VVC 2007: Gender and race!
Aug. 23rd, 2007 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
springgreenBecause I am insane, I decided to try and do a tally of race and gender in this year's VVC Premieres, as seen from my DVDs. Even though I generally try to pay attention to these things, I don't think I really noticed gender or race things while watching the VVC 2006 DVDs. This time round, I paid more attention because a) ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laurashapiro has been showing some older vids so I have a better sense of the vidding world outside of Random Things I Download, b) the discussion afterward about "Women's Work" and "300," and c) laurashapiro talking about her Sekrit Feminist Vidding Agenda.
It was rather odd watching the 2007 premieres because they're different from most of the vids on my hard drive -- a lot more male-centric shows, for one. I didn't quite realize till now just how much I self-selected when it came to vids and TV shows. I tend to like things better when there are female protagonists or several women in the ensemble, and I tend to focus on the women more, which means I seek out vids on women more.
I am too lazy to link individual vids so I point you to: VVC 2007 Premieres first half | second half
I tallied 32 vids on the DVDs. For the male/female divide, I was a little strict. Things counted as "F" if there was a female POV and there wasn't too much about men. I counted "F/M" for vids that seemed to have fairly equal weight between the men and the women, though in some of the ensembles, the weight skewed more toward the men. I also separated out ensemble vids from romance vids. I counted "M" for vids that were from a male POV and was mostly about men.
For the POC count, I basically counted any vid in which a POC appeared on screen, so it's divided between "blink of an eye" POC appearances (just a few clips, even if it's a fairly main character of the show) and "main-ish" POC appearances, in which the POC seemed to have a fairly significant number of clips (aka, anything more than 3).
M: 13
F/M: 11
F: 9
POC: 17
Total vids: 32
M: Moons of Jupiter, It's Not Over, Seven Nation Army, I Remember, Cathain, Bankshot, Spiriti, Sick Cycle Carousel, Lifetime Piling Up, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Tamacun, The Trouble with Poets, Woodstock
F/M: My Happy Ending, Rodeohead, Men in Black, Signal to Noise, Head over Feet, Want, West of Her Spine, The Loyal, Nothing New, Another Sunday (We Built This City), Southwood Plantation Road
F: (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay, Synthesizer, Women's Work, Falling from the Sky, The Adversary, Cold as It Gets, Cosmia, Dreams Are Not My Home
POC: Moons of Jupiter, Rodeohead, Signal to Noise, Bankshot, Want, Lifetime Piling Up, The Loyal, Women's Work, Falling from the Sky, Tamacun, Cold as It Gets, Another Sunday (We Built This City), Cosmia, Southwood Plantation Road, Woodstock
As you can see, I was really pushing the categories for a few. I also got more and more tired toward the end, which is why earlier vids with one woman count as "M" (Seven Nation Army) and later vids with one woman count as "F/M" (SGA).
This looks pretty good at first. But for the F/M breakdown, 4 are ensemble casts, and three of the four are weighted toward men (Firefly, Torchwood, SGA -- fourth one is BSG). "Rodeohead" is less weighted toward men than "Men in Black" and "Another City," but it's still largely Mal's POV, with a few River POV/starring-River sections in it. Four more from F/M are romances (My Happy Ending, Head over Feet, Southwood Plantation Road, Nothing New), one of which is male POV (Nothing New).
The last three of the F/M category are Want, West of Her Spine and The Loyal, which are very nominally F/M. I stuck Want in F/M just because of the female singer; most of the actual clips are of men, and I've seen the Yellow-Eyed Demon referred to as male online. So I'm not sure if there is any F in the F/M, but I stubbornly stuck it in there anyway because I like to pretend it is about the demon's predatory female gaze on Sam and Dean (as you can probably tell, I don't watch SPN).
The Loyal is also a problematic fit in the category, since it's mostly male POV and the main female character first appears naked and pregnant among cows. I was a bit squicked by the race bit as well, but will touch on that later. I haven't seen Children of Men, so I have no idea what it's about. But it seems like the woman is holy because she's had a baby in a land with rampant infertility and the guy ends up protecting her and hi! The problematic just writes itself! Again, may be completely misreading the source, but that's what I got from the vid.
And West of Her Spine, which is probably the most problematic of the three. I knew about the vid coming in, and I love how creepy it is and how it nicely gets the viewer expecting one thing and then skewers the expectations. I also like it as a commentary on creepy love. On the other hand... the only reason it's in F/M instead of M is because of how much screen time the women get. Unfortunatley, most of that screen time is on the women as objects of desire or as literal objects, chopped up, stuffed in refrigerators, tied into parcels. This bit is creepy, but intentionally so, so while the images bug the heck out of me, the vid doesn't at this point. What does bug me is that a vid that initially comments on violence against women and women's bodies and literally making women into inanimate objects ends up focusing on the relationship between two men. And that's the part that I don't think is intentionally creepy, so it disturbs me much more.
