Defining My Girlhood

[TW: Abuse]

 My childhood was destroyed and turned into something that damaged me by a patriarchal societal upbringing that intersected with transphobic views that smothered my reality and my possibility to find myself in a haze of physical, psychological and emotional abuse from parents and others. I never had a childhood for these reasons, much less a girlhood, but I'm relearning that it's not too late to reconfigure and claim my own girlhood and define my childhood on my own terms.


My own sense of self had been muted for so long that my only outlet for expressing how I felt was through the vicarious nature of art, and specifically television, movies and music. Little tremors of power coursed through me in the images of Sailor Scouts because they stood up for themselves, which wasn't something I had the voice or know how to do against a father who routinely made sure I evaded all things feminine or face his wrath in the form of a beating. My father thought he was beating femininity out of me and masculinity into me, but what he was doing was completely eliminating my sense of self and setting me up for later bouts of depression, submissiveness and PTSD.

I recently viewed childhood favourite Labyrinth in a cinema, and while I was always struck by how much I saw myself in the lead character Sarah one scene had slipped out of my mind, but came flooding back in torrents during this viewing. I was already crying a good deal throughout, because fellow gender weirdo David Bowie had passed away recently (he'd mean something to me much later in life), but one line of dialogue made a memory come back to me that I had forgotten. The memory was that of a young version of myself re-enacting Labyrinth in my backyard saying "You have no power over me" over and over again. Those words are a deliberate statement of reclamation. I wish I had the strength to say those words to my father when I was that young, but I never began to put those words into sentences until almost twenty years later. "You have no power over me".

Fast-forward about ten years from that childhood memory and I'm listening to Bikini Kill, and finding a saviour in the words of Kathleen Hanna. I'm scribbling the words "Feels Blind" in bathroom stalls in the high-school I dreaded going to every day and on my bedroom wall as a kind of motto of my own sense of self. The bridge of the song features Kathleen singing her fucking lungs out, screaming the words "Women are well acquainted with thirst, How does it feel? It feels blind". The muted nature of my life in my teenage years was an endpoint that I thought at the time would end in suicide, but getting into Bikini Kill was like a curtain being pulled down, and I finally had a voice of my own to speak and scream that I wasn't satisfied. Kathleen's voice was like a flurry, a kick, a shot of confidence. Bikini Kill pulled me down a rabbit-hole that got me into feminism and queercore bands like Team Dresch along with other all girl rock bands like Sleater-Kinney.. The all-girl part was really important to me, because I didn't need a masculine voice to comfort me.. I needed reconciliation and support in knowing that I wouldn't be alone in feeling the way I did from another woman, and Kathleen was that person for the longest time. Today, I have "Feels Blind" tattooed on my wrist, because I wouldn't be alive without Bikini Kill.

When I finally moved away from my parents in the Summer of 2014 I told them I was going to Philadelphia to make movies. They knew I had contacts in Philadelphia who were making films of their own so I told them a lie to free myself. I went to Target after a 14 hour drive up the country (soundtracked by various Riot Grrrl acts) and bought some tops and jeans I could be comfortable in. I shed the oversized, masculine clothing on my body, and stepped into my own skin for the first time in my life. That was truly the first step in redefining my own girlhood, but I still lacked the language or the know how to get by on my own as a woman. I wasn't socialized to know these things. I was an on-looker with all my best girlfriends while growing up, but now it was my time to learn what I wanted to, and what kind of person I would be. I'd be carving out my own journey and figuring out my own sense of self.

I've been struggling for a very long time trying to reconcile why my childhood turned out the way that it did, but the short answer to the question is that it's the default considering how violent our society is towards transgender people. Today, I'm making a statement to free myself again from the burden of a broken childhood and the absence of my own girlhood while growing up. I am a girl, and I'm finding things out about myself every day. I'm turning into myself. I had a neglected girlhood, but I know it was present, because I could feel it, and I had a reckoning when I lived vicariously through other girls I looked up to in art. That my own girlhood was attempted to be stamped out by my own father's ideas of patriarchal upbringing doesn't matter anymore. I'm going to take the moments I can remember and cherish them, even if they were just in movies, and I'm going to hold onto them. They were the moments that eventually sculpted me into the woman I am today. My girlhood was observation. Looking into a window of a house I always wanted to enter. I'm finally here, and everything I ever wanted is now in practice. Everything I do makes me the woman that I am. That is my girlhood. That is my truth.

