These offerings and musings are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, and stolen lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta First Nations. These lands known as Miami.
These are stolen lands built by stolen people
“America’s Favorite Big Girl is in Trouble: What the Lawsuit against Lizzo tells us about Ourselves and the Nature of Work”
America’s favorite body-positive, sex-positive, confident, fat Black woman is in trouble. Lizzo is being sued by three former dancers, Crystal Williams, Arianna Davis, and Noelle Rodriguez, for a bevy of work-related issues, and what is being alleged is nothing to scoff at or quickly dismiss. The crux of the allegations is that these dancers believe Lizzo and her company, Big Grrrl Big Touring, Inc. (BGBT), created a hostile work environment that was a breeding ground for all manner of harm.
Here are the nine charges that have been brought against Lizzo and her company:
1. Hostile work environment and Sexual Harassment (all defendants)
2. Failure to prevent or remedy hostile work environment / sexual harassment (all defendants)
3. Failure to Prevent/Remedy Religious Harassment (Shirlene Quigley and Big Grrrl Big Touring, Inc)
4. Failure to prevent or remedy religious harassment
5. Racial Harassment (Plaintiff Williams and Davis against Big Grrrl Touring, Inc)
6. Disability Discrimination Plaintiffs Davis against Big Grrrl Big Touring, Inc and Lizzo)
7. Intentional interference with Prospective Economic Advantages all Plaintiffs against Big Grrl Touring Inc
8. Assault Plaintiffs Rodriguez and Davis against defendant Lizzo
9. False Imprisonment Plaintiff Davis defendant Big Grrl Big Touring, Inc.
In my work as The Social Justice Doula, I predominately coach women across race, age, industry, and geography. I also consult with organizations on ways to operationalize anti-racism at work and imbue their leadership with anti-racism. I do this because I sincerely believe if you do not clearly define your leadership and what it is not and state the values and sociopolitical ideas that animate your leadership or organization, you are at great risk of recreating oppression and domination whether you mean to or not. For many of us, the only kind of leadership we know well is patriarchal, harmful, and exploitative. In my capacity as The Social Justice Doula, I have worked with all kinds of organizations all-white organizations, racially diverse organizations, all-women organizations, predominately Black organizations, intergenerational teams, teams that were solely comprised of Zoomers and millennials, teams that were made up of all queer, transgender, and gender expansive people and the conclusion I have come to is that being the founder, Executive Director, CEO, the boss does not bring out the best in most people. Wherever you are insecure, the places within yourself you struggle to confront, where you lack ethics and discipline will all be poked at, highlighted, and put on display if you do not have systems of accountability in place and clearly articulated values that undergird your leadership and strategies for how you will protect your organization and your direct reports from yourself. In fact, it's much easier to be a harmful, ineffective boss than it is to be an effective, inspiring leader because these kinds of leaders are in abundance. There are many reasons for this; I propose that because work is not an inherently egalitarian or anti-racist place, and because most workers are not in unions and there are no real checks and balances on corporations, it allows for harm to be easily fostered and get concretized within a work culture.
So, when I heard about the allegations against Lizzo, I wasn’t shocked. Not because I think Lizzo is a bad person but because leadership is hard, and leaders are not often set up for success by their boards or the systems that are in place. Many Executive Directors and CEOs should be grateful that the people who work for them do not have the means to sue them because it would be disastrous if they did. Although I think most people are not effective bosses, I do not think most of these bosses are malicious and are being mean and abusive on purpose. These leaders are merely miming the content and the context they know best and staying true to their socialization, which is white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, word to bell hooks. The logic of these systems influences, informs and dictates how we show up, and because workplaces are sites of struggle racial, economic, gender, religious, struggle, etc., workplaces become the Petri dishes and the practice spaces in which the truth of who we are, what we believe, and what we practice is made evident. Put another way, if you do not have a plan for how you will manage your inner colonizer, your inner colonizer will manage you!