Also, for the F/M vids, we're largely missing relationships that aren't M-F romances. There's friendship and mutual sparring in Another Sunday and Signal to Noise (yay Teyla!), and brother-sister in Rodeohead. I read the Torchwood vid as having a lot of romance, but that is me just gathering things from the vid. But there seem to be very few vids focusing on non-romantic male-female relationships in this set. Is that normal? One of the reasons why I likedjarrow272's Club Vivid vid so much was that it is about friendship! Between both sexes!
Of the 9 F vids, one is Women's Want and the other is The Adversary, which I stuck in F because... I was tired. It is not really F. It is more F/M. Or plain M and dead F. I think? I have not seen Twin Peaks. But eight vids focusing solely on women, yay!
For the POC vids, 9 out of the 17 were "blink" vids. Aka, blink and you'll miss the POC! These include: Moons of Jupiter, Men in Black, I Remember, Want, Lifetime Piling Up, Women's Work, Falling from the Sky, Tamacun, Cold as It Gets. I know Martha's a big part of Dr. Who, but she's barely in Moons of Jupiter, and while I think the Asian woman is part of the ensemble in Torchwood, she's barely in Men in Black. Vids with POC as part of an ensemble were: Rodeohead and Signal to Noise. I'm not sure how to classify The Loyal. As mentioned, the black woman does play a fairly large role in the vid, but the vid is largely from the whtie man's POV and I am still disturbed of the image of her dropping her clothes while standing among cows! Though I am glad that there were other shots of her laughing and being normal instead of being a holy mother. (ETA: notes on the movie here and here)
The four vids with a fairly strong POC presence were Bankshot, Another Sunday, Southwood Plantation Road and Woodstock. Of these, Bankshot had a good deal of the black man (Denzel Washington?), but he's one POC among... everyone else (ETA: notes on Bankshot). Woodstock also has a black man, but the main character of the vid seems to be the white man (I have no idea what their names are, sorry). (ETA: notes on Woodstock) Even so, I was actually startled to see those two vids and was like, "Hey! POC!" I like Another Sunday not just because it has sparkly disco effects and bouncy music and literal vidding of the lyrics but also because it has scenes in which only Teyla and Ronon are on the screen! Imagine! Just POC in a few shots! And I liked that Jescaflowne meant it as an ensemble vid; the few SGA vids I've seen tend to focus on the two guys who keep being slashed together. As in, pre-SGA-AU-fic-debate, given what I saw discussed of SGA online (and not in deadbro, I would not have thought there were POC in it at all. And Southwood Plantation Road seemed to be pretty well balanced between Marth and Ten, as opposed to Bankshot and Woodstock, where you could tell the focus was on the white people. Also, Martha is hot.
Finally, there is Cosmia! One vid out of 32 that has a POC as the focus of the vid! (ETA: notes on the problematics of Ofelia as POC)
In conclusion, I should probably do this with my VVC 2006 DVDs for comparative purposes, but I am too lazy to. Also, hopefully I will get around to posting vid impressions sometime...
laurashapiro has been showing some older vids so I have a better sense of the vidding world outside of Random Things I Download, b) the discussion afterward about "Women's Work" and "300," and c) laurashapiro talking about her Sekrit Feminist Vidding Agenda. It was rather odd watching the 2007 premieres because they're different from most of the vids on my hard drive -- a lot more male-centric shows, for one. I didn't quite realize till now just how much I self-selected when it came to vids and TV shows. I tend to like things better when there are female protagonists or several women in the ensemble, and I tend to focus on the women more, which means I seek out vids on women more.
I am too lazy to link individual vids so I point you to: VVC 2007 Premieres first half | second half
I tallied 32 vids on the DVDs. For the male/female divide, I was a little strict. Things counted as "F" if there was a female POV and there wasn't too much about men. I counted "F/M" for vids that seemed to have fairly equal weight between the men and the women, though in some of the ensembles, the weight skewed more toward the men. I also separated out ensemble vids from romance vids. I counted "M" for vids that were from a male POV and was mostly about men.
For the POC count, I basically counted any vid in which a POC appeared on screen, so it's divided between "blink of an eye" POC appearances (just a few clips, even if it's a fairly main character of the show) and "main-ish" POC appearances, in which the POC seemed to have a fairly significant number of clips (aka, anything more than 3).
