One of our contributors, alibee, has been having some medical hardships. We just wanted to take this opportunity to say that she's in our thoughts and we wish her a speedy recovery. '

Come back soon, alibee!!"
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In light of a city buzzing with a queer film festival, I started thinking about what opened my eyes to my queer, feminist, trans-positive consciousness in art; Where do I lay my roots, so to speak?

The answer: not so simple. I often hear others talk of their first recognition of what it meant to be queer. They range from sexual experiences, a talk with their parents, or simply a realization brought on by something incredibly abstract. My root is more of a root-system; tangled, tight, and complex, it is hard to discern where it starts and where it begins.

I say this primarily because my queer politics came significantly before my queer sexuality. It occurred to me at a very young age that being queer was O.K., even normal, while it occurred to me much later in life that I, in fact, identified my sexuality and gender presentation as queer.

So? I want a root! Everyone else gets one! I don’t want to be the only one at the pride parade with an amorphous queer past! My solution: I’ve decided to pick my own queer genealogy.

Well, I shouldn’t say that; I’m not picking it, per se, but creating a new concept of what the root is. Instead of this instant shock of knowledge, I’m looking at what gave me my sense of openness and acceptance when it comes to gender and sexuality. I’m taking a close look at my history to help trace my little queer evolution, in mind and not just body.

Can you guess what my brain came up with? You guessed it: Art. Art of all forms helped mold my open-minded baby brain into the big queer tree it is today. First and foremost, I can tell you all with confidence my first queer realization came when I was about 11, reading a book my lesbian Aunts gave me (thank god I come from a family of queers!) called “Weetzie Bat” by Francesca Lia Block. Block’s writing is full of characters with all sorts of gender presentations and sexualities: little girls wear skate shoes and boys look for their princes all within short, succinct, bath-tub reads meant for our young ones. The pleasure I got from reading a story about a guy loose in L.A. looking for his special someone was unmatched. The stories were glittery, effervescent, and just bursting at the seams with open minds and hearts. I still read Weetzie’s story at least once a year, along with Block’s series of stories, and they still lead me close to tears every time.

But, it doesn’t end there. I was lucky to grow up in a house full of music. “Name that Tune” was a family favourite, as my dad flipped through the car radio and gave us 10 seconds each to guess who the artist and song were. Tracy Chapman, Ani Difranco, et al. filled my living room and my head. I was listening to messages of queer acceptance long before I realized what they were. And, it was awesome. I remember the first time I realized someone was gay… and it barely registered. It was just another way people were, and it felt awesome to have already learned queer acceptance before I learned exactly what queerness was.

And this isn’t to extol any superior evolution I’ve had that others haven’t-- not in the slightest. This is to extol the power of art in our culture. Imagine if every kid was exposed to the litetature of queer people, people of colour, disabled people, trans people, and so on? Imagine if every kid learned acceptance before they even had a chance to shape their own behaviour; the opportunity to follow ones feelings, impulses, and creativity would only multiply with the multiplicity of influences these children received.

And I think that might be pretty awesome.

Check out The Image.Nation Website if you feel like queering your current mindset (and you’re in Montreal, of course) or do some googling to find out where your nearest Queer Film Fest is!
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Dear readers, I have a habit I just can’t kick. It keeps me up at night, tossing and turning (pages). I do it in the bathtub, in bed, on the couch, even on the metro. The cashier looks at me like a freak, as I creep to the register, petite and shy, and hand over my magazine with nervous fingers. What does he think? He must think I’m a pervert! An old-fashioned, boobie-oggling pervert! He must picture it, my magazine and me, close and comfortable, reclining…

Ahem. Back to the topic at hand:

I, Alison B. Bee, am addicted to men’s magazines.

Ok, it’s probably not as weird as I think it is, but we’re not talking GQ or Men’s Health here, we’re talking good old bikinis-and-cars magazines, like Stuff and FHM. I don’t know what it is about them, but I just find them riveting, laugh-out-loud funny, and gorgeously composed, even in the trashiest of cases.

