Feminist comics fans have had quite the year: Wonder Woman broke box office records last year and Captain Marvel is set to premiere the Marvel Universe’s first female lead this spring. Even in bookstores, this year has seen hits like Comics for Choice and Bitch Planet that tackle overtly feminist themes. It’s a far cry from the landscape that feminist comic artists navigated in the ’70s and ’80s, when comics was an insular boy’s club of artists, writers, and publishers, and no one — not even feminists — would publish radical female cartoonists.

In 1972, realizing that no traditional, male-run comic book company would publish them, female comic book artists in San Francisco joined together to publish Wimmen’s Comix. The collective published 17 issues, the last in 1991.

One of the artists that Wimmen’s Comix published was the young Julie Doucet. At the age of 23, Doucet contributed “You know, I’m a very shy girl,” “The First Time I Shaved My Legs,” and “Tampax Again” to Wimmen’s Comix Issue 15.

But Doucet had bigger plans than publishing a few comics; she wanted to write her own strip.

In 1987, Doucet wrote the first comic of her eventual series Dirty Plotte (French Canadian slang for vagina) but due to its unrelentingly raw content — nudity, explicit sex, female carnality, violence, and of course, menstrual blood flooding streets like a rogue river — no one would publish it. She even asked a feminist bookstore to carry a self-published version. But no one would sell it. It was too uncomfortable.

That is until the Canadian comics publishing company Drawn & Quarterly — which describes Dirty Plotte as “quite simply one of the most iconic comic book series to have ever been created” — began printing her work in 1991.

(On October 2 of this year, Drawn & Quarterly published Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet, a hardback, two volume collection of the full Dirty Plotte series.)

In the pages of her comic, Doucet’s self-inspired character “Julie Doucet” draws comics, masturbates with a cookie, dresses as a man, castrates one, cuts off her breasts, and sews a penis onto herself.

Julie skips cleaning her house, but pays special attention to her vaginal hygiene in the bath. She stresses about purchasing the perfect bra in a dream, even though the actual Julie never wore one.

For drawing such loud, provocative and seemingly vulnerable scenes, Doucet herself is rather quiet and measured.

This past November, she spoke on a panel at Comic Arts Brooklyn, an annual comics festival at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

The event—standing room only—was filled with an audience keen to hear Doucet speak with cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore, who recently published a book-length analysis of Doucet’s work, life, and contribution to the world of feminist comics called Sweet Little Cunt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucet.

Several times during the panel, Moore tried to complement Doucet’s work and place her in a canon of influential comic creators — a woman from the audience even stood up to tell Doucet that the comic about Doucet’s first sexual encounter had a profound impact on her own coming of age — but Doucet shyly shrugged off the attention. Moore told Doucet that her art had fundamentally changed the world of comics; Doucet quietly laughed, “I wasn’t aware.”

It’s difficult to know whether Doucet is genuinely modest, or is keen not to take up too much space as a female artist exhausted by the dominance of men in the comic world. But it seems more likely to me that she was being honest: in the middle of the ‘90s, trying to draw comics about gender and sexuality as a woman, Doucet was just trying to get by. She didn’t and couldn’t know her comics would have such a profound effect on comics culture, and it seems, she might still not believe it.

Following the panel, the energy was palpable. I approached artists selling copies of Comics for Choice, prints of feminist figures, or zines about their or their female family members’ own experiences, and asked them who they looked to for inspiration. Many named Doucet.

When I interviewed Doucet over email however, she wasn’t sure if people like her comics more than in the ‘90s, but she was sure that the resurgence of feminism had an influence: “People seem interested in the gender theme comics in a whole different way, that’s for sure.”

Despite her celebrated success and rippling influence, Doucet stopped producing comics in the mid-2000s. She credits the comics “boys club” and the unreliable income with pushing her away from the medium.

And although Doucet recognizes the landscape has shifted for feminist creators, she doesn’t see herself reentering the comics world anytime soon:  “It feels like I don’t have any stories to tell,” she wrote me. It’s a strange phrase to hear coming from Doucet. After all, if her work was about almost everything—it was predicated on exploration. Her comics explored gender identity, sexuality, womanhood, power, and violence—what stories didn’t she have to tell?

Doucet hasn’t quit creating however. Instead, she turned away from text and towards images. She returned to printing—linocuts, woodcuts, and silkscreen printing—which she has originally studied at university. She published a book of collage and poetry called Elle Humor in 2006 and another titled A l’Ecole De L’Amour in 2007.  She even designed a cover for the Penguin Classics Little Women that looks like it could be a page from one of her comics. 

Doucet has shirked off the weight of the comic world, but her work continues to draw attention and glean recognition.  In 2006, she had a solo exhibition of her print work at the Galerie B-312 in Montreal; in 2007, she participated in the Biennale de Montreál; and in 2008, she appeared at the Triennale québécoise at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Most recently, in 2017, her comic work was featured in a retrospective exhibit at the Fumetto Comic Festival in Luzern, Switzerland.

“It was the first time I got to see the extent of all my comic and non-comic production,” said Doucet. “It was huge, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I hadn’t realized how much work I’d done in my life. That was very overwhelming.”

