sebastienne

I went to Edinburgh! In August, this means more theatre than anyone could see in a liftime. kaberett found us a ridiculously central flat right opposite Teviot / George Square, and (of course) I've been trying to see anything that goes anywhere near "queer, feminist burlesque" in its intent or execution.

Most of these reviews are spoilery.


Canon Warriors

A great start! A three-hander, new writing all about the premier feminist puppeteers (only feminist puppeteers) in Thanet (yes, UKIP Thanet). This was sweet and funny and warm and loving, but with a sharp core of realism; at the end, when Fleur has to choose between living a peripatetic lifestyle from beach hut to beach hut with her very unwell and sometimes-abusive girlfriend, or moving in with a Nice Guy From The Council while she gets her life in order... it's very clear that neither choice is freeedom, because that's not on the cards for her as a young queer woman who had to drop out of her degree. There's lots in here about the choices we make when the deck is stacked against us, and how even though we know we can never win, it's worth stating our truths anyway. It's about finding that sweet spot between valuing and centring others in loving, supportive community, and valuing and centring ourselves - while never entirely becoming Aidan who says, "maybe once I'm more established in this job, more secure, I can raise some ethical concerns [about making poor queer women homeless in December]".


Callisto: A Queer Epic

Now this feels like the find of the fringe. Four queer stories spanning centuries - feeling completely separate through character and costume, yet completely connected through how the evolve sparking off each other, scene to scene taking place in different time periods or in several at once. Domestic and intimate, and utterly epic, all at once. I fell, particularly, for Tammy Frazer; a women in 1970s Nebraska whose husband had brought home a porn film for them to watch together. We meet her after this, on her way to California in search of her impossible dream - she's fallen in love with Daisy Lou. It's set up as a tragedy - the sweet Nebraska girl drawn into the seedy underworld and the desires of unsavoury men - but that's not what happens! She holds her own throughout, constantly connecting with the women she meets in her sex work career; and right when you think it's at its inevitable nadir - the explosively violent man has her at gunpoint - Tammy and Daisy kill their abuser and Thelma-and-Louise off into the sunset.

I also fell hard for the furthest-future of the four narratives. Before this I'd have said it's impossible to do good sci-fi on stage, impossible not to evoke at least a little of the b-movie... but as Cal the AI and Lorn (the last of the 'big brains') struggle to complete The Bliss in time - with their language playwright-evolved across hundreds of years to be strange and ambiguous and yet SO EVOCATIVE - I started to sense what was actually possible with stage sci-fi. I need more of this. Luckily I'm seeing Callisto again tomorrow.


Strong Female Character

Oh, I wanted to love this so much! A one-woman stand-up-show about action movies, with a strong feminist angle? Count me in! And when I got into the stuffy little attic room and saw that audience of ten, and heard the totally autobiographical tone of the show ("and when I was six my favourite action hero was..."), I realised how much this had in common with the Vaudevillainy concept that I'd cooked up with deathbyshinies. And as she took the audience from "don't we all love action movies? we're all in-group here!" to "but sometimes they don't teach us great things about women, do they? haha those action movie men, what cads" to "so here's how my sexual assault happened because of male entitlement directly learned from these films" to "but these films have also helped me to reclaim a powerful sense of self as I've come to terms with my identity as a survivor" I felt like I was seeing a masterclass in how to get any random action movie fan to come on a journey of feminist discovery.

So it was such such SUCH a shame that her show, with all its focus on the importance of education, choice, and bodily autonomy, managed to fall down so badly on actually embodying those ideals. Between the flippant references to her dad's job performing surgery on intersex infants (weirdly gender-essentialist and erasing of trans experience, even while she described her own childhood experience of "feeling like she must really be a boy", then briefly and insultingly underscored with "I'm not meaning to make light of this, it's a serious thing, so difficult for the parents") and the sudden unwarned-for shift into graphic accounts of her sexual assault, it felt like she hadn't actually learned the lessons she was trying to teach. Like her show was SO focussed on taking a middle-aged male action movie fan on a feminist journey, that she'd overlooked the possibility that her audience might actually include people who weren't middle-aged dyadic cis men who've never experienced sexual violence.

I left this so conflicted, thinking round and round how maybe it just wasn't possible for her to appropriately impact her target audience (the men whose entitlement she was trying to shatter), without retraumatising people who are more like her. It's shoved me RIGHT up in front of the question I was trying to avoid wrestling with towards the end days of Lashings - is it ACTUALLY possible to "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" with the same piece of art? To REALLY achieve both goals without sacrificing on one of them? This theme and thought will come up again and again in the reviews that follow...


Pussyfooting

This won't have disturbed anyone comfortable, but by the gods did it comfort the disturbed. Raw, honest, monologue-driven group account of gender and power. A little bit "A-level drama derived piece" in form and staging, but interspersed with charming "alternative student comedy" sketches so that the whole felt somehow more than the sum of its parts. Also, as I now believe that all plays should, it ended with a Kate Bush dance party to which the entire audience was invited. This play was like getting a hug from the really earnest but well-meaning bits of Tumblr.