M: 13
F/M: 11
F: 9
POC: 17
Total vids: 32
M: Moons of Jupiter, It's Not Over, Seven Nation Army, I Remember, Cathain, Bankshot, Spiriti, Sick Cycle Carousel, Lifetime Piling Up, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Tamacun, The Trouble with Poets, Woodstock
F/M: My Happy Ending, Rodeohead, Men in Black, Signal to Noise, Head over Feet, Want, West of Her Spine, The Loyal, Nothing New, Another Sunday (We Built This City), Southwood Plantation Road
F: (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay, Synthesizer, Women's Work, Falling from the Sky, The Adversary, Cold as It Gets, Cosmia, Dreams Are Not My Home
POC: Moons of Jupiter, Rodeohead, Signal to Noise, Bankshot, Want, Lifetime Piling Up, The Loyal, Women's Work, Falling from the Sky, Tamacun, Cold as It Gets, Another Sunday (We Built This City), Cosmia, Southwood Plantation Road, Woodstock
As you can see, I was really pushing the categories for a few. I also got more and more tired toward the end, which is why earlier vids with one woman count as "M" (Seven Nation Army) and later vids with one woman count as "F/M" (SGA).
This looks pretty good at first. But for the F/M breakdown, 4 are ensemble casts, and three of the four are weighted toward men (Firefly, Torchwood, SGA -- fourth one is BSG). "Rodeohead" is less weighted toward men than "Men in Black" and "Another City," but it's still largely Mal's POV, with a few River POV/starring-River sections in it. Four more from F/M are romances (My Happy Ending, Head over Feet, Southwood Plantation Road, Nothing New), one of which is male POV (Nothing New).
The last three of the F/M category are Want, West of Her Spine and The Loyal, which are very nominally F/M. I stuck Want in F/M just because of the female singer; most of the actual clips are of men, and I've seen the Yellow-Eyed Demon referred to as male online. So I'm not sure if there is any F in the F/M, but I stubbornly stuck it in there anyway because I like to pretend it is about the demon's predatory female gaze on Sam and Dean (as you can probably tell, I don't watch SPN).
The Loyal is also a problematic fit in the category, since it's mostly male POV and the main female character first appears naked and pregnant among cows. I was a bit squicked by the race bit as well, but will touch on that later. I haven't seen Children of Men, so I have no idea what it's about. But it seems like the woman is holy because she's had a baby in a land with rampant infertility and the guy ends up protecting her and hi! The problematic just writes itself! Again, may be completely misreading the source, but that's what I got from the vid.
And West of Her Spine, which is probably the most problematic of the three. I knew about the vid coming in, and I love how creepy it is and how it nicely gets the viewer expecting one thing and then skewers the expectations. I also like it as a commentary on creepy love. On the other hand... the only reason it's in F/M instead of M is because of how much screen time the women get. Unfortunatley, most of that screen time is on the women as objects of desire or as literal objects, chopped up, stuffed in refrigerators, tied into parcels. This bit is creepy, but intentionally so, so while the images bug the heck out of me, the vid doesn't at this point. What does bug me is that a vid that initially comments on violence against women and women's bodies and literally making women into inanimate objects ends up focusing on the relationship between two men. And that's the part that I don't think is intentionally creepy, so it disturbs me much more.
Also, for the F/M vids, we're largely missing relationships that aren't M-F romances. There's friendship and mutual sparring in Another Sunday and Signal to Noise (yay Teyla!), and brother-sister in Rodeohead. I read the Torchwood vid as having a lot of romance, but that is me just gathering things from the vid. But there seem to be very few vids focusing on non-romantic male-female relationships in this set. Is that normal? One of the reasons why I liked
jarrow272's Club Vivid vid so much was that it is about friendship! Between both sexes! Of the 9 F vids, one is Women's Want and the other is The Adversary, which I stuck in F because... I was tired. It is not really F. It is more F/M. Or plain M and dead F. I think? I have not seen Twin Peaks. But eight vids focusing solely on women, yay!
For the POC vids, 9 out of the 17 were "blink" vids. Aka, blink and you'll miss the POC! These include: Moons of Jupiter, Men in Black, I Remember, Want, Lifetime Piling Up, Women's Work, Falling from the Sky, Tamacun, Cold as It Gets. I know Martha's a big part of Dr. Who, but she's barely in Moons of Jupiter, and while I think the Asian woman is part of the ensemble in Torchwood, she's barely in Men in Black. Vids with POC as part of an ensemble were: Rodeohead and Signal to Noise. I'm not sure how to classify The Loyal. As mentioned, the black woman does play a fairly large role in the vid, but the vid is largely from the whtie man's POV and I am still disturbed of the image of her dropping her clothes while standing among cows! Though I am glad that there were other shots of her laughing and being normal instead of being a holy mother. (ETA: notes on the movie here and here)
The four vids with a fairly strong POC presence were Bankshot, Another Sunday, Southwood Plantation Road and Woodstock. Of these, Bankshot had a good deal of the black man (Denzel Washington?), but he's one POC among... everyone else (ETA: notes on Bankshot). Woodstock also has a black man, but the main character of the vid seems to be the white man (I have no idea what their names are, sorry). (ETA: notes on Woodstock) Even so, I was actually startled to see those two vids and was like, "Hey! POC!" I like Another Sunday not just because it has sparkly disco effects and bouncy music and literal vidding of the lyrics but also because it has scenes in which only Teyla and Ronon are on the screen! Imagine! Just POC in a few shots! And I liked that Jescaflowne meant it as an ensemble vid; the few SGA vids I've seen tend to focus on the two guys who keep being slashed together. As in, pre-SGA-AU-fic-debate, given what I saw discussed of SGA online (and not in deadbro, I would not have thought there were POC in it at all. And Southwood Plantation Road seemed to be pretty well balanced between Marth and Ten, as opposed to Bankshot and Woodstock, where you could tell the focus was on the white people. Also, Martha is hot.