We can glean many teachable moments from this Lizzo lawsuit that can hopefully help us be more effective leaders who are serious about creating less harmful workplaces.
1. Misogyny for women leaders is enemy #1! - This will sound very harsh, but few people like having women as bosses, and even fewer people truly respect women’s leadership fairly and unbiasedly. And this includes other women. And if you are a Black woman, a woman of color, or a fat woman leader, disabled, middle age, etc., the disdain for you and your leadership and the unfair, unkind, exaggerated critiques of you will be fierce. Sexism has trained us to think that only certain kinds of identities and bodies are “natural born leaders” or are “good leaders,” and many people are not consciously aware of their sexism or internalized misogyny. You hear it in the ways people critique women leaders.’ People often struggle to give substantive critiques but will frame their critiques of women in very personal ways, expecting that women leaders should make everyone feel good and be their mom or mammy figure at work and if you are Black and live in a larger body the demand for you to be maternal will be great.
This unrealistic sexist and gendered expectation of women often forces many women in leadership into fashioning themselves after men and operating in a patriarchal way, which inevitably further triggers the misogyny of everyone, and it opens the door for power to be abused because the woman in power may start to feel as if her power and authority is being usurped. ignored, questioned, or dismissed. So, this kind of dynamic sets in motion a negative feedback loop. The women leader hates that she is being bogged down by sexism and misogyny, and if she is Black or a non-Black person of color, she is also fighting racism. This sparks her fight response, so she devises a plan to be taken more seriously at work, which, if done wrong, will come off harmful AF. Her leadership is now starting to look and feel emotionally based because good leadership cannot come from an anxious and fearful place. But sexism and racism impact us on the level of our dignity and self-worth, and nothing is more personal than these kinds of attacks. Women in leadership should not be expected to be everyone's work mom, nor should they feel compelled to become the work patriarch either. What is the middle way that honors what this woman brings to work while not having to wield power in a negative way? Internalized misogyny is real, and therefore, women leaders must be careful and methodical in ways that their male counterparts do not have to be, especially when they are new to leadership. Because of sexism and bio-essentialism, people expect more and better from women even though women are not inherently better human beings and can enact all kinds of harm and abuse. Therefore, if you are a woman leader who professes social justice, anti-racism, and feminist values, you must create the systems and structures around you that are rooted in your values. People have little grace, compassion, or forgiveness for women who behave badly at work, and as women leaders, we should expect this and, therefore, build work cultures that do not foster and give way to hostile work environments. You are not a man, boo. Put differently, you are not a white man; therefore, govern yourself accordingly. Have a plan for how you will manage people’s misogyny and unrealistic expectations.
2. Women in leadership should beware of having a misaligned Executive/management team – One of the complaints against Lizzo’s management is about racial harassment. In the court documents, they allege,
“Specifically, BGBT management treated the black members of the dance team differently than other members. BGBT’s management team consisted almost entirely of white Europeans who often accused the black members of the dance team of being lazy, unprofessional, and having bad attitudes. Not only do these words ring familiar as tropes used to disparage and discourage black women from advocating for themselves, but the same accusations were not levied against dancers who are not black.”
I do not understand why women with a particular feminist and social justice point of view management teams are comprised of all men. When I see a woman surrounded by an all-male management and executive team, I see a woman who is vulnerable because I am unsure if an all-male management team knows how to properly protect you while helping you execute your vision. And the same considerations apply when thinking about the racial aspects. Can an all-white male management team properly protect a Black woman without not putting her at risk of a racial harassment complaint? The answer, at least in this case, is no. You see this when a Black person takes over as the Executive Director for an organization with an all-white board. Black leaders usually last no more than two years because they are criminally unprotected and unsupported. When hiring for executive and management positions, we must ensure that these people align with the values important to our company or non-profit. I know when we are looking to fill positions, if there are 50 bullets of skills, we are looking for someone with all 50 of the hard technical skills, but what about the “soft skills,” which, in the era we are in, is anything but soft, these are critical skills.
