Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Review from Jennifer Baumgardner!

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for the support of some awesome feminists. What are you feeling grateful for? Gratitude is contagious... comment below to share!

"This culture is long on lamenting the sexualization of women and girls, but short on actually listening to women and girls talk about their own experiences with sex, being sexy, and sexuality. Melissa Tapper Goldman's Subjectified says that women don't want to be reduced to their sexuality, but they don't want to have to deny it, either. This is feminist storytelling--and it is powerful."
--Jennifer Baumgardner, creator of the I Had an Abortion Project and author of Look Both Ways: Girls and Sex, Manifesta, and Abortion & Life.

Friday, November 12, 2010

From the road

I just wrapped up an incredible trip to Bowdoin College.

It is always amazing to get on a plane in the hecticness of New York, surrounded by buildings and asphalt, and find myself amid green trees and just an hour later. Maine is incredible.

Bowdoin was super welcoming and I had a chance to meet Leah Pepe, the student organizer for Safe Space, a campus organization dedicated to supporting survivors of sexual violence, and Melissa Quinby, the Director of the Women's Resource Center. Both groups helped to bring Subjectified to campus.

The Bowdoin newspaper did a story on Subjectified as well. Very cool! You can read it here. It's always interesting to read other people's perspectives on Subjectified, and always strange to read my own quotes. I need to work on speaking grammatically in conversation! Recently, quite a few people have asked me what I personally learned in the process of making the doc and how it affected me. That is good food for thought. I can't quite know the answer yet because the process is not yet over. The succinct answer is what I told the Bowdoin Orient writer, Quinn Cohane "'I feel much freer to express myself, and that's been really useful in my personal life and the way I relate to other people,' said Goldman. 'I had to confront things I was uncomfortable with head on, things I didn't even realize I was uncomfortable with.'"

The longer answer is more complicated. I can honesty say that every single one of these interviews changed me and made me recognize something in myself that I had never acknowledged or understood. It's not too useful for me to speak in these sweeping generalities, so I will come up with some specific examples. More on this later.

In the meanwhile, this shooting/screening trip continues. I'll be in the southwest for a few days and eventually up to UC Berkeley for the event on Thursday! All are welcome: 145 Dwinelle Hall at 7PM on 11/18.

/Melissa

Monday, November 1, 2010

Screenings full steam ahead!

It's been eventful over here as I'm trying to finish up post-production (and even a little bit of production! More on that later), while moving forward with lots of campus screenings using the existing version of Subjectified. I've also been taking care of business and legal stuff, which is less fun but also very important.

Upcoming events!
I am very excited to be doing screenings and discussions at Bowdoin College in Maine (11/10) and at UC Berkeley (11/18). I am also working on another mystery screening in January! Stay in touch for details....

Other big news
I am super excited to be working with John Weston of Futura Productions on our sound mix. John is an awesome guy and has been terrific to work with so far. It's so heartening to know that we have the support of men as well as women on this project! John will help to refine the rough edges of this DIY project.

I am working in parallel to John to refine the video components. All the money that I didn't have to start this project translated into my using very basic equipment, which is translating into a lot of time on the back end, fixing things. I had no idea that I'd get so far with Subjectified that day when I walked into the electronics store and looked for the cheapest digital video camera with a mic input... Five years and thousands of hours of work later, I am very close to a final product that (hopefully) does justice to the incredible bravery of the women who told their stories on my camera!

There is other news to do with the final push for production/post-production, but that will have to be another blog post. More content soon, I promise.

Recent events!
We've had some really successful events recently, including a screening and Q&A at Lesley University, and a screening and fascinating discussion at Moishe/Kavod House in Brookline, MA, put together by their Sex Ed Team. The Moishe/Kavod Sex Ed Team does young adult sex ed at their social justice community center. The discussion was facilitated by Bonnie Solomon and Mimi Arbeit of the blog Sex Ed Transforms.

Daphne Strassmann wrote a very stimulating blog post through the Lesley Women's Center about Subjectified and the culture of oversharing. (She doesn't think that Subjectified is part of the oversharing problem, by the way!) I really appreciated her insights. It helps that she loves the project! She did a fantastic job putting together the event at Lesley and really going to bat for Subjectified.

I also had the pleasure to show an excerpt from the doc at Dr. Amy Rutstein-Riley's course on Women in Culture and Society, and to conduct a discussion with the class. You can see photos on facebook through the Lesley Women's Center. It's so fun and refreshing to encounter young women grappling with these ideas, sometimes for the first time. I wish they could be more involved with the project. By the way, if you are reading this and you want to get involved, I could totally use the help! Be in touch.

//Melissa

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