Welcome to my long overdue blog. I’m going to keep posting regularly
from now on. Promise!
My problem with research
is I don’t know what I’m doing. Instead of narrowing the focus of my thesis I’m
getting more and more weird and unrelated ideas. However, I’ve decided to stay
within the frame of >>feminism<< and gradually narrow it down until
I have the aha moment. Bear with me, please.
Karolina mentioned election on her
blog a few days ago. I thought that it would be interesting to look into
numbers of women in the American politics. I’m going
to focus on the 113th Congress (If you are too impatient to wait for my update with results of the latest election click away: 114th Congress Freshly Published Data).
What strikes me as odd is the fact that there are
still states (Vermont, Mississippi and Iowa) without any congresswomen ever.
Seriously, how is that even possible!?
Let’s examine the exact numbers now and compare them
with Poland.
At a glance the number of women in American Congress and Polish Parliament seem comparably low. I wonder, are the reasons for this similar in both countries?
To end on a positive note, take a look at this table presenting classification of states based on percentage of women in national parliaments. Some surprising results there:
“I don’t think there’s a woman in the readership of the Guardian, not
one, who hasn’t been objectified or trivialised because of her gender at
one time or another,” stated Tommy Lee-Jones in an interview for Guardian.
That obviously caught
my eye and made me read on. It turns out that Jones is a man of many talents: he co-wrote, directed and starred in The
Homesman which enters UK cinemas tomorrow.
Jones is accompanied on screen
by Meryl Streep, Hilary Swank, Hailee Steinfeld (nominated for the Academy
Award and BAFTA) and John Lithgow (any 3rd
Rock from the Sun or Dexter’s
fans?). The script was based on a
novel by an American writer Glendon Swarthout.
Guardian interviewer calls Jones a
quasi-feminist. But he himself is careful in labelling The Homesman as a feminist movie (geez, why is feminism such a bad
word for some people?). The film is supposed to be a western inversed, which
means that unlike in typical westerns women, not men, are central characters, there
aren’t any heroic figures and finally a journey taken by protagonists
leads east. According to Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Cinema feminist western is not a new invention:
Apparently the film gets mixed
reviews. Its Filmweb average score is 6.6 and Rotten Tomatoes rates it as 7. Nevertheless, I’m curious of this feminist/inversed western phenomenon. To be
honest I can’t stand how women are portrayed in the traditional thing.
Definitely will let you on my opinion on The
Homesman and whether it really is a feminist western or just a marketing ploy.