3. Young leaders MUST stop trying to befriend and party with your direct reports - This is a major problem I see all the time among mainly millennials and younger Gen-Xers. These leaders are often obsessed with being read as cool and likable by their direct reports, which leads to poor boundaries and sticky situations. You can be a kind and cool boss while having good boundaries and not obfuscating the lines of power. On two occasions, Lizzo took her team to nude bars; everyone on her dance team was not down with that. Some people felt pressure to hang out with Lizzo. In the court documents, they write that some of the dancers felt they had to “endear Lizzo.” The assumption that the people who report to us will always have the courage and the language to tell us no and advocate for themselves is fantasy thinking. We must get better at having more insight into our behavior and the environments we create and get better at not putting people in awkward or inappropriate situations. I think it is a good gesture that every now and then, leaders share a meal with their team but do not party with them, do not do drugs with them, or hang out with direct reports. This kind of behavior also speaks to a larger issue we must investigate: our obsession with looking for and wanting to be friends with people at work. We can be kind, ethical, and good team players without not blurring the lines of work relationships and platonic intimacy. I am not saying we cannot find real friends at work, but we must stop trying to force these kinds of intimacies because in doing so, issues of misusing power and control will inevitably show up.
4. In a post #MeToo era, what are the lessons that women and gender-expansive people have ALSO learned - The sexual harassment that is being alleged in the complaint is mainly due to the dance captain Shirlene Quigley who was having inappropriate conversations about sex with the dancers, in which she shared her fantasy about having ten penises in her face and would disclose when she masturbated. I have noticed that in predominantly women and queer spaces, some will treat these spaces as slumber parties and not work. Please stop forgetting that you are at work! They will use these spaces where there is an overarching shared gender sameness to have raunchy conversations at work, and because everyone is a woman/queer and because there are no cisgender heterosexual men around, people think there is no issue with this kind of “locker room” talk that is taking place on the pink/lavender/rainbow side. Again, we must fight the bio-essentialist thinking that teaches us that women are always the victims and men are always the victimizers. This binary thinking does not allow us to see how women can participate in creating sexual harassment at work against other women and against queer and gender-expansive people in ways that may not be so obvious. And I know we are in a moment where we are challenging what professionalism even means and the white supremacy tenets of what defines professionalism, but beloveds, let’s not lose the plot and descend into debauchery at our workplaces. This is work, and people will sue you or make a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
5. Check the Christian supremacy at work - I have written about this before. Christian supremacy is a serious issue in the workplace. Evangelicals across race think it is okay to proselytize at work, and it’s not. However, this nation is rooted in Christian values, and because The United States is on the brink of falling into Christian fascism, many do not see the issue. The dance captain, Shirlene Quigley, kept using her Christianity as a tool to terrorize the dancers. First and foremost, she showed an unhealthy interest in the virginity of Arianna Davis and kept using every opportunity to preach and was trying to force one of the dancers to lead prayer even though the dancer kept declining. If a Muslim, Hindi, Atheist, or a person who practices Santeria or Vodou was doing this kind of recruitment and sermonizing at work, everyone would clearly see the problem.
6. It’s time to break up with authenticity at work unless you have a lawyer on retainer, and if that’s the case, carry on, boo - Your work colleagues and direct reports should not have to be subjected to your inner monologue and private self. Who I am with my partner, friends, family, and with my therapist has no place at work. When reading the many accounts of the legal document, it was clear that the line between private and public self did not exist, and that became problematic. Do we not have a public self that we can bring to work that has good boundaries and is not weird with colleagues? In the court documents, while at one of the nude bars, Lizzo and her man were getting hella inappropriate in front of the dancers. And was seen going to the club's backroom with her man and her homegirl. Now, at the risk of sounding like a Boomer, that was wild and way too much at work if that happened! I think it’s amazing that Lizzo is in full possession of her sexuality and body, and if the allegations are true, just because you are sex-positive, that does not mean your direct reports need to be a witness to it. And based on her IG response to this lawsuit, it appears that Lizzo may be conflating some things.