Do You Have Any Regrets?: 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (Dan Trachtenberg, 2016)

My Dad was not a good man. He ruled our house with a dedication to control that veered into threats that were both verbal and physical. I still have the emotional bruises that came with growing up with a man who came from a line of men who were taught to be respected was to be loved, and to be respected one had to be taught to obey through violence. Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) talks about regrets. She saw a little girl being drug along a store by the arm much too hard by a father, and how she couldn't do anything to stop it. The girl fell. Michelle said she knew girls like that because she was one. I was one too.

Female Filmmaker Project: Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015)

In the book of Genesis Adam and Eve live in the garden of Eden among many temptations that God has laid before them to test their faith. One such temptation is the "Tree of Knowledge" or the tree of life. The tree of knowledge is a metaphor for free will, and if anyone eats from the tree of knowledge they become "like god". Eve eats an apple from the tree after great temptation from Satan in the form of a snake and she is made into a scepter of fallen grace, because she dared question her rulers who "knew better" and convinced Adam to do the same. Eve is every woman who ever sought liberation, and like Eve the women who suffer and languish under strict patriarchal rule in Mustang also take of that apple.

Mustang begins as a breezy summer picture. The girls have ruffled sleeves on their blouses and smiles on their face as they cheer out "Let's walk, the weather's nice". The end of school begats horseplay in an inviting ocean as summer arrives and nothing could appear to be dangerous about this situation, but they made the mistake of having fun with boys. When word got out to their grandmother and uncle that they had been engaging in this activity it meant handcuffs, cages and control, because a woman who plays with boys eventually has sex, and in this small patriarchal community nothing could be more abominable.

Director Deniz Gamze Erguven does a good job of introducing visual confinement over her motion picture. The grandparents are from an older way of thinking where a girls chastity was tied into her value as a wife, and in their panic to preserve their granddaughters they slowly begin to build walls around them as they sell their five adopted children off to eligible bachelors. In the beginning of Mustang the camera has an elegance in frame that mirrored the young girls personalities, and when the walls go up the camera remains intuitive to their perspective but instead of the curiosity of the world inviting exploration the eye is dominated by mundane household activities and an introduction of rhythm and repetition in the girls lives, as every woman in their community has taught them this is their definitive role. There is no safe space in the home of this sisterhood either, and all five girls eventually start striving for their own spots in the house-jail to relax. The older siblings sunbathed through a crack in the exterior. The youngest girl literally plans an escape just to go to a soccer game, which coincidentally was attended by only women after rioting caused by male attendees ruined the national team's previous game. This notion of a safe space is in the visual language and finding a fracture inside of their of their home built upon an architectural chastity belt becomes paramount. As the walls become more densely layered with steel and spikes the house begins to resemble something between a castle and a prison- a blunt metaphor if there ever was one, but appropriate in its usage here- and the only truly safe space becomes the arms of the sisterhood. In many frames the camera lingers on their symbiotic relationship. The girls are a tangle of limbs, a web of skin providing support where there otherwise was none and it becomes a recurring visual motif as the web is untangled and their sisterhood altered as each girl one after the other, getting younger and younger is married off to a suitor.

"You'll learn to love your husband" but what if they never wanted one in the first place? The compulsory decision making of their uncle, and to a lesser extent their grandmother a representative of a larger cultural problem all around the world where views on women are archaic is driving force of the conflict. In a previous film I watched for the Female Filmmaker Project, The Day I Became a Woman, there is a long section of the film devoted to one woman who escapes her husband by disobeying him and competing in a bicycle race. In that movie the feminist text of the film is refashioned into an action picture through long tracking shots, overhead camera work and an attention to detail that makes the escape invigorating, terrifying and personal. Mustang goes for something similar in the latter half of the movie when the feminist text becomes genre by adapting the prison break trope. It's a relatively standard idea considering the already in place prison metaphor, but it works because of a smart decision to align the escape with the wedding of the second youngest child. There are legitimate stakes in what the two girls are trying to elude at this point as we've already seen the previous sisters suffer under sexual violence in their marriage or plan their own much more dire escape through attempted suicide. This is their last chance to make it to Istanbul. To find their own liberation. Erguven's choices as a director in these final moments are solid. The foliage and cages become peepholes and escaping the maze of steel is like a lesser version of the climax in The Shining. There is never a clear view of the Uncle as he trudges through the steel walls behind them, and the camera stays almost exclusively in the girls point of view which only makes the final moments more tense and worthy of its genre rhythm.

