An Bittersweet End, and A Beautiful Beginning

After nearly 7 years, it's finally time. As of March 1, 2017 the BattyMamzelle blog will officially become defunct at this address. Over the last two months I've been working closely with a designer I trust to build a website that's more suited to my needs. A lot has happened over the last few years and Blogger is no longer sufficient to handle everything that a professional writer needs.

But, alas you can't get rid of me that easily. I, and the blog, will still be alive and well over at www.cate-young.com. I've very excited about this change. Moving platforms has been on my to-do list for the better part of three years, and I've finally done it. This blog will remain up as an archive. Most of it has been gutted circa 2012 or so, but the important stuff is all still here for reference when needed. The essays, the rants, the nonsense; it's all right where it's always been and will remain up until the Google machine sees fit to swallow it up.

Over the next couple weeks I'll be finishing up the migration and switching over my social media. My handles will stay the same, so you can always come find me for a chat online. I will continue to blog sporadically over at my new home and I hope you'll follow me there. To everyone who has read me, cited me or just complimented me, THANK YOU. It was that encouragement that made me confident that I could make something of my passionate rantings. I'm grateful and excited for the future.

Passengers Should Have Been Brave Enough To Explore Its Dark Premise

Imagine the scenario: your high-tech hibernation pod on the spaceship you're travelling in to colonize a far flung planet has popped open 90 years too early because of a technical malfunction. Faced with the knowledge that you will be long dead when everyone else wakes up, what do you do? According to Passengers, the answer is "doom a beautiful woman to the same fate and lie about the fact that said fate was in fact your choice. Fall in love with her then stalk her across the ship when she discovers the truth and wants nothing to do with you."

In another world, this would be the perfect setup for an exciting thriller with feminist undertones about men's entitlement to women's bodies. But if you can believe it, Passengers is meant to be a story of true love, forged in the fires of intergalactic peril.

No, I'm not kidding.

Other critics have noted the sinister undercurrent of the film's very premise, but the problem with Passengers is that it tried to have its cake and eat it too. Either you're making a film about unconscionable behavior in the vast emptiness of space, or you're making a romance drama about two people effectively lost to time who find love. It takes a level of skill that this film lacks to blend the two successfully.

Bring On The Next Dumpster Fire

via aboutface.org

2016 was a dumpster fire of a year. Not counting larger international setbacks *handwaves* I had a shitty time personally. I ended relationships and I reevaluated others, but mostly I figured out how to get closer to being my own best self. It took a lot of self-reflection and recognition of my own limits, but I'm better off for it, even if it was a long and painful process.

Somehow I also managed to accomplish quite a bit. I wrote my dissertation and finished my Masters degree. I completed a pop culture criticism fellowship with Bitch Media, I appeared on the BGD Podcast, I pitched my first paid pieces and became a ~*rEaL wRiTeR*~ and I started building professional relationships that I hope I can cultivate as my career progresses. I'm proud of those things. They were difficult and extremely hard-won, and now that I've done them, I know I can do them again and again until I'm comfortable enough to raise the bar and try something more difficult and much harder won.

The biggest lesson I learned this year is that despite all the whining about how entitled millennials are, no one ever teaches you how to be an adult or gives you a sustainable roadmap for your life. You're on your own. You figure it out through trial and error and you hope you don't fuck up irreparably. I'm 26 and I'm CONSTANTLY calling my mum to complain about the latest thing I failed at, because at this point in my life it feels like time is slipping away from me and I've never going to have the kind of life I want. And while the first part isn't true, the second part doesn't have to be. It's just going to take far more hustling than I was told I'd ever have to do, what with my good education and two degrees.

2017 will probably suck. That's just the way life goes, but it doesn't have to suck for me. I have goals and I'm planning to achieve them. I'm going to write more. I'm going to stop neglecting this blog. I'm going to save and I'm going to stop making lateness a part of my identity. I'm going to find a way to get myself to the opportunities that I want. Because all I can do is make sure that I'm set.

Here's to 2017!

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch...

Hello loves! It's been ages, but I promise there's been a good reason! This year has been a wonderful messy amalgamation of projects and plans that have completely bogged me down. But it's a great problem to have so I can't complain. 

As you might remember, last year I was named as the inaugural fellow for Bitch Media's Writing Fellowship in Pop Culture. Additionally, I'm a month out from the due date of my dissertation for my MA in Mass Communications. All that's on top of my day job! Unfortunately that meant my blog has been a little neglected of late, but it doesn't mean I haven't been writing and reading and learning. I've published some essays I'm very proud of with Bitch Media, and there are more on the way.