Julie Doucet's comics explored gender identity, sexuality, womanhood, power, and violence—what stories didn't she have to tell?
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Doucet remains a force in the comic’s world, especially now that Dirty Plotte has been republished. And she’s proving that female artists can be more than one thing. Just as her comics depicted Julie-the-lover, Julie-the-man, Julie-the-artist, Julie-the-woman; so her life is revealing Julie-the-cartoonist, Julie-the-print-maker, Julie-the-poet.

She wrote me that she’s started drawing again this year and has been working on a series of geometric cardboard structures, although she admits, “I’m not sure where I’m going with that.”

Doucet’s work continues to explore the infinite permutations of womanhood and artistry, but her role as Julie-the-publisher is perhaps the most radical to date. She started her own publishing house in 2013, Le pantalitaire, to publish her own work and has found herself full circle: from unpublished to publisher—from powerless to powerful.

In a culture steeped in male violence against women, whether it’s physical assault or online harassment,  the concept of violent female revenge can sound exhilarating. Given the high rates of women murdered by male partners, and the simultaneously low rates of male rapists given jail time, it’s hard to not fantasize about a vigilante giving these men their comeuppance, or at least, a female figure that invokes the same fear in cis men that women face daily.

Feminists have been grappling with the complexities of these fantasies for decades. On one hand, it’s clear that more real-world violence is not the answer to a culture already poisoned by it, regardless of justification. But also, can we at least imagine unbridled revenge?!

The existence of, and potential for radical female violence is one of the many difficult subjects psychotherapist, author, and longtime feminist Phyllis Chesler tackles in her latest book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women, The book itself traces Chesler’s journey from her Orthodox Jewish childhood in Brooklyn up until the present day, primarily focusing on her experiences during the heyday of the second-wave feminist movement. While it’s clear her writings come from a place of passion and respect, Chesler doesn’t shy away from giving a realistic picture of the movement’s in-fighting and the topics that caused derision between women vying for justice.

One of the most fascinating subjects in Chesler’s book is the movement’s division over the overtly violent rhetoric of Valerie Solanas, the woman who penned the infamous SCUM Manifesto and later attempted to murder Andy Warhol. In later years, a similar division would spring up surrounding the trial of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a woman plunged into sex work as a teen, who later murdered seven men. Her first victim, Richard Mallory, was a convicted rapist Wuornos claimed she murdered in self-defense. Her narrative around the other victims shifted throughout the trial, regardless, the story of a serially abused sex worker reaping revenge on a violent man both enlivened and divided the feminist community.

Given the cartoonish conflations often made between feminism and man-hating, some feminist leaders, Betty Friedan in particular, did not support the notion of aligning with either Solanas or Wuornos, particularly because neither IDed as feminist themselves. Their anger was, let’s say, bad for the brand. However, Chesler and many others, felt empathy towards both women, kept an open dialogue with Solanas and later wrote the forward to a collection of Wuornos’ letters.

In conjunction with the release of her new book, I was lucky enough to interview her about how the feminist movement has evolved, why arguing is crucial to a movement, and the allure of violent female vigilantes.

Isaac: Do you think the internet has created greater understanding between feminists with different ideologies and priorities?

Chesler: I think if feminists of my generation had understood that people with ideas are always fighting with each other, and taking ideas very seriously, it would’ve helped. If you look at military history, you’ll quickly see that in every movement there was a falling out of line. What I never liked was incivility, or never speaking to someone again because you disagree on one issue. The ideological demand for saluting to one flag fully with your whole heart is somewhat totalitarian. We’re all going to have different priorities. Intersectionality is not new. We didn’t have a word for it at that point, we just understood that everything was related and that each woman chose her priorities.

I was thinking about how people talk about intersectionality like it’s a new issue. Looking at the history of feminism, the issue of intersectionality was always there.

Totally, but Kimberle Crenshaw had to coin the phrase for it to really enter the conversation on a mainstream level. Sometimes I’ll hear people condemn feminists for openly disagreeing, but I think disagreeing is fine, if only the women of my generation understood that. Sexism is like racism and homophobia, you have to actively try to unlearn it. Even if you’re a woman, you have to unlearn your own bias against women. We didn’t want to understand the “Mean Girl” stuff when I was younger, which is why I wrote about it in Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.

There were many feminists at the beginning, I was one of them, who said “we have to praise and uplift women because we’ve been kept down for so long.” But since there are so many differences between individual women, there will always be fighting. I think your generation is much more accepting of that truth. But my generation felt like our hearts would break if other women betrayed us right after we found the language for sexism.

Since there are so many differences between individual women, there will always be fighting.
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I was really fascinated with Betty Friedan’s desire to keep Valerie Solanas out of the movement because of her violent radical rhetoric. Would you consider Friedan’s concern an issue of respectability politics?

Betty wanted the feminist movement to stay above reproach, to have an impeccable image. Valerie was a legitimate lunatic. She was brilliant, the SCUM Manifesto is brilliant, but she was serious—she wasn’t kidding. So, Betty was horrified by it, she was afraid people would start believing the feminist movement was full of lesbians who wanted to kill men. But Valerie stirred our imagination because she was so out there, she was our outlaw. She wasn’t actually a feminist herself, she thought that NOW was a lady’s luncheon. In a sense she was right, because we weren’t breaking up buildings or rioting at NOW, but we also passed some important legislation.