Cuncrete

In glorious contrast to Pussyfooting - which flitted around all sorts of issues around gender and power without ever really settling on a 'core message' (because how can you, with gender) - Cuncrete had one thing to say and said it. Loudly. For an hour. With drag kings and punk rock and a concrete mixer.

Like, imagine if The Dykeness had Arts Council funding. So many of the beats of one of our sets were in this show, but it was tight and focused beyond our wildest dreams.

In Cuncrete, Archibald Tactful and the Great White Males (a banker, a Lord, and a working-class-boy-done-good-who-proves-anyone-can-be-almost-as-good-as-the-rest-of-use-honestly) formed a band and sang about brutalist architecture, Thatcherism and giant concrete dicks. Maybe it was more performance art than a punk gig, but even so, the audience's titters of laughter, their polite and erudite attention, rubbed me wrong -- there should have been shouting and spitting and spilling of beer. I wanted this to be a punk gig - then the lack of narrative or structure wouldn't have mattered. If we could just all have been all-in, it could have been the most raw-throated cathartic night of my life. "YEAH! BRUTALIZZUMMMMM!" But as it was, it was a skilfully delivered hour of intellectual pleasure - "haha, yes I caught that JG Ballard reference too" - which just stopped short of actually letting me ROCK OUT.


(Yes, you read the subject line right - this is just the first two days of my week at the fringe. More reviews to follow...)

( the rules )


Clothes/fashion
1. Any leads at all on where to look for gender-neutral formalwear in size fat.
2. The same, but for men's period costume styles.
3. Yeah. I really want one of those big, over-fabricked linen shirts, and trousers with a front panel instead of a fly and matching braces... ok I basically want this look don't I. Or, y'know, this guy. Just, not 1920s/11th Doctor.

Things to help me be mindful / look after myself better
4. Write me a paragraph or two about a book or album you think I should read or listen to.
5. An exciting one-off treat like a face mask or a glittery bath bomb
6. Got a cat needs petting or a dog needs walking? Call on me, please!

Social things
7. Let's do cool things together! Let's play board games / go for winter walks / curl up under a duvet and watch TV.
8. Show up at my house with a book or something, then make cups of tea and soothing noises while I Sort My Shit Out.
9. Send me cards & postcards that you think I'll like. For bonus points: write something on them about who you think I am. I'm struggling with a) a sense of self and b) a massive empty pinboard in my office, so help me solve both these problems at once!

Yes well it's worth a try isn't it
10. Two tickets to Hamilton. Oh, and plane tickets to New York.

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely that was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God;
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance-
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

I enjoyed last night's Doctor Who so much that I'm about to liveblog a re-watch! Isn't this charming and just like the old days. (It'll probably start on a grumpy note but it gets squeeful after that I promise!)

( spoilers )

For such a beautiful, gentle film -- one that I adored every second of, and that managed to deal with memory loss in a way that I didn't find overwhelmingly upsetting -- this sure has left a sour taste in my mouth I've been thinking about it pretty constantly for the last 24 hours!

( spoilers )

Medical professionals are so fond of telling us that regular exercise is great for our physical and mental health, but for a lot of us that's about as much use as prescribing chamomile tea to a chronic insomniac.

There's a huge amount of privilege involved in being able to take regular exercise. Factors that make it difficult or impossible to exercise might include: disabilities and pain conditions; long working hours; family/caring commitments; lack of access to safe or appropriate spaces for exercise; lack of access to specialist equipment or clothing; lack of interest in exercising.

For me, it was all about being fat.

Read more at the Lashings blog >>

(This isn't new to me, but this morning gives such a clear articulation of this concept that I thought I'd share in case it's useful to any of you)

Often, depression isn't about the things I do; it's about how I think about the things I do.

Depressed-Emma looks at this morning and thinks "Oh god, it's 11am and I am still unwashed in a dressing gown, feeling hot and sticky and lazy and lethargic and all I've done is poke the internet aimlessly and I'm such a failure as a person".

Non-depressed-Emma looks at this morning and thinks "I made breakfast - avocado and eggs and fresh-baked bread! I helped a stranger on a web community with tech support, and then I sent some emails and did some Facebook networking in support of a new group investigating medicine for marginalised groups. (All the time, I had my work email up in the background - I might not have any booked appointments til the afternoon, but it's good to be on call.) Now I'm running a bath to soothe my aching muscles (last night I squatted 90kg and benched 40kg, no wonder I'm a bit lethargic today)."

And, sure, if I'd been at my worst I'd be unlikely to have made such a nice breakfast, or to have gone lifting; but non-depressed-Emma knows "I can't be expected to fulfil all those obligations when my mental health is struggling, and it's fine to be a bit gentle with myself at those times."

Britannia seemed really helpful when I phoned because I needed to renew my savings account with them. They wanted me to post them my deed poll (..sigh) but they were definitely going to be able to change my title, no problem.