Finally, there is Cosmia! One vid out of 32 that has a POC as the focus of the vid! (ETA: notes on the problematics of Ofelia as POC)
In conclusion, I should probably do this with my VVC 2006 DVDs for comparative purposes, but I am too lazy to. Also, hopefully I will get around to posting vid impressions sometime...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-25 10:02 pm (UTC)Vidders can be a contrary lot however and I don't know that guilting them is the way to go - or at least not the way to get really quality Ronon vids made. I mean, I immediately get on the defensive about making vids featuring women and for a m/m slash vidder, I do a hell of a lot of Female Character focused vids (my VVC Premiere vids: Peacekeeper (Buffy), Two Words (ensemble), Ring Them Bells (Beatrix), Be So Glad (John/Stark) and Women's Work (meta?). If the debate is CoC, I start thinking about the only nearly finished SGA vid I have on my hard drive, which happens to be a Teyla vid and it SUCKS and I feel guilty that it sucks and I haven't yet figured out a way to make it not suck and therefore viable. Then I feel guilty for not vidding Gunn, even though I never vidded Wes or Fred or Connor, either. It's not like I don't want to vid them or wouldn't vid any of them, but my time and my ideas can be limited and I only start a project when I *have* to make a vid - the idea and the song come together and there is no way I can stop myself from letting it pour out. Making me feel self concious about whether or not the idea is about a character of color is not conducive to getting my ass in front of premiere, even when I have a fantastic idea for a vid. You don't want a reluctant vidder - a reluctant vidder finishes no vids!
But you are right - there should be more vids about everyone in the fandom, not just the white boys in love. I think the way to get more of these vids (and I think this has worked in the past because I totally feel there are a great deal more vids these days about female characters than before) is to find the vidders who make vids about the characters you want to see and let them know how awesome you think it is they are vidding this. And tell your friends and have their friends tell their friends and suddenly there is this audience and where there is an audience, there will be a vidder. I mean, the vidder way back in the Buffy fandom day who did those intricate AUs where Spike and Buffy were in love but then she got pregnant and he wasn't ready, so he left her and she cried and cried and he drank a lot and then Buffy had a miscarriage and Dawn yelled at Spike to shape up and then Spike came back and they were back in love and had sex, even she had an audience.
This is where I felt the tone of this post was dismissive toward vids like Bankshot and Woodstock, which are extremely well done vids featuring just the thing the poster seems to want to see, which is a vid that centers around a character of color. I then got flip and a bit cranky and, again, I apologize.
Again, I don't actually think the goal of the post is not valid or something I do not support, but I think the method is flawed. I don't think anything is accomplished by pointing at a group of artists and saying, that they, as a group, are not doing what you want them to be doing. I think a much better approach is either make the thing you want to see or find the people making the thing you want to see and give them support. Of course, I heard the other day that there is this thing called differing opinions and I am sure that there are many on this issue.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-26 01:53 am (UTC)Also, my post was written not as an attempt to guilt people into doing anything. I am a POC, and this is how I view things. I understand that anyone can come in and read my posts however they like. It sounds a little to me like you're implying that people should not write posts like these because they make other people feel guilty. I'm sure you don't mean to imply this. It's just I've had this reaction to a lot of my posts on race and racism on my other LJ as
My problem with the idea to get more of these vids made is that there are so few made in the first place. Also, I do try and find vids and shows and books and media on POC, and I pimp them. And I do plan on attempting to learn to vid just so I can get some of these vids made. But I do not think that the burden should lie on fans of color and allies. I also do think that something is accomplished by pointing to a group of artists and saying that in general, they are producing things that are upholding an institution of oppression. It's awareness. And it's not just awareness for vidders, but awareness for viewers. My personal experience in fandom has been that if I and other POC and allies don't talk about these things, no one will.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-26 03:52 pm (UTC)