“I am very open with my sexuality and expressing myself but I cannot accept or allow people to use that openness to make me out to be something I am not.”
It’s okay for us not to be super open at work. I promise less is more sometimes. Once again, I know we are in a place where we are dissecting the meaning of “professionalism,” but this kind of casualness and openness doesn’t fit this kind of job. We are taking “keep it real” and being your authentic self to an extreme authoritarian limit. If you are sex-positive, is there no space for others to be sex-negative or even prudish? Must everyone around you be on your wavelength? And how and why is it meaningful to my job fulfillment that I know the sexual politics of the people at work when we do not work in the Adult Film Industry? Work is not the place for your unapologetic self. This kind of rhetoric is giving petulant, misbehaving white men at work who have no filter and are always grossly inappropriate in every way in almost every space.
Perhaps we should be seeking to have well-articulated values and ethics that we deploy consistently throughout all areas of our lives. Perhaps let’s seek to be the kind of leaders and workers who can be trusted to do the right thing no matter the circumstances or contexts. However, in lieu of this, people think they must invest in over-sharing about themselves, telling everyone at work their trauma story, or when any discomfort at work arises must alert everyone, which forces your colleagues and people who report to you into helping you manage your emotions, your dysregulated nervous system, and disappointments all in the name of you being your authentic. This doesn’t feel like authenticity; it feels like lording yourself over others and forcing them to comply with your every whim. It’s giving big Elon Musk energy.
In regard to the allegations, I actually do not blame Lizzo. This is her first time being famous, running a multinational company, and being a brand. Lizzo is an artist! I blame her management team, who has been in the business longer than her, for not advising her well and not protecting her fiercely. To become an effective, inspiring leader who manages people well is a skill that takes time to develop. Lizzo is young, and she will bounce back from this, I think, but I am worried she hired the lawyer Marty Singer, who represented Bill Cosby and Johnny Depp, which is evidence she is not about to play nice, and I wonder what that will do to her reputation. And I was not a fan of her IG post discussing this lawsuit, nor was I of the recent picture of her drinking champagne at the Chanel store. That is not the narrative and tone I would have advised her to be pushing right now.
The public is not forgiving of women who are growing in public, especially a fat Black woman whom people find her refusal to perform self-hatred infuriating and perplexing. The people who hated Lizzo will continue to do so, and the people who expect perfection from celebrities, especially Black women, will turn on her because they have no politics or praxis of their own. I never saw Lizzo as my savior, and I do not expect celebrities to be paragons of social justice and feminism. Therefore, I am going to leave space for Lizzo to grow or even be transformed by this moment. I talk to women, trans and non-binary leaders, middle managers, and creatives all day who truly do not want to be harmful at work or in their leadership but who often feel that the center of gravity at work is often in direct conflict with their values. This causes them to struggle to create an alternative space at work that does not collude with harm.
Black people, especially Black women, are worthy of my compassion and grace. No one is above critique, but disposing of a fat Black woman is never on my bingo card. Lizzo has shown in the past that she has the capacity to change, own up to her mistakes, and change course, and I hope she will learn from this and come back better.
Hot Girl Feminist Summer
I think we can aptly dub summer 2023, at least in The United States, as the summer of “the feminist economy” or the summer that women saved the U.S. economy, Jerome Powell, who? Between the Barbie movie, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, and Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, there is no denying that the gworls, girlies, the gays, and the theys have been carrying the economy together on our backs while the Federal Reserves n’em try to figure out what they are going to do about this inflation and quasi recession. At least the price of eggs is back to normal.
And Just Like That, The Whole World is Striking!
The children are striking! The writers are on strike, and so are the actors. The viewing public has not been asked to stop watching movies or using streaming platforms. I am ready to be in solidarity and do what needs to be done when instructions are shared, but I doubt this ask will be made of us.