So imagine my surprise when

1. They returned the Deed Poll to me, with a letter addressed to "Ms", querying which type of account I wanted to move to and (casually, incidentally) containing the single line "Regarding your change of name unfortunately our Customer development Systems will not allow us to do this."


2. I later discovered that, despite refusing to change my name and also not knowing what kind of account I was opening, they had nonetheless cashed a cheque I had made out to myself as "Mx".

I pulled on my privilege-pants and called them this morning to query the fact that they'd taken my money, despite not having done the thing they'd told me they would, or indeed even having opened the new account. I don't know how strong of a case I have for fraud, given that they cashed a cheque to someone who isn't even in their systems, "Mx" me...

The person I spoke to was businesslike, helpful, and did not question my title had changed. They explained the internal processes with their fixed set of titles to choose from, but suggested that at least my statements could be addressed to 'Mx' (as that's a different system). They also spoke pragmatically of all the points where the big note now on my file saying "please address this person as Mx" could maybe be missed or ignored by good old human error.

They've put a request in the system for me to be sent a statement; if it comes saying "Mx" I'll stick with them for now, but if it comes saying "Ms" I'm gone, gone, gone.

The oven's full of improvised Christmas-food. (Some kind of veggie shepherd's pie that's full of slow-roast tomato and red wine, with sage-and-onion stuffing instead of potato.)

The Wicked soundtrack just finished playing. (I danced around the open-plan kitchen & living room, jumping on sofas and stirring pans.)

It's December 25th in shortcipher's new Oxford flat, my gin-and-tonic's full of fresh lime, and I'm... optimistic.

(We both have terrible memories, had to consult calendars and chatlogs to remember how this started. Turns out it was May the Fourth. (One way to make sure that geek-partners won't forget your anniversary, I guess.))

Recently, kaberett wrote about their polymer, and I was moved to do the same. I hope to get round to it at some point. But I couldn't even think about doing that without writing about kaberett - an amazing friend and human being, three times my metamour and, it turns out from today's chatlog-reading, basically responsible for goading me into admitting how much I wanted... what I have right now this moment.

So, 2013. I dragged myself out of my worst mental-health-fail to date. I joined the Indelicates. I started planning a solo show, but soon realised that I'd always rather work with deathbyshinies, if there's any way that I can.

My mental health's not perfect. My job situation's insecure at best. But this polymer - especially this boy right here, who's just moved to Oxford and starts his new job in January - make me feel like, somehow, it'll all work out ok.

For those that don't know - "Mx" is a title. Y'know, the bit that goes in front of your name, like, "Mx Sebastienne Stardust". I often explain it by analogy to "Ms" - much as Ms was created to get rid of the shitty situation where a woman was forced to disclose her marital status (or, to *appear as if* she was revealing her marital status) through her choice of Miss or Mrs; so Mx was created to get rid of the shitty situation where a person is forced to gender themself through the title they use. (More on Mx: from Ganymede on the Lashings blog.)

I have set myself a goal of becoming a Mx by the end of the calendar year. Now, this really should be easy - titles have no legal standing in UK law (unless they are tied to particular qualifications, eg, Dr) and when I stopped being Miss Sebastienne Stardust and started being Ms Sebastienne Stardust, nobody batted an eyelid or asked for a deed poll.

But - as many genderqueer people and their friends reading this will already know - it ain't always that easy.

There are systems problems - "computer says no". Places that *require you* to use a title from their drop-down list, which might include "Wing Commander" but almost certainly won't include "Mx".

There are human problems - "that's not a real title", "I'll need to see a deed poll".

(A "deed poll", of course, having about as much legal standing as a title, ie, not very much. But already, I'm starting to think that I may need to get one if I'm going to make this work.)

A few weeks ago, I contacted my bank to discuss this change. (This is the same bank that moved me from "Miss" to "Ms" without too much faff, about five years ago.) They flat-out could not help, and continued to address me as "Ms Stardust" throughout the conversation. Eventually I got them to agree that they could remove the title from my bank cards, but their internal systems? Not even that.

(And I've had other customer service problems with them recently - they very nearly cost me a job through failing to provide a bank statement that I repeatedly requested - AND they've just been bought out by hedge fund managers. So.)

Yesterday, I visited two banks to enquire about moving my current account.

The Coventry Building Society was perfectly happy to put "Mx" on my record, as long as I could provide a deed poll; but they needed me to deposit a certain amount every month, which in the current economic climate, could be difficult to commit to.

Nationwide Building Society said that there was no way they could put Mx, even with a deed poll (computer says no), but they could remove my title altogether (this could be a good workaround if my primary goal was to not be gendered; but actually, my primary goal is to increase the visibility of Mx). They offered an account that suited my needs quite well, so I am considering finding an address and writing a letter to see if I can get Mx on their systems.

(I should also do some more reading about "Ms" - after all, that was a new, created title and feminist activists succeeded in getting it into the mainstream. What tactics did they use, and how can those be mirrored today?)

( notes on politics )