Bailey Porter
Editor in Chief
Three guest speakers discussed gender and choice using their interpretation of films like “Shallow Hal,” “Cider House Rules” and “Paris is Burning” during the final day of a two-day Engendering Diversity and Community conference at the University of La Verne on Friday.
“If I choose to be overweight or just have to be or go to Jenny Craig, I want to be projected as a woman of value,” said Jeannie Musick who presented a paper on the homogenization of beauty in Hollywood titled “Fat Girls Don’t Know Love: A Study of the Female Body in Film.”
A lot has changed in our interpretation of beauty, said Musick, visiting from Louisiana State University. Enlightenment artists defined physical beauty as unique, but Hollywood has moved toward celebrating thin as beautiful, she said.
“Thin is the default and the default is becoming thinner,” she said.
Describing movies like “Sister Act,” “Misery” or the more recent “Shallow Hal,” Musick said overweight actresses are typecast as the silly one, the psycho or anyone unworthy of love. Even in “Shallow Hal,” Hal only falls for Rosemary when he thinks she embodies Gwenyth Paltrow’s svelte form. Projects like the made-for-TV movie “Beautiful Girl,” which casts an overweight model as the lead in a romantic comedy, still fall subject to making weight an issue, she said.
Janelle Wilson, a student at Claremont Graduate University, presented a paper based on the 1987 film “Paris is Burning” about black and Latino urban, gay men.
The film depicts the drag scene, which represents gay men’s strength to survive in postcolonialism, Wilson said. Classified as “other” by many societies, gay men began taking part in drag balls to create change and make-over their terms of domination, she said.
If you are black, male and gay you have three strikes against you, Wilson said, describing the premise of the film. Drag allows you to be what the colonizers don’t want you to be, she said.
Active in the gay community, Wilson said she does see signs of improvement – movement away from classifying people in terms of “other” – with progressive human rights movements that deal with gay legal and social issues.
These kinds of movements create the space and environment for everyone to be themselves, she said.
“Unfortunately, images of the perfect body and notions of what defines male and female permeate western society. As a result, it is going to take multiple community gatherings, such as our conference, to begin to undo these long-standing biases,” said Assistant Professor of Education Lisa Porter, who facilitated the discussion.
The final speaker, a ULV alumnus, spoke about choices that women, in particular, make and how we judge people’s choices.
Melle Richardson used a personal anecdote about choosing to be a stay-at-home mom to open her talk on three John Irving books whose movie versions are: “Cider House Rules,” “The World According to Garp” and “The Door in the Floor.”
In these films, the characters make difficult decisions on issues of abortion, child abandonment and single-parenting. But because the films present all the facts the viewer does not make unfounded judgments, Richardson said. Instead, the characters are respected for the choices they make based on their situations.
Unfortunately, life is not scripted. Judgment is passed almost instinctively because we cannot get all the facts at once.
“Everybody’s life is a novel. Often we only get one chapter at a time,” Richardson said.
Richardson’s mother-in-law attended the discussion.
“It was truly enlightening,” Edith Richardson said.
Stacie Pham, a ULV psychology graduate student said she has never seen the movies discussed in the presentations but that the event inspired her to check them out.
“I like (the conference) considering my gender and my major,” she said.
The presentation was called “Sex Acts: Gendered Bodies and Gendered Choices in Film.”
This was the first Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference at the University.
Bailey Porter can be reached at porterb@ulv.edu.
