If there is something Chileans are good at, that is poetry. We have some pretty good prose writers, too, but our poetry is just at a whole different level. (Recommendations on prose at the end of the post. You are welcome)
Probably because I´m going back to Chile next Saturday (!!!) Pablo Neruda came into mind during the last three weeks. One of my favorite Neruda pieces is called "Walking Around" and the first line reads "sucede que me canso de ser hombre" (more or less "It happens, I am exhausted of being a man"). No, it is not a piece about gender, it has some of that but it evolves into an universal topic. Of course it does; its a Nobel prize! but still, after learning the things I have learned because of this project, I think a whole new reading of this masterpiece can be done. This is a piece that I consider "part" of me, one of those little treasures one keeps, and it feels nice to read it from a new angle because of this project :)
This is one of the scenes I like the most. I was really excited that I was getting to see Aiden working. Huge detail: this photo session was scheduled for 7 AM!! Aiden has really good friends, I guess, who would wake up around 6 am so he can take pictures of them.
I loved the interviews Cris and Sophia gave me. I liked how Cris has a tremendous respect and admiration of Aiden´s work, and how honest he is when he says he knew little or nothing about trans people before meeting Aiden. I feel we can relate to him. By "we" I mean myself and all those who have never met a trans person: those who I would like to be the audience for this short doc.
Sophia´s interview is just lovely. You can tell how much a close friend of Aiden she is, you can tell how she is happy to help with this project, but it is also clear how much she wants to respect Aiden´t privacy. I loved how she balanced that. You can see how much she loves her friend by how -while being helpful, spontaneous, and honest for this project- she makes sure to choose the right words in order to be a caring, respectful, supportive friend.
BTW: People have told me they can´t find the previous videos. They are here, here, here, and here. And also in our YouTube bar at the side of the blog. Duh.
Yes, you can email me as many you-are-so-lazy letters as you wish. It is OK. More than letters, I have been receiving face-to-face complains from family and classmates for not uploading new material and, especially, for not posting the full short doc somewhere online. I´m sorry, people, but that´s not going to happen until we are accepted in a couple of festivals!
Truth to be told, the piece is finished. I turned in my revised capstone project on Dec 22nd and got a great grade. But I wasn´t happy. I wasn´t happy with it at all. So I was adviced to let the project "sleep" for a while and come back to it later. That is why you haven´t heard from me: I took exactly 5 weeks to decompress and calm down a little bit because, trust me, the scenario got pretty dark around here. Total meltdown.
I haven't posted in five days. Sorry: five very busy days.
Yesterday night, I got into some sort of discussion on Facebook: a guy I knew in college posted a pretty unethical news story and a friend and I spend some time making jokes around it, my friend blaming journalism for all the evil in the world and me trying to justify my vocation by saying that female journalists are different. We were joking, but there was someone else who never got it: after some sort of defense of crappy journalism with cliches like "journalism is more than getting a quote," this random dude jumped onto my claim against the lack of women running newsrooms.That, I didn't find funny. He said "I know some women who are editors, and I don't think this is an issue of genre, I think it is an issue of criteria and the editorial positions predominant in each media outlet."
O.K. More than silly arguments, I hate silly arguments that actually prove the exact opposite to what they are trying to go for. He is denying sexism in the newsroom and then actually admitting it but changing its name. He is saying that some newsrooms just prefer not to hire female editors and this is their "editorial position." There are more precise ways to put it: misogynistic human resources departments prevent women to achieve powerful positions in the media industry. It is so dangerous when journalists fail at seeing reality. Where did Random Dude on Facebook go to journalism school?
This fight is not over, and here in the U.S there are blogs and columnists who make sure we don't forget that. Being the President of Chile a woman, I have to admit that I forgot about it a little bit.