Mustang is a film whose text is woven into feminist theory as well as personal women's narratives, but it also functions as a folk tale. "The girl(s) who have been locked away in the tower" has been around literature and cinema for a very long time. In the older Disney animated pictures there would need to be a prince to whisk the innocent maiden off to safety, but those narratives were always reliant on good men earning a prize. It was a male hero's journey instead of a self actualized story about women. The metaphorical dragon in Mustang is an ingrained culture of men making decisions for women and having abject control over their respective bodies. But in Mustang there is no prince. The sisters have to be their own saviours, and while that seems to blur into the strong female character archetype that oftentimes reduces women in action pictures here it is an inborn strength through desperation, and not one achieved through violence. Mustang comes from a Turkish mindset first and foremost, but there are other similar narratives throughout cinema that prove dominance over women is bound to Earth in various forms of severity. Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides and Isao Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya are two others on the same family tree as Mustang, and the list goes on and on all the way back through the history of cinema whether the director was Kenji Mizoguchi or Ida Lupino. Cinema is a mirror into reality, and one doesn't need to look far to see that often in movies women are struggling under the control of some force whether it be societal or personal just because we ate of an apple.

Analysis of a Scene: Jeanne La Pucelle (Jacques Rivette, 1994)

*Analysis of a scene is a feature on Curtsies and Hand Grenades where I take a look at specific scenes in movies and discuss them*


Jacques Rivette smartly evades the weight of Carl Th. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc by never trying to emulate or tap into the same filmmaking techniques that bluntly created one of the most devastating portraits of personhood in all of Cinema. Dreyer focused on the weary, crumbling presence of Maria Falconetti's face in close-up, but Rivette's picture avoids those comparisons by never actually focusing on the trial or lingering on the tragedy. Instead, Rivette opts for a portrait of Joan as a person who was persecuted not only because she was considered an idolatress, but because she dared call into question the place of women in society by subverting her gender role and dabbling in masculine presentation.

Joan giddily darts a pair of scissors across her unkempt straw-like hair in order to please god and herself. She chooses a mirror of armour, a masculinizing of vanity. Her reflection reveals an evolving self. In order for Joan to go into battle she must adopt the roles of men. If she is going to be with the men she must be a man. Her first task is to remove the long hair that paints her as feminine. She mutters to another woman who works nearby that she must look like a boy, and in an attempt to make her haircut more appropriate the woman offers to even up her look. This early scene paints a portrait that continues throughout the rest of the film, and it is one of women helping Joan achieve her goals. Whether those women know that Joan is only merely doing these things because she sees messengers of god or they envision a woman breaking barriers of gendered norms is irrelevant. They help her regardless. The same woman who cuts her hair finds her a suit of armour made from hand-me-downs of smaller boys.

Jacques Rivette shoots his adaptation of Joan of Arc with documentary style realism. There are insertions of talking head shots to deliver the exposition of the narrative. These scenes are coupled with recreations of the events certain characters discussed moments previously, and the majority of the first act is Joan's acceptance of her task and the battles she wins for her country and for God. Along the way many men question the legitimacy of Joan's combat and military skill, often chalking any setbacks to her gender, and whenever she succeeds men say "I've never seen a woman do that before" or "You're pretty good for a woman", to paraphrase. These exchanges of soldiers finding their notions of gender challenged further establish a theme on Joan's breaking of binary ideas on what a woman can or cannot accomplish. Even a woman can die for her country, and her beliefs.

This particular version of Joan's story is split into two parts and while the first film is relatively triumphant the second part brings about the inevitable tragedy that is nestled inside of this story. The tranquil pace of the first picture begins to evolve in the final hours, as that same pacing mutates from peaceful to brutally anxious. Every viewer goes into the film knowing that Joan is a martyr, but Rivette alters this narrative slightly, and presents a wrinkle on Joan's doom that is far more powerful in day to day life than the religious persecution that colours Dreyer's masterpiece. In Rivette's film her martyrdom would be one of the illusion of choice for a woman who lives in an uncaring patriarchal environment.

Once Joan is captured by the English they begin a trial based around her idolatry, which Rivette only briefly engages, but the reasoning behind the trial is clearly the deep-seated misogyny behind the men who would be furious that a woman defeat them in a battle. If battle is not man's sport anymore then what does he have left to conquer? But it's more than that as well. There is a hatred in how easily Joan was able to try on a masculine identity, and worse how natural a fit it became on her body. The bible states in Deuteronomy that any man or woman who would wear the clothing that wasn't associated with their gender would be considered an abomination, a disgusting thing, a wicked creature. Joan came through God, but was challenging the very notions of his perceived word. There would be no evolving of ideas on a gender binary. There would only be fire to put out an idea.

