Beyond Blood & Bra Straps

So I know this blog has lain dormant for the past little while (so much so that I forgot my password!) because I'm insane, and have basically been doing three full time jobs. Well, they would be three full time jobs if I were getting paid for them.

One of them has been co-producing a theatre festival at Concordia (http://loyolatheatre.tripod.com), and stage managing one of the shows in the festival. When we first got the proposals for the projects (not that us, the lowly student producers were given any opportunity to see them before the faculty approved them) were all about women - an adaptation of Anne Sexton poems, Paula Vogel's Desdemona, A Play About A Handkerchief, a play about what it means to be a young woman faced with the idea of "goodness," a group of three plays written by a graduating female playwright from the department, among others.

To myself and the other co-producer, this seemed to suggest an obvious theme: feminism. We got excited. We planned installation art. We came up with a title: Beyond Blood & Bra Straps.

We were thwarted at every turn. Our advisor (all hail the straight, white, balding, Ph.D.-ed male) looked at us crooked every time we brought up the subject. We nearly quit half a dozen times each. He said the idea that "you can be a mom and a feminist or whatever" was an 80's idea. Like he knew something about the topic.

In the end, the installation art got nixed because no one wanted to approve a budget for two gals to build giant vaginas in the auditorium. But we were being marked on our ability to create a "whole art space." So I gathered up some old bras (why do we keep bras we don't wear? The ones that the underwires have come out of and that poke you in the armpit? A topic for another post...) and a dozen or so stockings with runs in them and strung them up on a string across the space. We're calling it The UnderGarland. Yes, this is the fluff paper as manifested in theatre school.

Someone asked me what it was about. I stammered, then bluffed. Then I decided that my bluff was a good idea after all. I told her that it was purely literal. The space where the UnderGarland was hung is the passage way between the lobby and theatre. The theatre, I said, was literally beyond the bra straps.

"Oh good," she said, "I was worried that it was some crazy feminist thing..."

You were worried!?!

A twenty one year old actress is worried that feminism might... what? intrude on the theatre? say something that makes you uncomfortable? ask you not to submit to the male-dominance of theatre which continues to exclude women as directors, artistic directors, playwrights, and characters on stage? You would have thought that feminism would be good for actresses.

I am tempted to let the whole thing slide, let my literal art stand as literal, because I don't have a good idea of what it means, outside of knowing that the display of displaced lingerie is meant to demystify female sexuality - they're just items of clothing... maybe it's the women who wear them that make them sexy. Maybe they're there to defend women who won't be cow-towed into wearing lingerie for a man but who just want to wear it for themselves. Maybe it's to convince women that they don't need to apologise for having a sexual self. Maybe it's to convince women that they don't have to apologise for their bodies.