Tags
ableism, bechdel test, eddie redmayne, films, hoosiers, media, movies, racism, the hunger games, transmisogyny, transphobia
I’m so tired of cis white abled straight males playing lead roles in media. Recently my cis white male teacher showed us a basketball movie called Hoosiers that takes place in Indiana (Iowa? Illinois? I don’t care.) It was like they had been trying to find an excuse for no POC in the film (“it’s in Indiana, there are only white people in Indiana.” UH… okay.) The only ones that were really there were the “big shot defending state champs” that weren’t important except as an obstacle to the “single unit” of the straight white male’s dream. The only important female wasn’t really important at all, she only talked to men and only talked about men. This means that the movie didn’t pass the Bechdel test, which is used widely to indicate gender bias. No worries about Hoosiers though, it’s not like half of all contemporary films fail this test. Except they do.
Recent Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne has accepted a role in an upcoming film called ‘the Danish Girl’. He, a cis man, will be playing a transgender woman. Not only does his accepting of this role help the further idea that transgendered women are actually men, but it takes away the opportunity for trans women actors to play a role that should be for them. Haven’t heard of any transgendered actresses? That’s because they’re so rarely cast, however here’s four women who could have played the role Eddie Redmayne took.
There’s erasure everywhere you look. The Hunger Games, a pop culture hit that’s viewed as not very problematic has it’s own flaws. The Hunger Games cast a white woman to play a brown woman’s role. Although the series exhibits something rarely seen in popular media within the PTSD that Katniss Everdeen, the face of the revolution in the novels, struggles with. They dirty their clean bath by exhibiting ableist erasure in another form. In the books Katniss requires a hearing aid, and another character, Peeta Mellark, has a prosthetic leg. These details weren’t included in the movies because Hollywood likes to paint anyone disabled with tragedy. They thought that the audience wouldn’t be able to identify with the characters if they were disabled, that their disablement would be seen as too much of a big thing to have to write in, as if someone couldn’t just put on a prosthetic and move on with their life, as if any disablement was a capital T Tragedy.
Constantly keep your eye on the media. Ask yourself: how come all 5 of the superheroes in the avengers are white? What are the odds of that happening? Ask yourself: Why is it that there are no mainstream films that have characters that aren’t straight that don’t completely revolve around how they aren’t straight? Keep alert. Don’t let them get away with this. The world that they write is not the world as it is.