Ok, it’s probably not as weird as I think it is, but we’re not talking GQ or Men’s Health here, we’re talking good old bikinis-and-cars magazines, like Stuff and FHM. I don’t know what it is about them, but I just find them riveting, laugh-out-loud funny, and gorgeously composed, even in the trashiest of cases.
I know you’ve probably read gobs of denouncements of and admittances of guilty pleasures in trash culture, but the funny thing is that I never saw these mags as “trashy” or in any way different from the normal stuff sitting around in the bathroom. Sure, they show women in compromising positions and questionable bikinis (I question, is that even a bikini, or a misplaced shoelace?) but so do Vogue and Cosmo. Do these magazines even participate in what our culture deems as low brow, or are they caught in a middle ground: elevated by opulent consumer goods on every page but debased by wacky gender norms?

Frankly, I can’t claim to know the answer. But, I am intrigued by this idea of a certain type of ‘visual pleasure’ that is derived from looking, specifically at materials meant for the eyes of others. What can I say for sure about my Stuff addiction? It’s not based in sexual fantasy. So, this brings me back to the beginning; if I’m not thinking about screwing the girls in the bikinis (I save that for Rosario Dawson on the cover of Bust…) why am I so riveted? Is it because the trashy is turned into a taboo? Is it a competitive feminine instinct that drives me to compare myself to the models? Is it a hope that the knowledge contained therein might teach me more about men? While maybe it’s a little bit of all of these, I think by-and-large the logical solutions don’t completely fit.

The most comfortable answer I can come up with is the thrill of being included in a reading that’s not meant for me. It feels subversive (and fucking fun) to laugh along at jokes about Entourage or morning wood. It strokes a special part of me, and maybe other women, too; it’s the part that wasn’t included in the ‘guy talk’ but always felt most comfortable there. It’s the part that feels constrained by just getting one heavily gendered periodical. It’s the part that maybe, just a little, feels excited by cufflinks and perky nipples, no matter how little sense it makes. …that, and I love the smell of men’s cologne. Oh, fold-out samples, you harlot.

Wanna swap centerfolds? You can contact me at gee.alibee@gmail.com
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While the former might be a fitting title for my latest opus, it doesn’t hold a candle (nor a lighter, flashlight, or road flare) to a gem I saw this week at the Montreal Fringe Festival: “…And God Created Woman”. When asked to give a review of this multimedia-modern-dance bonanza, I reached the root of my disdain in two words: pretentious and clichéd.

Now, I’m going to do my best not to rant, but to set the scene I must summarize this piece as two leotard-clad figures representing the ‘oppression’ faced by women, people of colour, queer people, and other less clearly defined ‘minorities’. Sounds inoffensive, at best, but the problem was really in the intensely regurgitated approach. For example, a man and a woman doing a dance to represent “Hey, Wife, get me some cigarettes!” appears strikingly similar to a 6^th grade drama piece, especially when set over simplistic and unattractive electronic music.

So, having made my point about the overall badness of the show, the fact remains that it is still art. I am not of the opinion that one can deem things artistic or not, but my opinion does dictate that this show completely blew, unlike the rest of the Fringe which is possibly the coolest thing since plastic-coated ice cubes. But, to its credit, at least this piece got me thinking past that of my angry reviews; what is the future of activist art in a culture with so much anti-oppression theory?

I found myself frustrated walking out of this show, deciding it must be a catch-22: anyone who left feeling inspired was probably learning ‘new’ things (racism is bad, sexism is real, etc.) and anyone else was probably feeling annoyed at wasting 30 minutes watching a live-action after-school special. Now besides the “how did you not already know racism was bad?!” exclamation, there is the lingering feeling that maybe it’s all been said as far as activism in art…. Could this be?

One of the lowest points of the performance was when the female dancer donned a silk sheet in the style of a burqa and did a ‘middle-eastern style’ dance to try and somehow represent muslim women’s oppression. Why is it that we make the statement “Woman in Afghanistan are oppressed” (a statement made verbally in the show) and do not dissect it? Is there nothing left to say? Oppression is individual and widespread. There are as many stories as there are people, so boiling it all down to a burqa and a pair of gyrating hips was, to me, offensively simplistic and emblematic of the kind of racism these artists were trying to fight. If you ask me, lifting the burqa is not the job of art, but telling the story beneath it is.