However, in the meantime, I have been reflecting on the subscription model of the world that we are in and how it is not sustainable. It’s great for the customer that you pay a nominal fee to the platform, and you have access to a vast library of entertainment, but for writers and actors who are not A-list celebs and Hollywood moguls, this model does not work for them.As a customer, learning that people can write and act on hit TV shows and still live in economic precarity feels like a truth that is both absurd and too much to process at the same time.For more context, read the article fromThe New Yorkerall aboutOrange Is The New Black (OITNB), in which actresses discussed being unable to leave their second jobs in hospitality while juggling becoming increasingly recognizable to fans of the show. Not to mention, OITNB is what put Netflix in serious play as a company.
Maybe it’s just me, but seeing the sheer number of writers and actors discussing their economic anxiety made me sad and even increased my anxiety about the future. These people have acquired entry into their dream profession and, in some cases, have achieved success but still can’t pay their rent. What does this say about the American Dream? The United States’ whole brand strategy is rooted in being a place where dreams can come true. My life was made possible by this marketing and branding. The more this dream ceases to exist, the more life in the United States will become increasingly precarious and dangerous for us all, no matter what city we live in, because it's these United States, After all, what ails one part will impact the 99%.
The writers' and the actors' striking underscores why I no longer believe in the concept of a dream job, especially when a dream job may not be enough to pay your bills, and the strike renews my commitment to why I will always lovingly encourage us all to put work in its proper place and context in our lives because work will never love you back! It can’t. The capitalist model and payment structure will not allow such folly.
The Hollywood strikes, the persistent talk and almost strikes happening across other industries, and the threat of AI to white-collar workers should be a sobering reminder for us all never to forget that we are workers and seek to have a worker solidarity ethic rooted in a worker-first identity. We have more in common with factory workers in Amazon fulfillment centers than we would like to admit. None of us bristled when self-checkout machines appeared everywhere and cashiers started disappearing. Well, that same anti-worker sentiment that invested and created such technology is NOW coming for every kind of “high-skilled” worker through AI.
No worker is safe; we all have a technological nemesis seeking to undermine and make our various professions obsolete. As consumers of various streaming platforms, we all must take seriously that things being cheap do come at a harmful cost to our collective economy. The U.S. is rapidly turning into a nation of gig workers. As consumers, we were sold a lie; we were told to cut the cord and leave cable to save money, but now we are more tethered than ever to various dispersed streaming platforms, but this time, the cord is invisible, and Netflix has the nerve to introduce commercials into its lowest paid tiers, and it is now anti-password sharing can you be more authoritarian? Turns out the cable model made more sense for most parties involved, and Blockbuster was not actively waging war against your favorite show writer room and trying to keep them in poverty. #BringBlockbusterback
Chronically Online Observations
101: Intro to Black/Queer/Gender/Trans Studies
To my non-Black readers, the discourse in this section may read very intra-community and niche.
If you are Black and queer, the internet streets this summer have been particularly heinous to your queer Black soul, and the harm doers have been other Black people. Every day, as I peruse the internet, I see so many “cis” Black women fake beefing with Black trans women and blaming Black trans women for trying to erase them. All Trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), no matter their race, have the same tired white supremacist talking points. However, looking at the tweet pictured (I am still calling them tweets) about Michelle Obama is a good example of how Black women who are transphobic are being daft and low-key appear to be delusional about the way gender and race function in this here racist ass nation-state. Black feminine expression, especially dark-skinned Black women’s gender expression, is always already on shaky hollow grounds and seen as unreal because, in the United States, the gender binary was created to keep Black people out so that OUR subjugation, enslavement, and rape could be justified. As Black people, our perceived cisness is always up for debate and can always be questioned because we cannot be cis in the ways white people are cis because we are not white, and in an anti-Black society, personage or the default human experience is white, heterosexual, able-bodied and male.
