Hi to everyone
I've never tried this Soulforce forum before. It seems quite a bit more friendly than the SNL list I wrote to sometimes and always used to read.
The fun thing that I'm up to as a hobby that has only a tangential connection with Soulforce is enjoying "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," largely because of actor
Mariska Hargitay, who I consider talented and gorgeous. I've decided to do a research project partly about her and her family: mother
Jayne Mansfield and father,
Mickey Hargitay (Mr. Universe) who just died. Mariska was only 3yo when she and her two siblings were in the back seat of the car crash that killed their mother, Jayne Mansfield. If looking closely, it's easy to see Mariska Hargitay's resemblance to her mother. Quite interesting what type of 2006 Golden Globe winning actor Hargitay is turning out to be--with her femininity quite understated in relation to her mother's "blonde bombshell" flaunted femininity. Interesting also what the SVU actor has done with herself gender-wise with two hyper-gendered parents (feminine and masculine to each of their extremes).
(UPDATE: What did you think of the 2010 SVU Lesbian episode, when Hargitay turns on the radical Lesbian in-your-face routine, in order to nab a hate-murderer? I thought it was very hot stuff).
Here's how I am relating it to my ongoing, neverending Soulforce ethnographic work: doing a study of women who were variously publicly traumatized as little girls. From my filming days of soulforcees as a video ethnographer, my eyes and lens automatically gravitated to the sidewalk sign-holding children of Christian fundamentalist gender and sexual supremacists. Some 7 years gone by now, many of them, especially the girls, are becoming of age so that I can speak with them as women who were put on public display by their gender and sexual supremacist elders.
Every frame of video of them I've shot bothers me;
much more today than when I originally filmed them. Just as the mental imagery does of a 3yo little girl, the youngest, in the back seat of the car when her famous mother was killed in a crash. (While I filmed I didn't feel--I was on the job being objective--rationally minded. That's the dilemma with being a participant-observer ethnographer; by working/filming, I'm always at a specific scientific distance. Years later, now as I review the video footage I shot, in private at home, it's quite emotional for me to watch--more and more as time goes by, and each time I view. I am more in the moment reviewing the film than I was at the moments of filming). My angle of looking at it is through a lens of feminist consciences and research methods combining gender, age, circumstance, and public trauma. Again, I am studying women . . . this time, ones who are post-traumatized and were originally
publicly traumatized as little girls.
Hope to have some interesting chats with you here.
Kindly,
m~d
PS--Jennifer5, thank you very much for the e-birthday card in August.