I was also fascinated to read that a similar dynamic played out later with Aileen Wuornos, that feminists were divided about whether to support her trial.

Wuornos had a worse childhood, she had one of the worst childhoods I’ve heard about. Valerie, like Wuornos later, thought feminist interests were a form of social climbing, that feminists wanted to get famous off of her. I got involved in Wuornos’ case because I wanted to expand the Battered Woman Syndrome defense to apply to sex workers. I believed that she killed the first man out of self-defense. She inspired an opera, two plays, books, a movie. I wrote an op-ed about her because while she wasn’t the first serial killer, she felt different, women tend to kill husbands or children and we don’t hear about it as often. This was about killing a series of strange men, white men, adult men, that was never heard of. I wanted to check her out, I had to move a lot of pieces to get her to call me from jail. I called her and I said “Lee I’m from a feminist government from the future and we need you” and she was on board.

Lee wanted to sell her story and make money, she was a capitalist, and I was an abolitionist. I had nothing but compassion for her. It’s interesting that women, feminists, lesbians, were thrilled by this notion of an action hero. There was this sense that she died for our sins, that we secretly wanted to reap the same violent revenge on men but never would.

Totally. I think there’s a natural fascination with the idea of female vengeance. I’m curious, with your experience writing about mental health and violence, do you have any theories on why there aren’t more female serial killers of Lee’s caliber?

When women kill in self-defense in a marriage or partnership, they go to jail. No one is visiting them, no one is marrying them like male serial killers. This is a very powerful punishment. Oftentimes women who are traumatized and abused as children who may be violent take it out on other women or children. But they’re statistically less likely to go up against men violently, and if they do it’s just one, usually a partner.

Women often turn violence against ourselves, women who have been incest victims are often angrier at the mothers who couldn’t save them than they are at the father who raped them. They feel the mother who looked the other way, because she needed the support of the father. Women are very tightly controlled, we get treated as lesser early in life, and then we become surveilled and manipulated by the sexual harassment that is completely normalized everywhere.

When women kill in self-defense in a marriage or partnership, they go to jail. No one is visiting them, no one is marrying them like male serial killers.
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We’re still fighting for a lot of rights that you were fighting for in the 1970s. What is one thing you’re surprised we’re still fighting for?

One is obliged to undertake the struggle, but not to complete it. You do it for your lifetime, and then the other generations come and pick it up. That is, if feminist knowledge hasn’t been systematically disappeared—which it has. Sadly, I think that our inability to stop pornography, torture pornography, has increased the normalization of it. That may make me a feminist of the unfun kind, I like fun, and I have fun. But I think not pushing for greater regulation of the content of porn was a loss and it was a very divided issue because feminists feared censorship and feared an alliance with right-wing forces that were also against pornography. But in my opinion, that was a loss on my watch. I wish we could have stopped the sex slavery of children and women featured in certain venues of porn, on our watch that traffic has proliferated and been normalized.

What is one thing you’ve seen progress the most?

I think progress has been made with LGBTQ rights. I always thought being gay was like being an artist, very bohemian. There’s a huge improvement in lesbian custody battles and gay male custody battles.

I would love to be able to say there’s been a proliferation of women’s thinking and artistry, quantum leaps. And yet it’s also been disappeared in my own life time, some of the most radical voices from the late 60s and early 1970s stopped being taught by the 1980s. When I ask younger women about Mary Wollstonecraft, Joan Stewart Mill, Matilda Gage, if you don’t start with that you’ve got nothing. There’s a couple of major historians of women’s—Mary Beard, Eleanor Flexner, when I discovered them I was so excited. We didn’t read Sojourner Truth, we read African-American men, we read maybe Virginia Woolf and George Elliott.

Not all changes are made by going on the street, that’s an important expression, it’s theater. Real change can be made that way, a lot of change is made in boring meetings and courthouses.

Looping back to the gendered culture of violence, and its effects on mental health, do you think the conversation about mental health has evolved and moved in the direction you were hoping?

We’ve moved away from institutionalizing people, but now we leaving them on the streets homeless. So, two extremes, both bad. I don’t know if my pioneering work that made a difference in the beginning is still being taught in medical school. Do battered women now understand that they’re battered? Yes. Is it understood that abuse causes PTSD symptoms? Yes. Do we have good services for rape victims and battered women? No. We pioneered the conversation about rape, there are rape kits now. The conversation about rape is more understanding and pro-woman, but rape victims are still seen as a drag. There’s this attitude of: “other people have dealt with this, why don’t you be quiet.”

We now understand a lot more about Trauma and Recovery—coincidentally the title of an excellent book I reviewed in The New York Times. The author, Judith Lewis Herman, dignified women’s mental illness by beginning the book with the combat veterans who were WWI shell shocked, and linking their manifestations of PTSD to incest and rape victims. Our work collectively began to give more dignity to women who have anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks, who are self-destructive. The same destroy their own cases in court because they can’t trust themselves. Is there more sympathy and understanding? Yes. Is there enough? No. I think one important progress is there are more memoirs by young women writing about their mental health experiences and their eating disorders, which are often intimately connected to sexual abuse. There are now feminist therapists, there are lesbian feminist therapists, there are lesbian therapists of color. It’s a good thing, but it’s still not enough.

