As you may (or may not) be aware, International Women's Day is coming up in a couple of weeks. I may blog about it later (especially as - keep your fingers crossed - I'm planning to meet with a gender equality group about potential projects), but this post reminded me of a few things that I wanted to mention now, in increasing order of importance:
First, the Oscars are on Sunday, which I otherwise totally forgot about. Now, I was never an Academy fanatic, but being a movie buff, I did try to keep an eye on the noms (even if I had totally given up on the Oscars as an even remotely reliable sign of quality in film-making after As Good as It Gets' Helen Hunt, who is a lovely person, I'm sure, beat Judi Dench's performance in Mrs. Brown for Best Actress in 1997). Each year, I had usually seen a few of the movies (only once had I seen everything nominated in a major category), and around this time of year, it was always an interesting topic of conversation. This year, I don't even know what's been nominated. It's funny how your priorities change in Peace Corps. I'm not saying that the Oscars aren't important
Okay, I'm kind of saying the Oscars aren't important.
But almost anything can be important if we make it important. Take this example from Reel Injun, a documentary about the portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood: Part of the documentary covers Marlon Brando's famous refusal to accept his Oscar for the Godfather in 1973 due to the poor "treatment of American Indians today by the film industry...and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee," as explained in a speech on his behalf by Sacheen Cruz Littlefeather. At the time of broadcast, the armed standoff between the FBI and Native American activists at Wounded Knee was ongoing. Russell Means, a Lakota activist, remembers how bad morale was, how he didn't think they would make it out alive, how some of the guys were watching the Academy Awards, when "all of a sudden we get a call. They start yelling: 'Hey, there's an Indian [on TV]!" and how that moment created at the Oscars by Brando and Littlefeather "totally uplifted our lives."
Any Peace Corps Volunteer will tell you that at the top of their "most-missed" list of important things is family and friends (unless they're heartless bastards - which, incidentally, is a great band). I think of it as missing community, of which, I, too, have keenly felt the absence. I miss my familial community, my work community, my yoga community, my bar-trivia community, my alumni community, my neighborhood community, and yes, my community-work community. So I may not miss Oscar himself, whether or not he's important this year, but I do miss the role that he played in facilitating conversations, vociferous disagreements, rambling digressions, and yes, bets (non-monetary, of course) among the people in my various communities.
Okay, I'm kind of saying the Oscars aren't important.
But almost anything can be important if we make it important. Take this example from Reel Injun, a documentary about the portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood: Part of the documentary covers Marlon Brando's famous refusal to accept his Oscar for the Godfather in 1973 due to the poor "treatment of American Indians today by the film industry...and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee," as explained in a speech on his behalf by Sacheen Cruz Littlefeather. At the time of broadcast, the armed standoff between the FBI and Native American activists at Wounded Knee was ongoing. Russell Means, a Lakota activist, remembers how bad morale was, how he didn't think they would make it out alive, how some of the guys were watching the Academy Awards, when "all of a sudden we get a call. They start yelling: 'Hey, there's an Indian [on TV]!" and how that moment created at the Oscars by Brando and Littlefeather "totally uplifted our lives."
Any Peace Corps Volunteer will tell you that at the top of their "most-missed" list of important things is family and friends (unless they're heartless bastards - which, incidentally, is a great band). I think of it as missing community, of which, I, too, have keenly felt the absence. I miss my familial community, my work community, my yoga community, my bar-trivia community, my alumni community, my neighborhood community, and yes, my community-work community. So I may not miss Oscar himself, whether or not he's important this year, but I do miss the role that he played in facilitating conversations, vociferous disagreements, rambling digressions, and yes, bets (non-monetary, of course) among the people in my various communities.
Second, I wanted to share this video in time for the Oscars tomorrow. As it highlights, there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of gender imbalance in America, even though opportunities in the U.S. are now much better for women than at other times in its own past and in other parts of the world today. Moreover, Hollywood is merely a microcosm of a larger landscape of disparity and gender normative privilege.
Third, I can't help but detect an inherent, and perhaps unavoidable, degree of imperialism, colonialism, or condescension in development work, in which good-hearted, well-meaning folks from industrialized or technologically advanced countries or regions go to developing ones to help bring about a better quality of life. At worst, I've heard international development workers (only a few, thankfully), who are doing amazing and important work, no question, talk about the communities or individuals they're helping almost like pets or small children who have learned SO much and done SO well and they're just SO proud of them. Even at its most ego-less and self-effacing, I find something slightly patronizing about it, so the video from the Women and Hollywood blog was a good reminder that it's not like we have reached the pinnacle of civilization ourselves, that our houses, too, are glass (so to speak) and that we should try to be humble and ever mindful of our role as facilitators of (hopefully sustainable) change that comes from within the community. It's about others, not about us.
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