Avoiding the expected witticism about ‘coming from down under’
Wednesday afternoon Erica Hateley presented the colloquium "’It’s Not Just Cricket’: Sexual Colonization in Woody Allen’s Match Point and Someone Else’s Wimbledon." I decided to check it out because the flyer had the word "sexual" near Erica Hateley’s name.
Although she assured us this would be a "post-feminist rant," I wondered whether this would be delivered in saucy layman’s terms, or if instead we would be playing the poststructuralist drinking game. So I sat around for a few minutes and tried to get into the groove of whatever dialect she’s going with this afternoon.
4:06 PM "ideology founded on patriarchy."
4:08 PM "patriarchal heterosexuality." Okay, it’s gonna be one of those.
4:08 PM "psychology of patriarchal capitalist culture"
4:14 PM If Karin Friggin Westman wasn’t sitting right behind me I could just IM this right to all the English majors I know and THEY could play the drinking game along with me. What’s up with that? And why is Michael Donnelly over here too? The back row is for slackers and badasses.
4:15 PM ….
4:15 PM Oh.
4:16 PM "I’m looking at her skirt, not her arse." Tee hee!
4:16 PM "heteronormative patriarchy.”
4:17 PM "It takes a lot longer to find a picture of Anna Kournikova playing tennis than it does to find her…resting."
4:19 PM "destabilize the binary gendered logic of patriarchy"
4:19 PM "scopophilic patriarchy." Okay I FORFEIT the poststructuralist drinking game. Erica wins, because the patriarchy is oppressing us faster than I can type. At this point I decided to just listen, and only use my computer to google the big words.
4:20 PM Oh dear, look at the time! Erica never notices things like that.
4:21 PM There is a "been there done that" popular discourse of feminism internalized by female tennis players. Did I type that accurately?
4:23 PM "the sexualization of tennis-playing woman"
4:24 PM "containing women w/in acceptable patriarchal limits"
4:30 PM "body spectacle:" "pornography’s portrayal of orgasm." There’s something to google.
After she had thoroughly established that tennis is a tool of colonial and sexual repression, we started watching movies.
4:40 PM Heh, Erica said "Scarlett Yohansson."
I wasn’t sure how much I liked Match Point when I actually saw it, but Erica’s analysis pointed out that the film is aware of the colonial representations embedded in its characters, and partly because of that, the mood of the film prevents us from fully sympathizing with Chris Wilton. Uhh, I think that’s what she said. There were more big words too.
4:49 PM In Wimbledon: Why did we fast fwd through the part where Kirsten Dunst is nude? Wouldn’t it be possible to undermine my own internalized scopophilic patriarchal tendencies and make Kirsten Dunst’s ass a site of agency by normalizing her apodysophilia, or would this just reinforce them? Later on, after bumming one of Erica’s Marlboro’s, I felt a little guilty about joining the "I’ll eat out Luce Irigaray" Facebook group. Then I ate out Luce Irigaray.
4:54 PM "retroactive destabilization" what?
5:03 PM Time for questions. Why are these feminized, fetishized representations of America both blonde?