Sixty-year-old Hajiya Hamsatu Allamin—popularly referred to as “the woman that speaks with Boko Haram”—is the mother of 8, winner of the 2016 Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice’s (IPJ) Women Peacemakers, and is one of the most powerful conflict mediators in Nigeria today.

Boko Haram (which loosely translates to “Western education is forbidden”), was formed in 2009 by a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists who violently oppose Western forms of government, education, and society. Since they began an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria, more than two million people have been displaced, at least 20,000 killed, and thousands of women and girls are believed to have been subjected to horrific sexual abuses.

The militant terrorists’ sprawling power and destruction continue today; on Sunday August 19th around 2 a.m., Boko Haram stormed Malari village in the Borno state with guns and rocket-propelled grenades, claiming the lives of more than 60 people in their continued attempt to establish a so-called Islamic state governed through fundamentalist Sharia law.

Hamsatu’s activism—which started about the same time as the insurgency—focuses on gaining justice for raped women and girls, re-integrating the ex-wives of Boko Haram, and rehabilitating former child soldiers.

In this interview, Hamsatu discusses her potent human rights work, her persistent fears, and the ever-evolving fate of the Northern Nigerian women who have suffered under the terror of Boko Haram.

Orji Sunday: What factors influenced the rise of Boko Haram and your activism against Boko Haram?

At some point Boko Haram lived among us in various communities throughout Maiduguri, Nigeria. Whenever they attacked on the military, they would return to the community and we would absorb and hide them—to expose them is to ask for death. And when the military came for counter insurgency operations, they would arrest every youth in the entire community, including the innocent. When the violence escalated, the military started burning our houses too.

At any rate, the military was a threat and Boko Haram was another threat on the other hand. It was in this crossroad that I decided to speak against the silence. I encouraged the communities to stop hiding the insurgents. This made me popular with the people and the insurgents, too, and those encounters made me gradually embrace full time activism. The Boko Haram were all living with us, they were the children of the people we knew, but you couldn’t talk about it, and nobody could go and report it.

The Boko Haram lived among us and whenever they attacked the military, we would absorb and hide them—to expose them is to ask for death.
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Can you talk about your activism with the sexually abused women and girls in northeastern Nigeria?

When Boko Haram seized some communities and small settlements in Banki, a Nigerian town bordering Cameroon, many residents fled to Cameroon. The Cameroon soldiers captured them, collected all they had, and allegedly stripped the women naked, asking them to spread their legs wide and open so they could molest the women as they so desired.

Later the Cameroonian army handed over the refugees to the Nigerian army. At Bama, a city in Borno state Nigeria, the Nigerian military separated women and children and husbands—the women and children were moved to an IDP facility in Bama, Borno state, Nigeria.

It is during their stay in the Bama IDP camp that they suffered huge sexual abuses; they alleged that military officers demanded sex before offering them food and relief materials.

We organized these women and girls into a group called Knifar Movement to collectively seek the release for their husbands after years by the military, in addition to getting justice against the alleged rapists. The violated women are over 1,600, and some of them had babies out of those sexual violations.

But nobody listens to us or cares to look at their situation.

Can you talk more about confronting Boko Haram insurgents?

Whenever there is such incident, I go to the women in those communities, get the details and report to the government sponsored security agents. In all honesty, it was very risky. And sometimes, the insurgents would come to me brandishing their guns, but I still kept talking to them.

Gradually even Boko Haram came to understand that I was neutral and harmless and they started opening up to me. They apologized for the threat and started telling me their own version of the story. They would tell me, “Mama, your government does not value life.”

There are more than 1,600 violated women— some of them had babies out of these sexual violations—but nobody listens to us or cares to look at their situation.
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Why does Boko Haram respect and trust you to lead negotiations with the government?

It is very easy. They know who is honest and not. They tell me:

“Mama, we are not willing to listen to any man, much as we are ready to listen to you. When our leader was killed in 2009, and we went underground and those who were shot during a harmless burial ceremony were allowed to die because the military refused to allow us donate blood to some of them who were just injured. The government did not care about justice then, but you did. So why should we listen to them when nobody listened to us?”

In this war against insurgency, I don’t take sides. If some military personnel suffer violation and injustice and he is willing to speak up, I would join him to fight for justice. I know that the ordinary Nigerian soldier too is a victim.

Can you speak about your other project targeted at ex-wives of Boko Haram?

I want to engage the former wives of Boko Haram next so that they wouldn’t go back. I have started in a small scale, but I want to assist them in every possible way to get back to their life and society. Because of my little resources, I need to create a small social network amongst a small number of them and we can take it further from there. And some of them are pregnant from Boko Haram. The plan is to send the younger ones to school and train the older ones on the trade of their interest, in addition to providing start-up stipends for them. Then I would engage the communities on the danger of sidelining these people. But I don’t have the resources to do this all alone or to do more than this.

What are the mistakes in the current handling of the Boko Haram issue?

We have a lot to do to get this war over. And a whole lot more to do after a truce has been reached. Almost every person and institution tackling this war is focused on humanitarian issues. We have not turned our attention to the root causes. How can a society saturated by former child soldiers, aggrieved women, aggrieved suicide bombers, and aggrieved survivors—people who have lost a stable psyche—sustain peace?

My prayers and pleasure every day is to touch the lives of my people. And to change the little I can change. Making a difference in their lives.