"Racebending rebooted franchises allows us to add diverse perspectives to the existing canon of culturally significant narratives, present minority characters in a way that better reflects our varied experiences, and escape the material dangers that a single story can present."-Reboot and Rally: The Revolutionary Opportunities Inherent In Reupping Franchise Favourites

To hear pop culture tell it, no man has ever unabashedly loved a Black woman without "taming her" first. It's significant to have a Black woman who embraces her inner "savage" be acknowledged as the prize that she is: beautiful, successful, ambitious and not at all in search of a partner. 
-Performance Anxiety: Why I'm Here To Watch Drake Worship Rihanna

While Wiley is right that art reflects life and vice versa, she skipped an essential step: Art is meant not just to reflect life, but to comment on it. To distill a universal truth about the mundane lives we live and supply us with a greater understanding of ourselves. The artist’s responsibility is not simply to reproduce the violence that exists, but to deconstruct it. What did this season of OITNB add to the conversation about police brutality that hadn’t already been said? How was this plotline any different from a simple reproduction of Black trauma?-On "Orange Is The New Black" and the Destruction of The Black Body

The stories we tell about ourselves do not exist in a vacuum. As I often say, pop culture is a feedback loop that is both sustained by and contributes to the ways we see ourselves as a society and in relation to each other, so it’s frightening to know that at a cultural level, Black women are considered inconsequential, that our stories exist as incidental to those of white men and women. As Mary McNamara wrote at the Los Angeles Times, “These characters should not be used as seasoning or garland to give a white man’s story a little spice, a little color. They should be telling their stories too, in ways that don’t call for the ultimate sacrifice quite so often.” Television’s boast of increased diversity is meaningless if its stories reinforce the trope that Black female characters are expendable. -When Visibility Isn't Enough: Abigail Mills and the Failed Promised of "Sleepy Hollow"

I have two more wonderful essays in the pipeline and a magazine feature for Bitch Magazine about performative misandry in online feminist spaces (hence Beyoncé.) In a month I'll have graduated and be free to finally start my secret project that I won't divulge here in case I change my mind. This year has been hectic and stressful but I've gotten to write about things that I'm passionate about and be guided by wonderful editors who helped make me a better writer. I'm excited for what 2017 will bring for me, but honestly I'm just trying to get through 2016! I'm so grateful that even though I haven't posted in months, people are still here everyday reading the things I've written and finding value in my work. It's part of what gives me the confidence to pursue my writing professionally. Onward to the new year!

#GYMTW: On Black Women And The Capitalist System

Critiques of black women and capitalism without first properly locating their position with the capitalist system are incomplete, disingenuous and pointless. Discussions about capitalism and who benefits from the existing social structure cannot be flat. They must be intersectional and take into account the varied ways in which capitalism affects people at different levels of society. Everyone is against capitalism when black women demand payment of the money that they worked for, but is happy to support from the ground up, policies and legislation that would funnel wealth back into the hands of the most wealthy.

The backlash to both Beyoncé's Formation and Rihanna's Bitch Better Have My Money indicate a racial bent in the opposition to the fair valuation of labour. In the video for BBHMM, Rihanna and her women of colour #goonsquad kidnap and torture the wealthy white female wife of a white man who is later revealed to be an accountant who stole Rihanna's money. At the end of the video, it is heavily implied that Rihanna dismembers and kills "The Bitch," as he is styled. Opposition to the imagery largely centered on violence enacted on the white woman as a means to harm the "true" culprit, the white man. What these critiques did not acknowledge was their implicit assumption that the white female character was not also complicit in the theft of Rihanna's wealth. But as Lauren Chief Elk points out in her work with Yeoshin Lourdes and Bardot Smith surrounding GYMTW:

"White women are the biggest beneficiaries of white men's historical wealth. When we begin to really dissect what pay inequality means we have to look at it intersectionally. When thinking about wealth redistribution it's important for white women to look at their position to women of color, and examine how for generations they have also exploited us and gained huge advantages off us."

Many people took issue with the line "I just might be the next Bill Gates in the making" in Beyoncé's Formation, citing it as a reflection of Beyoncé's desire to simply replicate systems of oppression through capitalism pioneered by white men. But a black woman possessing the kind of capital that Bill Gates does is so far and away from what the capitalist system imagined for itself as to be a mini-revolution in its own right. As far as I am concerned, wealth transfer to black women in a capitalist system is reparations.