That is one of the reasons why, when talking about Black women, I sometimes use cis in quotes because I do not think that Black people are proper cis subjects under these conditions and anti-Black context. And reading Black feminist scholars across academic disciplines such as Black Studies, Trans Studies, and Gender Studies helped me to arrive at this idea.
And it is precisely because of this knowing and theorizing that I no longer give a whole lot of thought, energy, or fucks about pronouns because, firstly and most importantly, pronouns are NOT gender, and I will no longer be acting like or colluding tacitly with this idea. Secondly, as a Black person who understands herself to be definitely not cis and also fat, my gender will NEVER be legible using the current colonial understanding of gender and fatness.
Black scholars like Roderick Ferguson have theorized that even when Black people engage in heterosexual behavior, the state still sees them as failed heterosexuals (e.g., Black motherhood is often criminalized see: Moynihan Report and Black families are heavily surveilled by Child Protective Services, which results in Black children being removed from their homes at an alarming rate). This does not mean that I am saying all Black people are transgender. I believe Black people have agency and the right to self-determination.
One of the ways we operationalize this self-determination as Black people is by choosing to take on gender or reject gender, but I am saying that Blackness disrupts and destabilizes whatever it modifies. And this is why I know people who, although they identify as non-binary, reject woman as a category and identity but still politically and socially align with the language and category of Black woman because once you put Black in front of woman, it becomes queer AF even if the subject isn’t! This is one of the ways Black genders operate. The way Black people are gendered and ungendered within anti-Blackness is so deeply tied to white supremacy queerphobia and transphobia, and even the most politically unconscious Black person among us senses this gender anxiety and unease.
You hear it online all the time among Black heterosexuals and cisgender people incessantly talking about how “masculine” and “in their male energy” certain kinds of Black women are, which has given rise to Black femininity coaching and coaches, or you see it in the ways some Black people police the gender expression of Black men and boys.
Gender policing is something many Black people reflexively and obsessively engage in because many of us do not feel settled or fully seen and understood in our gender expression, and you don’t have to be trans or non-binary to be intimate with this kind of gender malaise. For example, it’s almost impossible to find a Black woman who has not experienced being misgendered. Even famous Black women can't escape this kind of gender policing and transphobia. Famous Black women like Serena Williams, Joseline Hernandez, Wendy Williams, Ciara, Megan Thee Stallion, and now we can add Sexxy Red to this list, have had transphobic insults hurled at them or have been accused of looking manly. Why is the go-to insult transphobia? There is something that we all know and understand acutely about Black womanhood on a cellular level without the need for any fancy degrees or jargon.
The fact that so many Black women, cis and trans, have the same experience of being misgendered by people both inside/outside of our community, no matter how we choose to express or signal our gender, should make us all curious about the relationship writ large, between Blackness and gender. The problem is always gonna be white supremacy, anti-Blackness, misogynoir, and queer antagonism, not other Black people who happen to be queer, trans, or non-binary. Remember, my fellow Black people, we also need an anti-racist gender liberation politic like everybody else!
For further readings on this mode of thinking:
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammer Book” by Hortense Spillers. This is a foundational text. This article has inspired all the academics and academic books I have read on the subject of Black genders. This is not easy, but if you read it and get it, life will never be the same.
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History on Trans Identity is a book written by the Black trans scholar C. Riley Snorton, who talks about the relationship between Blackness and transness. Word on the street is that there is a PDF of this book on the internet.
“My Gender is Black” by Hari Ziyad: A must-nuanced, accessible read!
“You Could Never Misgender Me” by Hunter Ashleigh Shackleford; just read it and let this get into your bones.
Belly of The Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness- written by Da’Shaun L. Harrison, this book explains how the intersection of fatness and Blackness impacts and shapes gender.
The Television Corner
I watched Survival of the Thickest by my fellow Haitian Michelle Bateau, and it was a perfect show. The number of episodes, the length, and the straight people having queer and trans people in their lives in a meaningful way was perfect, and it felt good to watch. The show prominently featured Black people in relationships with each other. It’s a must-watch, especially for the over-35 crowd.