What are your fears and worries especially looking at the nature of your work—you are almost confronting death daily?

I am not afraid of speaking or dying. Many people warn me not to speak because my work is dangerous. Sometimes I worry that my immediate family could be targeted. But, I worry more about the women and the children because they have lost everything. They don’t have a future. They are living a completely hopeless life.

How can a society saturated by former child soldiers, aggrieved women, aggrieved suicide bombers, and aggrieved survivors—people who have lost a stable psyche—sustain peace?
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How do U.S. policies, leaders, and legislation dovetail with the situation in Nigeria?

The United States and the United Nations could do much more and I already said that when I addressed the United Nations Security Council a few months back. But a lot depends on Nigeria—a principal partner in resolving the conflict. While I blame the U.S. partly, I truly understand their position. If the Nigerian government had created the platform to deserve support, perhaps the U.S. could come in. This is a country that is not interested in her own progress. I have done politics in Nigeria and I know it does not work.

Nigeria is a country that is not interested in her own progress.
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What does the future hold for these women?

The women don’t have future unless we decide to give them one through collective actions as humanity. They have lost everything—their husbands, their children, their relatives and all the people that meant something to their lives. It’s sad, but in truth, the future is particularly bleak because even the government does not care.

Who is your hero?

My father is my hero. He taught me to read. He gave me everything to succeed. And he believed in me. My mother did not want me to go to school, but my father held firm and encouraged me. 

If you’d like to help support Hajiya Hamsatu Allamin’s work please consider donating to ICAN (International Civil Society Action Network) which supports women’s rights, peace, and security.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Costume Designer Wants To Fuel The Fire With Visuals

The Establishment speaks with award-winning designer Ane Crabtree about symbolism, feminism, witches, and Handmaids.

Handmaids attend the premiere of Hulu’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 2 at TCL Chinese Theatre on April 19, 2018 in Hollywood, California (Credit: Facebook)

Warning: mild spoilers ahead

E ven if you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel, or seen its Hulu adaptation, you’ve probably seen images of the women’s uniforms in Gilead — red robes, white bonnets, hiding women’s faces and bodies, marking these women as men’s property, not people. These costumes have been donned by activists in many public protests in the last year and are now a widely recognized symbol of resistance.

At least some of the credit for this powerful sartorial movement can go to Ane Crabtree, the costume designer for the Emmy-winning series adaptation. Ane’s been a costume designer for film and television for decades. Some of her work includes the pilot for The Sopranos on HBO; episodes of Rectify on the Sundance Channel (a great series loosely based on the true-life story of Damien Echols); and episodes of Without a Trace, LAX, Vanished, Justified, and Westworld (about to debut its second season).

Ane and I talked about the ways in which her upbringing informs her work, and the importance of color in the symbolism of The Handmaid’s Tale. Also, witches…

Peg Aloi: You were born in South Dakota, raised in Kentucky. I’m very interested to know if your upbringing in what many people would call “flyover country” informs your work in general, and maybe your work on this show in particular. In The Handmaid’s Tale we see many references to the proud liberal city Boston once was, and what it has turned into.

Ane Crabtree: I definitely think that is something that informs everything and everybody, where you grow up. I moved to Kentucky from South Dakota when I was 3, and I’ve done all my adult growing-up away from Kentucky; I haven’t lived there since I was 18. Since then I’ve lived in other places usually for about 15 years, with the exception of England, where I lived for two years. I left because I was a young kid wanting different things at a young age. But I do reach back sometimes, to use things in a creative way as an adult now. I love South Dakota. Oddly, with Kentucky, work is what brought me back and I was just there recently. In my fifties now, I want to spend time with my family and get to know it again. There was some bad stuff that happened there, personally and politically. But the landscape inspires my work in a very personal way. And a very prolific way, and also in violent ways.

PA: I think one of the most interesting costume moments in the first season is in the episode “Jezebels” [in which characters visit a brothel in Gilead]. Did you have fun with that?

AC: I did. It was funny, though; we never had a lot of time, because when you’re doing television everything is on fast-forward. “Jezebels” was something that was very well-known in the book. I had to speed through it much faster than I would have liked. It was really awesome, though; a departure in so many ways. The whole vibe was so different, where the women were dressing provocatively.

It felt as though all of a sudden you’re seeing women as sexy, which is so normal, but it felt not normal. I designed everything in those scenes, from the leads down to the 40 women working at the brothel. I really wanted to make each one a distinct character, but as I said, it was all very fast. Funnily enough, I think my fashion show experience helped me, because I had to move quickly through all 40 designs, and so it was a bit stressful.

I Grew Up In A Fundamentalist Cult — ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Was My Reality

PA: Whitney Friedlander’s interview with you for Variety discussed the color palettes and the blue dresses of the wives, which are referred to as “peacock” colors. In Margaret Atwood’s novel, the wives’ dresses are referred to as sky blue (sort of a Virgin Mary image), and in the first film adaptation the dresses are a very primary blue, sort of cobalt or royal blue, which, paired with the very bright red of the Handmaids, had this American patriotism thing going on, flag colors.

I find it so intriguing that your designs for the Commander’s wives contain a variety of colors within this palette: emerald green gowns for formal occasions, dark blue dresses for everyday, and sometimes other shades. Why is there this subtle gradation of color for them, and what kind of symbolism is contained in the color choices for these costumes?

