Various Tidings

[selenak]

Alas, I won't be able to watch The Good Wife or Manhattan for another week (don't spoil me!), but I can get a hold of the Sleepy Hollow season opener; watch this space. Meanwhile, the weather is splendid, meaning the Aged Parents & self spend most of this week outdoors, and thus there isn't much internet for me. But there is some.

Since the Yuletide nominations are open now, Penny Dreadful fans, shouldn't we coordinate our efforts to get as many characters as possible nominated? (However, I'll have to drop my Vikings intentions since this year you can nominate three fandoms, no more. I definitely want Penny Dreadful and The Americans, which leaves me with just one slot for one of my cracky historical RPF ideas.

Also: it's always a pleasure when a poster you appreciate discovers an old show of yours for the first time. local_max is watching Twin Peaks, and has been writing Twin Peaks meta already. The owls are not what they seem!

Lastly: for some reason, I can't copy a link to The Guardian anymore on this iPad since the latest update, so, without links: you may or may not have heard about the current kerfuffle that unfolded when Hilary Mantel's short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and an interview accompagnying it in which she mentioned having carried it with her for thirty years got published. Now on the one hand, as Lisa Appignanesi points out in one of the commenting articles I can't link, either, given that assassination plots against public figures who did in fact not get assassinated have a long tradition in fiction, both of the written, tv and movie kind (she mentions The Day of the Jackal for Charles de Gaulle, and Nicholas Baker's 2004 take on the assassination of George W. Bush, which didn't get him called "sick and deranged" or in need of a therapist or a visit by the coppers). But on the other, the interview with Mantel that went with the publication of the story contained something I objected to as well, and it wasn't the idea of killing off Margaret T. in fiction. (Or for that matter, anyone in fiction. I mean, were it a public figure I actually care about, like, say, Patrick Stewart, I certainly wouldn't read it, but I wouldn't call the pitchforks, either.) No, it's Mantel something I also recall Antonia Fraser saying once, and several others when commenting on Thatcher: calling her a "psychological transvestite" (or, to give the context: The idea that women must imitate men to succeed is anti-feminist. She was not of woman born. She was a psychological transvestite. (Mantel) or "honorary male" (Fraser, who also called Elizabeth Tudor this when comparing her to Mary Stuart), in other words, a woman who isn't really a woman, not entitled to be treated as a woman. Which, just: no. "Woman" isn't a title you can deserve or can be discarded of.

Speculating, I would guess where this comes from: if you're a woman seeing yourself as a feminist, and loathe a female politician, you're unconformtably aware that there is an eons old misogynistic tradition there of vilifiying any woman in power. On the other hand, this politician truly does do and say things you can't stomach, and which you'd have no problem attacking were they voiced and done by a male politician. So your psychological and emotional out is to declare that this woman doesn't deserve any type of female solidarity because she's not truly a woman. I get the mechanism of that, but that doesn't make it less objectionable for me, because, to repeat: nobody gets to decide who is or isn't a woman. Margaret Thatcher did a great many things which left lasting damage to British society. She also was beyond any doubt a woman. (And let's not even get into the use of "transvestite" as a negative.) And it should be possible to hold forth on why her policies were objectionable without feeling the urge to strip her of her gender.

Comments

[monanotlisa]

So your psychological and emotional out is to declare that this woman doesn't deserve any type of female solidarity because she's not truly a woman. I get the mechanism of that, but that doesn't make it less objectionable for me, because, to repeat: nobody gets to decide who is or isn't a woman. Margaret Thatcher did a great many things which left lasting damage to British society. She also was beyond any doubt a woman.

So true, and thanks for restating.

[frayadjacent]

Wow, I had forgotten about that "psychological transvestite" crap, though I think I encountered it in my college student years in the early aughts. It's such a fundamentally essentialist notion of gender and women, and so completely at odds with my sort of feminism. To be sure, I don't think Margaret Thatcher deserves any sort of solidarity, and I'd spit on her grave as soon as I would Ronald Reagan's. Sexism against her should be confronted not because she specifically needs or deserves feminists' support, but because it's sexist.

[lilacsigil]

They could even go with "Thatcher used male modes of power because in that misogynist context it was the best way to get ahead". But she's still a woman and we don't get to disown her.

ETA: Penny Dreadful! I can spare a nomination slot if you want to split characters.

[kerrypolka]

I had the same "bwa?" reaction to 'psychological transvestite', but after thinking about it and reareading, I don't think Mantel just meant 'Thatcher was effectively male and therefore okay to take potshots at'. Especially since I don't think she has a problem taking shots at women.

I read it as Mantel pointing out that as well as Thatcher trying to remake herself as upper-class (which she definitely did, she spent a lot of time studying posh accents, codes and mannerisms and trying to emulate them), she also actively tried to become as male as possible (getting voice coaching to speak more 'like a man', wearing masculine silhouettes) - she identified the things that important people were (posh men) and consciously tried to take on qualities of those identities. IE I think Mantel is criticising Thatcher for going " political success means being male, therefore politically successful people have to either be or become masculine". Not saying "Thatcher's success was in a male kind of way, therefore she is not-woman, therefore it's okay for me to criticise her".

I read 'not of woman born' as supposed to be what Thatcher thought of herself, or how she tried to remake herself, as well as being an allusion to Lady Macbeth's conscious rejection of femininity to take on political power. She's both criticising Thatcher's values and, at the same time but as part of a different argument, pointing out that Thatcher thought it was necessary to become male ('psychological transvestite') to be Prime Minister.