The Real Housewives of New York - Only RHONY could get me back into the Bravo cinematic universe, and I am happy to be back. I am only watching for Jenna Lyons; her style and closet are the kind of aspirational content I live for.
Barbie Movie Review
The Barbie Movie has crossed the Billion-dollar revenue line; with that said, spoilers are ahead in this review for the five of you who have not seen the movie yet.
1. My biggest takeaway from the film is that in the final scene, when we see Stereotypical Barbie dressed down, with no arch, feet flat, and wearing Birkenstocks, I am left with the feeling that it appears Stereotypical Barbie has awakened to herself being a lesbian. Barbie not only shows zero interest in Ken or any of the Ken’s, but the audience is also made aware by Barbie herself how every night was girls’ night, and we can even argue that Stereotypical Barbie was not even picking up on the romantic cues that Ken was dropping. And when Weird Barbie, who is clearly lesbian coded, offers Stereotypical Barbie a choice that spurs her journey, the Birkenstock is introduced. Birkenstocks, which are now very mainstream and for everybody, initially belonged to lesbians and are part of lesbian history and culture. Plus, she is the Stereotypical Barbie who is at the top of white feminine beauty ideals but does not make the stereotypical choice to choose Ken. That, to me, feels very radical and is giving big lesbian energy. Furthermore, the song playing while Barbie is on her hero’s journey is The Indigo Girls “Closer To Fine.” There are too many lesbian smoke signals for there not to be fire! When Stereotypical Barbie decides to permanently leave Barbieland, she first goes to a gynecologist. I assume Barbie is getting ready to take her new vagina out for a spin which is a beautiful, low-key way to make a nod to sex positivity and women’s reproductive rights. I see you, Greta.
2. I enjoyed the movie. I thought it was smart and funny, but it was not revolutionary to me as some corners of the internet proclaimed it to be. The one reason the movie was not great to me is that the film failed to give us a good and believable reason why Barbie chose to leave her dream house and a feminist utopia to become human. Barbie is coming from a reality where women are fully actualized human beings who do not live under the tyranny of patriarchy, and she leaves that to come to a world filled with misogyny, sexism, and gender-based violence, where women, who make up half of the population, are treated like a special interest group and minority, and that is supposed to be a happy ending, nah! In the scene when Barbie and Ken are at the beach and, for the first time, Barbie is experiencing the male gaze and is being objectified, she has an unpleasant somatic response to being seen and made human in this way, and she looks visibly distressed, and this is the same place she willingly chooses to come back to. Stop it! I am not buying this conceit.
3. In a world full of Ken’s, be an Allen! Allen is a great representation of how men can/should be traitors to the patriarchy. There is lots of discourse online saying that Allen was queer-coded, and that is why he was always with the Barbies, and that is why he was helping them. I am unsure if I believe this or if it even matters because quite a few visibly queer-looking Ken’s went along with the incel insurrection that the main Ken orchestrated. The movie was brilliant at showing and reminding the audience that all men, no matter their perceived sexual orientation or how they arrive at masculinity, can be drafted to become soldiers for the patriarchal army.
4. Ken was an incel and became radicalized because the object of his affection was not interested in him. What a tragically common story. So much patriarchal gender-based violence happens because a man feels entitled to a woman’s time, affection, body, and love. Ken told himself a one-sided story and made Stereotypical Barbie the villain and the source of his pain. Ken was surrounded by other available amazing, beautiful Barbies but refused to see them. It feels like Greta wrote the main Ken character from composites of actual incels.
5. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling were perfectly cast, the film was beautifully shot, and the soundtrack was very enjoyable. I love how the music was used to bring more depth to the movie and move it along while speaking to things that could not be captured in the movie dialogue or action because it was made by a major corporation and did not have the liberties of an indie film.
