A Lady Makes "A Lady Made That"
Posted at 9:00 AM Mar 18, 2010
By Andrea Grimes
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If you like phat beats, montages and women's studies, you're going to like the e-mail I got this morning from New York City comedian Jenny Hagel telling me about her web video series, "Feminist Rapper." I do like phat beats, montages and women's studies, but I also love sweet videos I can post about feminism, because I am spending my spring break writing my master's thesis, which just so happens to be about female comedians. I am stressed out, angry and desperate for anything that will actually make me laugh. And this video totally does. Take it away, Jenny!
Pretty fantastic.
Having tried to teach gender theory to undergrads, I do believe I understand what Hagel's getting at. My students were, on the whole, more responsive to ideas about gender than Prof. Feminist Rapper's, but probably not much. (I think most liberal arts instructors will tell you: it's a lot easier to convince students that racism exists than that sexism exists. Sexism is so deeply embedded in a narrative of things that are "natural.") It's hard to expect students to think critically about gender issues when nearly everything they consume in pop culture, from reality television, to magazines, to films, reinforces roles and stereotypes, rather than challenges them. To me, the end of the film, wherein the students are still all, "this is bullshit," rings sadly true. You can get them excited about gender for a week, but a lot of them go back to their old ideas eventually. Which is why we need things like this video and ladyblogs and more female comedians and writers in the pop cultural sphere, so that a (thoughtful, feminist) woman's viewpoint is a norm, not an exception to.