AC: It’s a very subtle thing. I am a huge rabid fan of Margaret Atwood, and of course followed the novel for much of what we did. When we first got started with Season One, the design went into a very dark emotional version of the red and the blue in the book, which is one reason we didn’t do sky blue. Our red became blood red, and the idea for the teal blue followed thereafter. We play with color in the camera work and the use of filters in our show, and we wanted something that was hauntingly beautiful, and hauntingly disrupted. I’m a fan of the original film, and Margaret Atwood is a producer on our show so I could write to her and ask questions at any time. I followed Margaret’s story for many of the costume ideas, but I did change out the striped dresses for the Econo-wives; instead I did grey.

The original movie had that bright blue and red, as you said, and those were really perfect colors for the 1990s. But for our show, which premiered in 2016, it felt like the colors we were using were really the perfect colors for right now. There’s so much black in these colors. Being a painter that’s one way that I look at it: These are like blackened colors.

PA: The color palettes of the show’s production design often seem to arise from the costume colors, as if those points of color are the inspiration. I noticed in this season, where we see the “Unwomen” working in the Colonies, cleaning up toxic radioactive waste, there is a lot of grey in the costumes and interiors, but a lot of golden light when we see the women working outdoors. That feels almost nostalgic to me. That’s such an interesting contrast, the sunshine and all that greyness, a bit of beauty and romance amid all the horror of that place. How did you go about envisioning the costumes for these segments?

AC: When we were pitching the season, me and (production designer) Mark White came up with the visuals, and for the Colonies we looked at so many different places for inspiration. Mark and I have a very symbiotic way of creating, because we’re best friends, basically. We both adore Andrew Wyeth, and that kind of dry brushed gold you see in his paintings, that golden light that comes in winter; you know it because it’s all over upstate New York. It also occurs in Kentucky, and also in Toronto where I was living for a while. It doesn’t necessarily fill you with a feeling of warmth, there’s a coldness to it. So that straw colored shade of gold was in our original ideas for that place and affected how we chose the location.

It’s a tricky thing to ask, though: What color is radiation? Most of us are lucky enough to never even have to consider this question. I grew up with several Japanese families in my neighborhood, they were mixed families, women who had married American servicemen during the war. One of them was this amazing woman who introduced me to collecting rocks and gems, which I still do to this day. Also, in a very macabre way, she was trying to help me with understanding her story: She showed me her wounds from Hiroshima. It happened when she was a little kid and it stayed with her through her entire life. She had horrible health problems, but she was a very formidable, strong and vibrant woman. As a child, she was outside when the bombs fell and so she was exposed. So this woman’s experience found its way into the costume designs and what happens to the women over time. Fukushima, which is a much more recent historical example of this, that was also an influence, so this research all went into the costume and production design for the segments taking place in the Colonies.

This place isn’t shown in Season One, but the color blue was seen in so many places, not just costumes: a color that is tinged with sadness. So what we did was just added some grey to that for the outer layers of the costumes in those scenes. Those costumes have a lot of under layers too, and you can almost imagine it like layers of skin peeling off, which is of course what happens. You have all good intentions for things to be a certain way, but as is often the case in Toronto, there are weather changes, so I had to redesign so many things between Seasons One and Two.

‘The color blue was seen in so many places, not just costumes: a color that is tinged with sadness.’

We ended up adding more layers to the costumes of the Handmaids when they’re outdoors, and also for the women in the Colonies. The underlayers of those costumes is a sort of onion skin look, made from sheer organza that was transparent, and these went underneath these 1920s-style slip dresses, and all of this would cling to the skin, if they were bathing, for example. In one or two scenes, you can see this fabric hanging out from beneath the outer layers, you see it on Emily and Janine. One cool thing was that Lizzy [Elisabeth Moss, who plays June/Offred] saw it, and while she doesn’t wear any of those costumes, she’s just so beautifully inspired and supportive, and she said it looks like a membrane around a newborn baby. So that definitely became kind of a very meaningful icon, even though it was such a tiny part of the total design. And that idea of the onion skin, the different layers of a person and what’s left of them as they’re being literally worn away.

PA: I noticed the Commander’s wife, who winds up in the Colonies, gets to keep her blue dress.

AC: We could spent a lot of time discussing what happens to the women of Gilead; the process they go through when they’ve done something wrong, like if they’re a “gender traitor” or an educator. So for example when we see Alexis [Emily/Ofglen, who plays a professor and a lesbian, aka a “gender traitor”] and her lover go on trial, we have to think about what would they wear when we see them. Same idea for Marisa Tomei’s character: Because she was a Commander’s wife, they allowed her to keep her clothes until the very end. In our script, she was the first of the Commanders wives to go there, and in a way having that color as a reminder of who she is allows the other Unwomen to be very angry with her and it causes a chasm. It’s the way to fuel the fire, visually.

PA: I have noticed in the new season that there is a great deal of imagery that is reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. Or maybe that’s just me. Did this inform your designs at all, the idea that the Handmaids are witchy figures? Also thinking of Emily who is a sort of witchy healer figure in her time at the Colonies. And the Marthas, whose outfits feel very Puritan and Colonial-era to me.