[saturnofthemoon]

According to the google spreadsheet for Yule nominations, people have already started nominating Penny Dreadful. Can't remember which characters, though.

[legionseagle]

To be fair (and you don't hear me say that often when the subject is Thatcher), it wasn't necessarily so much "upper-class" her accent was aiming for as "not regional". I grew up with a marked regional accent and comments like, "Of course you can't do that when you grow up. Whoever heard of a lawyer with a Northern accent?" were prevalent. That's the trouble with social issues changing quickly - people disbelieve those who lived through the change about how bad it used to be.

[lonelywalker]

All the main characters plus Proteus, last time I looked. Although people can edit their noms, so I suppose some could conceivably disappear.

[d_generate_girl]

I've already nominated Penny Dreadful, with Vanessa, Malcolm, Mina, and Kali/Evelyn, and I've seen other characters nominated.

[selenak]

You're wecome!

[selenak]

True. Why is it so hard to critisize a woman without falling into these types of clichés?

[selenak]

Yes, exactly. It's not there is LACK of issues which one can critisize Margaret Thatcher vor. But this kind of artifical disgendering (is this a word in English?) is distasteful to me.

Penny Dreadful: I'm told in other comments everyone is already nominated, up to and including Proteus? Which is fabulous and frees both you and me for nominating other fandoms/characters.

[selenak]

I don't know. That may be what she was aiming at, but it didn't come across this way to me. Incidentally, the "remaking herself as posh" strikes a non-Brit like myself as a generational and bigender issue (unrelated to "not of woman born", because there is nothing masculine about class issues). Not only, as legionseagle points out, was it more a "non-regional" thing, but I can think of a lot of male examples of Thatcher's generation where the training themselves out of regional and class bound accents were praised and not regarded as class betrayal. (Actors, for starters - Patrick Stewart doesn't speak Yorkshire dialect -, but also people not in the limelight themselves, like George Martin, who became famous as the Beatles' producer but before that, as a young man, trained himself out of his London working class accent and into the one which resulted in him being described as "Patrician" by absolutely any biographer ever. ) Also, Mantel both says in the interview and in the short story lets her character state that Thatcher would have changed her origins if she could have. Allow me to doubt that. Not for sentimental reasons, but because as far as I know, they were of enormous political benefits to M.T. Didn't she use the whole "I'm a grocer's daughter and I got to the top by hard work and will power, so who needs social benefits and quota?" argument (to simplify it) at nauseam? She marketed herself in a way she couldn't have as an aristocrat. Also, weren't the old elite among the Tories during the time Thatcher rose still carrying the Profumo affair (and all it implied) as an albatros across their collective necks? So she got to embody a new type of conservative appealing to voters who didn't believe into the upper class anymore.

But back to the gender issue. Given Thatcher's public image included hat, pearls, and a voice that was perceived as the all-knowing, scolding nanny type, I'd say she played up and used qualities perceived as feminine as well as those which she may very well have thought of as masculine. (Whatever worked, I reckon.) And undoubtedly she enjoyed being perceived as the toughest in the boys' club that was, by and large, the Tory party of her day. But this strikes me as no different than just about any woman who is successful in a still very male dominated area, no matter her political orientation; other women, however, aren't declared to be "psychologoical transvestites". (Mind you, I think things are getting better. Our current chancellor, for example, is someone whom I've never voted for nor will since she's a conservative and most of her politics aren't my politics; but the fact she's usually wearing trousers in publich - Thatcher never did that, did she? - thankfully hasn't caused any of her opponents to declare her not-of-woman-born.) (Instead, Merkel gets caricatured as Hitler by the occasional Greek, which is a whole different type of insult and unrelated to her gender.)

What I'm trying to get at: Margaret Thatcher has done more than enough anyone can critisize her for. But to my knowledge, she saw herself as a woman, lived as a woman, and died as a woman. Therefore, no one gets to declare her an ersatz male.

[selenak]

Excellent. This frees a slot fo rme to try and get my Rodrigo-Margaret Beaufort thing nominated...

[selenak]

Wow, that sounds fabulous and would free one of my slots...

[kalypso]

It was a frequent criticism of Thatcher that she never did anything for women, in the sense of adopting women-friendly policies or increasing the representation of women in government (obviously she did something as a role model simply by being the first woman to become a British prime minister). But as you say, she liked to play up her feminine appearance ("I stand before you tonight in my chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved: the Iron Lady of the Western World!"), and allegedly wasn't above flirting when it was useful, so she was closer to the stereotype of the woman who prefers male company and keeps out potential female rivals (possibly Elizabeth I was a role model). Spitting Image liked to show her dressed as a man, but I remember contemporary critics pointing out that this was completely ignoring her tactics.

She certainly liked to make the most of her father's solid middle-class business values (though a recent not-hostile biography said she very rarely visited him after she married a much richer businessman) and she also liked to portray herself as a housewife who understood the value of money.

And one of the aspects of her voice lessons was that she wanted to lower her pitch, to sound less shrill - but I don't think that was to sound more masculine, it was a bid for a more attractive feminine voice ("Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman") with an intimate quality intended to seduce the listener.

(And no, she's not very like Theodora, but I have no idea what icon to use...)