6. The song and dance sequence “I’m Just Ken” was to me when the movie was at its best and even genius. In many ways, Ken is the only character I feel truly gets a proper narrative arc in a movie that is supposed to be woman-centered. The male character being the only one who gets fully fleshed out and whose interiority is shown to us in a movie about Barbie, is muy complicado! The song and Ryan Gosling’s performance of the unremarkable cisgender, heterosexual, white guy who isn’t creepy per se but whose “sensitivity” and seeming rejection of toxic masculinity reeks of being fake and performative was sublime. What makes “I’m Just Ken” a great song/scene is that it narrates the anxiety of cis/het/white dudes that many of us know so well because these men have tried to draft us into helping them manage this anxiety for them. Many of us have had the experience of being in a classroom, hanging out, or in a meeting that is ideologically progressive of center and ideas are being shared, and a white guy who is not problematic and who usually makes decent contributions to the group will start to speak, but before he makes his comment, he has to preface or punctuate his comment with the disclaimer, “I’m just a cis het white dude” or “As a cis het white dude” aka “I’m Just Ken!'', I will never be able not to hear this song in my head whenever I hear this phrase anxiously come out of a white guy’s mouth again. Regarding how Ken was written, Greta and her husband nailed this character and archetype of this kind of man.
7. Barbie does a stellar job of illustrating the hetero pessimism haunting heterosexuals regarding their dating and mating woes.
As much as I enjoyed the movie, it does seem that many writers and creatives struggle to bring a social justice feminist point of view to their art and their character’s dialogue and can’t seem to resist the urge and the trap to descend into America Ferrara’s Twitter rant/monologue that happens in the film. We are all still meaningfully learning how to signal/center social justice in our world-making. Barbie was a commercial hit, and the marketing behind Barbie was genius. It felt good to have a monoculture moment in which we all were doing the same thing and talking about the same thing. As a feminist content creator, Barbie proved something that I have known for a while: that there is a thirst for smart feminist content, and I hope the success of this very white feminist film makes room for even smarter, more nuanced feminist content from other feminist spheres.
Bonus Content - I watched and reviewed the Netflix show The Ultimatum Queer Love. You can read it here.
VIEWINGS AND READINGS:
Dear Erica Mena, You Can’t Co-opt Black Culture & Hate Black Women - The amazing Dash Harris aka @diasporadash on IG wrote this timely piece about an anti-Black incident that happened on Love & Hip-Hop Atlanta and how is stems from anti-Blackness in the Latine community.
Neo-Nazi Prevention and Dog Whistling- Phrases and symbols we should all familiarize ourselves with to keep ourselves safe from Nazis or inadvertently cavorting with Nazis.
The Digital Misogynoir Report: Ending the dehumanising of Black Women on social media - A report from Glitch in the UK. A great resource for building digital literacy around the topic of Black women and what they face online on social media.
LISTENING:
Financial Feminist Podcast - Can Feminism Exist in Capitalism? With Rebecca Walker - Rebecca Walker has a new book about women and money. Rarely do we hear feminists discuss money like this publically.
The Waves Podcast- How Drake Betrayed Megan Thee Stallion- This episode takes a very niche-focused lens on Drake and Torey Lanez, who are both men from Toronto, Canada, and the episode tries to explain the flavor of misogyny that Toronto produces and gets imported to the United States.
Today Explained Podcast- Woke, woke, woke, woke, woke - An episode about the Black ideological lineages of the term woke and its present-day co-option by the Right.
Upstream Podcast - Capitalist Realism - For the super nerds, this is a two-hour podcast on Capitalist Realism, so if you like philosophy, talks of capitalism, and movies, this is for you.
LUTZE SIGHTINGS:
Check out the interview I did with Canvas Rebel where we talked about anti-racist feminist leadership, controlled burns, and how I became the Social Justice Doula.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Patreon Shoutouts: We want to give a special shoutout to our patrons who pledged this month!
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