AC: Wow. It’s mind blowing to hear this. Listen, what’s really cuckoo about it is, I have never researched any of that. I am sitting here with my mouth agape, because while I am very curious about all of that, in fact, oddly enough my grandfather on my mom’s side from Okinawa was a healer, so that’s in my family. But also, Margaret Atwood talks about one of her relatives being a sort of witch, in that she went against the grain in different ways. I had read about that in relation to The Handmaid’s Tale. Also, one of my favorite films is that one with Daniel Day-Lewis, oh what’s the name of it?

PA: The Crucible! Such a great film adaptation.

AC: I found out that my neighbor played Goody Nurse in that movie, and I never knew she was an actress. This is just so interesting and inspiring. And I have to say, sometimes when you’re dealing with creativity, there are things that are just inherent, so who knows how or why people bring their own thing to a book or piece of music or a painting. One thing I did refer to was that Old Dutch cleanser label, this beautiful image of a girl with a pair of wings, it looks very Dutch. Margaret Atwood had said this image just horrified her as a child, and so she really wanted to use that as inspiration for what the Handmaids wore.

PA: In addition to the costumes having a sort of puritanical look — well, apart from the color red, but then that’s reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter, which takes place during those times as well — you have all the imagery of the gallows, the public stoning and then the way that women in the household are treated like servants. But also, like you see in The Crucible, there’s this sexual tension with the man of the house, so basically that was all just screaming at me during the first few episodes of the second season.

AC: Again, this is just blowing my mind! I mean, maybe that symbolism was in the minds of Bruce Miller or some of the directors. TV goes so fast in production, you design and research all of it as much as you can, then you just have to run with what you’ve got. I’m sometimes embarrassed when people ask me about specific things, and I realize it’s something that was unintentional or came out accidentally, but I guess that’s how people often respond to film and TV. It’s fascinating.

‘Sometimes when you’re dealing with creativity, there are things that are just inherent.’

PA: I love that! As a film and TV critic I sometimes ask directors about things like this, and sometimes am amazed to find that some piece of symbolism or some aesthetic that I think is completely intentional was not even something they had considered. It’s really mysterious and magical to me sometimes.

Okay, one last question. There’s a lot of bad stuff happening in America now. Do you think regimented clothing or dress codes for women or other groups may soon become a reality?

CA: I think those in power are trying to take things in that direction, and I don’t think they’re going to get very far. I don’t know why I’m saying that, because we have already seen so many changes; but in my mind, I am completely optimistic. We’ve been through so many things in my lifetime. I know someone from a country that experienced severe repression of women in the late 1970s, I’ll just leave it at that without identifying the country by name. She wrote to thank me for the design of the Handmaid costumes, and she thought that I took the idea for that design from her country as a metaphor for those times of regime change. But in terms of that kind of thing happening here, I think it would take years and years, and I don’t think we’ll get there. Because I think women will just become stronger and stronger and will fight against it.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/tangerine-star-mya-taylor-wants-to-break-more-barriers-for-trans-women-d4df834f0c1f/ Thu, 25 Feb 2016 18:08:27 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=9586 Read more]]>

‘Tangerine’ Star Mya Taylor Wants To Break More Barriers For Trans Women

Magnolia Pictures

By Kitty Lindsay

Mya Taylor’s meteoric rise to fame is the stuff from which fairy tales are spun; call it a Cinderella story for the new millennium. Plucked from a Los Angeles street corner to star in last year’s critically acclaimed indie Tangerine, Taylor, an aspiring actress and trans woman of color, may not have been invited to Hollywood’s biggest party this year (in case you forgot, #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarSoStraight), but the spell she’s cast on the industry’s tastemakers is far from broken.

In addition to two Best Supporting Actress wins and some 10 nominations on the festival circuit, Taylor’s also poised to win the Best Supporting Female award at this weekend’s Film Independent Spirit Awards — which would make her the first transgender actress to win the honor. All this as fans await her much-anticipated transformation into trans activist icon Marsha P. Johnson in the upcoming Happy Birthday, Marsha!, as well as her more somber turn as a transgender pagan priestess struggling with self-acceptance in Diane From the Moon.

Taylor opened up to The Establishment about her struggle to reconcile her faith and her identity, trans women’s anxiety about “being passable,” and the biggest barrier facing trans people today.

Kitty Lindsay: What was your experience as a trans woman growing up in a strict Christian household in Texas?

Mya Taylor: I have so many horrible memories from when I was growing up in Texas and everything that I just kind of leave that there. But I still carry that religion along with me today. The issue wasn’t the religion or the spirituality or anything like that. The issue was the fact that when I did finally come out, I was told, “Oh, you know, you’re going to hell” and this and that. But I knew my Bible and nobody’s gonna tell me about my Bible ’cause I know what’s in it. I’ve read it a million times and when I have an issue, I refer to my Bible, so for someone to tell me that I’m going to hell, right there you’re judging me and that’s one of the sins and no sin is greater than the next. God loves me. God loves everybody and I had to tell myself God lives within me. So I can’t listen to what other people are telling me is gonna happen to me. I have to follow my heart. He lives within me and I just follow my own instinct when it comes to Him.

Kitty: What led you to Los Angeles?

