The adolescent Thymian Henning is seduced on the night of her confirmation by the repulsive Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In 40 years’ time, when some suit at the BBC is searching the archives for some suitable footage to illustrate women in music in the early 21st century, will he pull out an image of Miley Cyrus or Rihanna wrapped in fishnets and bondage tape? I ask because it seems as though the central question posed by this women-in-punk-themed edition of The Culture Show - namely, whether the spirit of the fearless femmes of the 1970s lives on today - must be answered not by the many successors to the punk, riot grrrl and grunge acts playing their way through underground venues all over the country, but by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin.In contrast, Hanna herself was never and isn't deferential. Her vital importance to cultural and rock history is set in stone as, for the former, she initiated the Nineties feminist musical groundswell riot grrrl and, for the latter, she sprayed the words “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” (a deodorant brand) on Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Almost 45 years after the publication of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer - now 75 years old and working on a rainforest conservation project in her native Australia, but still “full of bile” - thinks that it is time for a new analysis; a go-to feminist text as succinct and divisive as the one that she created in 1970. These days it is men that are experiencing the identity crisis, she tells Kirsty Wark; now that women are free of the restrictions created by expectation that prevented them from entering traditionally male-dominated spaces like the workplace, politics, the media and gaming it Read more ...
Naima Khan
Performed by all-female theatre company, Fluff, Sarah Sigal's take on feminism through the ages drops us in and out of three time scenarios: the Royalist household of Lady Anne in 1646, the adventures of fashion journalist Pamela in 1936, and the discourse between corporate manager Celia and her recovering addict friend Lucy in 2014. Sound familiar in both structure and content? Well, if you follow the work of Caryl Churchill, it largely is. The play's elliptical scenes and female-centric focus suggest Churchill's contemporary classic Top Girls, to which Sigal further adds an aspect not Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Feminism suddenly seems to be all the rage in London theatre. Yesterday, I reviewed Nick Payne’s Blurred Lines, and tonight I saw this show by American provocateur Gina Gionfriddo, whose Becky Shaw was at the Almeida three years ago. This current show is a light comedy, with some good bright lines, an entertainment that takes several pauses in which ideas are expounded and discussed. It’s a bit like being back in college: a mix of laughs and study.The set-up has an admirable clarity: two former college room-mates meet up again after some two decades apart. Catherine is now a hot academic who Read more ...