That idea would spread in subtle ways. In one digression a mother is frustrated her daughter's hair is tangled. The girl doesn't want to straighten or comb her hair, and after spending a short amount of time with Joan she seems to have grasped towards that freedom Joan was exhibiting in her presentation, even if that just meant letting her hair become slightly messy. This one scene is the fissure in society caused by Joan's gendered rebellion, and in a cinematic context it is all the evidence one would need to know Joan was causing change in the ideas of the women around her. Maybe I didn't have to spend so much time on my appearance?

Joan took the dress under the condition that she would be sent back to a prison in her home country and if she would be given female prison guards to attend to her needs. That final detail is important, because Joan knew that women, in this telling of the story, would have her back. Throughout this film women have been helping her along the way, whether that be the woman who helped her find the armour or the girl she befriended before trial. They were Joan's true angels. When the prison guards rip her of her masculinity and force her back into the more traditional femininity that she was seen wearing in the first scenes of the film it spells her doom. As a prisoner she was left to the will of the men around her, because there would be no female prison guards. Only men who saw a vulnerable woman who they could have their way with on repeated occasions. They wrap her in chains. Her dress exposed. A metaphor for the place women held in society during Joan's period of life. The only way to push back the rapist prison guards was to dress like a man again after they loosened her shackles. It was the only protection she had against rape. And as soon as they saw she was dressing this way again the priests decided she had rebuked god, but they weren't acting in the law of god. They were acting in the law of man. The law of man that would say a woman should stay in her place and lest she get out of line she be put back where she belonged. For Joan that meant ash.

Top 50 New to Me Viewings of 2015

The biggest change in my viewing habits from 2014 to 2015 was the centering of specific auteurs, which is much closer to the way my boyfriend watches movies than I choose to experience cinema. I usually take a sampler platter approach to the way I engage with cinema, but by living with someone who is far more organized than I my viewing habits were altered to some degree. His changed as well and my attitude of picking films on a whim became present in his life. We even kept a hat around this year with specific movies on slips of paper we'd draw that we'd eventually end up watching (an idea of mine). However, we scrapped that hat when we started an Alfred Hitchcock project, which you'll see visible in this list. Cinema always remains interesting. The movies I watched this year had their strengths and weaknesses, and there are certain goals I did not keep (50-50 gender split, which ended up being close to 35/65), but cinema is always the highlight of my year. This top 50 represents the best and brightest of those viewings I had in the previous year. At the top of the list is Robert Altman's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" which has been on my mind more than any other film in the past twelve months. It even has Cher. The other 49 movies do not carry that distinction so that made the choice for #1 ultimately easy to land upon. Here's to hoping 2016 is as fruitful, and I'll finally hit that 50/50 gender gap in viewing. (As always new releases and rewatches are excluded from the list)

1. Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982)

2. Wheels on Meals (Sammo Hung, 1984)

3. Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo, 1995)

4. Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985

5. The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini, 2000)

6. Hookers on Davie (Janis Cole & Holly Dale, 1984)

7. New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977)

8. The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)

9. Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

10. Green Snake (Hark Tsui, 1993)

11. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

12. All About Eve (Joseph L. Makiewicz, 1950)

13. Angel's Egg (Mamoru Oshii, 1985)

14. Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, 1974)

15. Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991)

16. Dance, Girl Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

17. Peking Opera Blues (Hark Tsui, 1986)

18. Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007)

19. Birds (Takashi Miike, 2000)

20. Limelight (Charlie Chaplin, 1952)

21. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945)

22. The Blade (Hark Tsui, 1995)

23. Challenge of the Masters (Lau Kar-leung, 1975)

24. A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon (Hark Tsui, 1989)

25. A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)

26. Needing You (Johnnie To, 2000)

27. Le Pont Du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981)

28. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

29. Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (Lau Kar-Leung, 1984)

30. The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

31. No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1994)

32. Monsieur Verdoux (Charlie Chaplin, 1947)

33. Katie Tippel (Paul Verhoeven, 1975)

34. Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967)

35. L'invitation Au Voyage (Germaine Dulac, 1927)

36. Sheer Madness (Margarethe Von Trotta, 1983)

37. Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Takashi Miike, 2009)

38. The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)

39. I Was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks, 1949)

40. My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)

41. Jour de Fete (Jacques Tati, 1949)

42. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

43. Stagefright: Aquarius (Michele Soavi, 1987)

44. I'll Take You There (Adrienne Shelly, 1999)

45. Friends with Money (Nicole Holofcener, 2006)

46. Once Upon a Time in China I-III (Hark Tsui, 1991-1993)

47. Merry-Go-Round (Jacques Rivette, 1981)

48. About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)

49. Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

50. Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999)