Mya: I have an aunt who’s biologically my uncle. She’s transgender, too. I came out to her first and she was proud of me. She was, like, “Oh, girl, I already knew.” I moved to L.A. to be with her. But this aunt, she used me in the worst way possible. [She taught me how to sell my body and] I went out to the streets to help to support us. [Here she was living a great life and] I ended up homeless.

Kitty: Sex work can be dangerous, especially for trans women of color.

Mya: It was the worst experience. Every time I stepped out of my car and stepped on that block, it was so scary. It was so scary because you’re scared of all the other girls that are working on the streets, too, because they’re known for robbing you or getting you beat up, so I immediately isolated myself from them. Then, there were men who got upset [because I didn’t give certain services] and actually tried to take advantage of me while I was in their car. Once I remember standing at the corner of Santa Monica and Bronson and this guy grabbed me and pulled me into the bushes with him and tried to have sex with me. Things like that I will never forget.

Kitty: Have you encountered harassment?

Mya: Looking at me right now, you probably just see a girl. But when I was less passable, and I looked harder around in the face, I always wore shades on my face in the morning and at nighttime. I was always hiding myself because I was so insecure about the way I looked. I was so scared about what society was going to say when they figured out I was trans. For me, my insecurities came from seeing how other [visibly] trans women were treated. A lot of young trans women are so focused on being passable when they really should just be focused on being themselves. You shouldn’t have to be so focused on being passable. You shouldn’t have to feel like that. But you can’t help but to be like, “What do I look like today? Did she figure me out? Or is he looking at me for that reason?” I’m guilty of feeling like that. Because even though I say I don’t care about what people say about me, deep down inside, I really do and it hurts. It hurts like hell when somebody says something mean about you. Especially when you don’t bother anybody.

Kitty: How did you find Tangerine director Sean Baker, and how did this project come to be?

Mya: You know, I was simply sitting in the right place at the right time, at the LBGT Center on Santa Monica and McCadden. I was in the courtyard talking to my friend. Sean came up to me and was like, “Can you tell any stories about this area? What do you know about it?” And in the midst of me telling him that, he fell in love with my personality, so I told him pretty much all of my experiences from being out there and everything. I could make him laugh, and I told him, “You know, I would love to be a part of your project because I’ve always wanted to be a full-on entertainer. I’ve been singing for years, but this will be my first time acting. But acting comes very natural for me. Very natural for me.”

So, yeah.

Kitty: So, did you always want to become an actress?

Mya: I did. I wanted to be able to do everything. I wanted to act, to sing, to model, to dance. I want to do it all and it’s going to happen.

Kitty: What is the biggest barrier facing trans people?

Mya: Employment. Employers find out that you’re trans by looking at your I.D. [and they don’t hire you]. I have my driver’s license changed now, but at the time I couldn’t afford to get it updated because I couldn’t get a job, and I couldn’t get a job because the information wasn’t changed.

I applied for 186 jobs in one month and [I have proof of] being discriminated against. It’s not the case for every employer. Of course there are some jobs that I just wasn’t fit for. But for you as a cisgender person, let’s say you’re looking for employment, maybe you’ll find an employer that says, “I’m sorry, but you don’t fit the description for this job” or “We found someone just a little more qualified than you.” It’s just that one thing and you move on. You don’t have to worry that maybe it’s because you’re transgender. You don’t have that against you. You can change the fact that maybe you just didn’t impress them in the interview, but you can’t change the fact that you’re trans.

Kitty: Do you feel the lack of employment opportunities led you to sex work?

Mya: Oh, yeah. ’Cause you have to do something to survive. L.A. is not cheap. Generally, [L.A.’s welfare system will] give you this card and if you qualify, you’ll get $200 in food stamps and $120 in cash a month. When I struggled with my best friend, we were limited to spending $6 a day on food just to make it through the whole month. We could’ve probably spent $30 on one meal just to treat ourselves for the month, but that’s it. My phone bill alone is $60. Hormones are between $70 and $130. It’s gone.

Kitty: Do you have hope that trans rights are progressing?

Mya: I do have hope for that, but I don’t see it happening right now. And the reason why is because people are so focused on hating something. Why hate a group of people because they are transgender? Or why hate gay people? Why hate black people? Why hate white people? I find people hate trans people just for no reason at all. This is what I think needs to happen; I think for people to actually get used to transgender people, in every employment agency, there needs to be lessons on how to treat trans people; how to use the proper pronouns and everything, and how to deal with those situations. Not much will change until that happens. ’Cause people are so ignorant.

Kitty: How did Happy Birthday, Marsha! go?

Mya: They hunted me down for this role. They were like, “I have to have Mya Taylor.” They’re so sweet. I loved the role because I’m actually playing the real-life person of Marsha P. Johnson, a trans activist from 1969 who’s broken down a lot of barriers, mainly as the first person to start the Stonewall riots. I loved playing her because it was very different from me. The only thing we had the same is skin color and the fact that we care about people a lot. Her whole aura, everything about her, is different from Mya Taylor, so I would say it’s challenging to play her.

Kitty: After all your personal struggles, what does it mean to you to be honored for your acting work in Tangerine?

Mya: I’m just really, really grateful for everything that’s happening to me. Because it’s breaking the door down for other trans women to come in and try to accomplish something. It gives us hope. I’m out of that horrible lifestyle, but I think about all the people who are still going through it.

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