The only answer I can come up with, which is surely one of many, is that we need to be telling these stories (and hopefully setting them to better music) instead of making blanket statements about oppression with no depth. It a crime to simplify someone’s experience just like it’s a crime to submit him or her to social erasure. A woman wrestling with a man for a job is not enough to explain their existence, and a woman putting on a silk sheet is not indicative of muslim women as a whole.

--xoalibee

What do you think the future of activism in art is? Write to me at gee.alibee@gmail.com or comment to tell me!

Please, please, please, don’t confuse this piece with the Vadim film by the same name!

Also, please, please, please do attend the Montreal Fringe Festival or check out your local fringe! It’s international, and all kinds of awesome!

Beginning today, Sundays will be the day I take care of a little housekeeping and share with y'all major blog updates, followed by an exciting review of the week's news:

+ updates +

The craziest thing about our society, in my opinion, is that we're constantly being bombarded with this amorphous thing we call 'culture'; in reality, we only have a fraction of the amount of time it takes to consume culture as it does to actually analyze it. It slips through our ears, and eyes, and back out our mouths, and we leave it up to academics in their ivory towers to tell us what it 'means' to be a cultural consumer. While I can't purport to really ascribe 'meaning'…as a geek of all stripes it's pretty fun to pick through my favourites to see just how I am consuming.

To start, it took me until this week to think about the way I process music under the lens of gender and sexuality. Ridiculous! This week, and I'm 21. Strangely, it took me until I was listening to Feist's "Lovertits" from Open Season to take notice of the differences of normative and non-normative gender roles in popular music. The reason this song caught my attention (as opposed to the entire crotch-throbbing Madonna, Peaches, and company oeuvre) was because I always found Feist to be a pretty conventional , clean-cut, straight (or, I am lead to assume) woman, who sings about love, loss, and the like, and not one of our glorious aforementioned femme-tops.

So, hearing this smokey-voiced vanilla lady sing "I'm your lovertits" with a husky, male back-up singer was exciting. I felt it was transgressive without being crass (although, I do love crass-ness…) and it made me consider what transgression means in music. There may be a line somewhere in the musical sand that is rarely tended to closely but is instead more frequently leapt over. Just like in porn, magazines, and television, there is a clear divide between women's sexuality constructed for male pleasure, and women's sexuality that rejects this standard of eroticism. When Peaches sings about her furry crotch, she becomes 'queered' no matter what her sexual orientation is, because she is transgressing far beyond those boundaries of what women are supposed to do to make men excited.

Moreover, it occurs to me that maybe this is what sets queer music apart: not only do queer artists not fall on the side of the line that fits into normative eroticism, but many of them don't even recognize standards of normativity and instead only subscribe to their own (normalized) desires.

However, there is a hole in my argument here because it does not account for the listeners – do its listeners play a bigger role in defining the music? Take Britney for example. When a gay man hops up on a podium at a club and grinds to "Slave 4 U" the song becomes somehow different than when a 14-year old dances to it in her bedroom. It transforms from faggy, ironic, tinged with S/M, to suddenly about premature sexuality, loss of innocence, and a very strictly gendered type of submission. The queer man dancing to the song is taking it from normative society and making it his own, while the young girl is having her sexuality dictated to her from what is considered admirable female allure. There are combined latent and manifest readings of the song (finally, a use for Freud!) that are both listener-dependent and dependent on the expression of desires within the music.

Which is why – just like there is a need for queer villages, clubs, and so forth – music by and for queer people can be empowering. For example, Lesbians on Ecstasy have no small following, thanks to the fact that queer women are able to listen to their music and hear a voice that is preaching a desire to be free and fuck whomever it pleases. It's no small gift to give someone, this ally in your headphones; to have a new standard for eroticism in art that more closely fits an individuals life is unquestionably a liberating experience. Queer or queered music is not simply cultural re-packaging of the vanilla stuff, but instead a chance to redefine gendered and sexualized eroticism in the arts.

Plus, it's hot.