Aiden has a say on this. I'm editing, and I found this clip. There is just no one with more authority than Aiden to prove my point. An important note about it, though, just so we are in the same page: Aiden, as he also says, has little or no authority to speak about how a woman feels, because he wasn't feeling things the way girls do. This is why he transitioned; he felt and perceived things like a man. He never felt 100% girl, then it's not like he can understand how we feel. BUT he looked like us: what he does know very well is about socially being seen and treated like a girl. As sexism and feminism are about socially being a woman, Aiden has an interesting insight on it. Here you can hear a word or two from an expert. Random dude on Facebook: watch this and then go read some sociology.
PS: The clip has a noise. Could you please be comprehensive with someone who is getting started on this? I'm working on getting rid of that noise. That's actually why I found the clip.
A couple of weeks ago, I was wondering about transgender people´s presence in literature and especially, in history. I mentioned the Victorians and I wasn´t so lost: I found this great blog in Spanish where the issue is covered. He is pointing to plays of the XVII century in Europe, and to the carnival. The carnival, of course! I forgot about it, duh! The blog´s author is quoting a lot of Spanish literature: Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Guillén de Castro. And Boccaccio´s The Decameron!
He also says travestism during the carnival gets talked about in Peter Burke´s "Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe." I read it, but I can´t remember what he said about this topic especifically.This is a good one, folks: if you want to read history during the winter break and you like European history,this is your guy. Trust me.
OH BOY I can´t wait to be on vacation to check some of these titles out! I´m curious: was it a matter of "erotica," or something even deeper? Were there folks who would be consistently gender non-conforming?
(Wait: I read the book´s description at Amazon...ha! it says "Long neglected by historians, the concept of cultural history....blablabla." I´m into cultural history, cultural journalism, cultural-cultural everything :S)
Something is going on with my face, something that I can´t decipher, and I´m totally blaming this project for it: I have a muscle that feels weird. It feel like it wants to curl or something. It seems to be a stress thing: when I laugh, I start laughing with both sides of my mouth like every other human being, but then I have to relax the right side of my face because it feels like the muscle is going to get curled forever. I´m scared! It began in the editing room on Saturday, all the area sorrounding the eyes felt really, really tired. That is normal, that always happens to me during finals, the problem is that it is going a step further this time: the muscle (or whatever it is, ok!) that connects your jaw with your face feels really weird. I am officially scared. On Sat, I had to go home early because I felt something could happen to me otherwise while driving, so I thought the sooner I drove back to Maryland, the better. Sunday morning it was still acting weird, though not as bad as on Sat. I told my dad and he said some people´s face paralyze when they are stressed out: that must not happen to me! How am I gonna interview Aiden this week with a paralyzed face! So I am working hard on relaxing, but now my face is again doing the "I´m going to curl" thing and I HAD to share it somehow! What can I do? I want to cry, this is scary!
Mixing the two important conversations I had this weekend, maybe now I know why people ask me if I knew Aiden before reporting the story. It isn´t pretty.
Manu is Colombian, I am Chilean. I´m having problems figuring out how my cultural background might affect my approach to this story, so I asked Manu for her opinion.
We spoke about how Latinos just allow themselves to discriminate. They see a gay couple and they have no problem with saying out loud "qué asco!" (how repulsive). They have no problem with looking down at African Americans. "An American just doesn´t do that," I said to Manu, "when they ´feel like´ discriminating, they work on it and stop themselves. It is socially unaccepted to discriminate, it goes against social rules." Manu said that yes, that´s true, but that we also need to consider American´s double standards. When they say one thing, but mean another. Manu said something like "maybe they say they accept it and they act like they don´t gossip about these things, but we would need to see how things go in their private space. Inside their houses. Maybe they say things just like Latinos do, but they act publicly as if they don´t, because of the double standards that rule here for everything." She has a point.
On Wednesday, after submitting my first cut of the project, my body completely shut down. I burned my disc at 5 pm, and then went to class: as I was sitting there, I could feel how my body was saying "Farewell, cruel world, farewell" (do people even say this in Eng? "Adiós, mundo cruel, adiós?")
Whatever: so it shut down, but before that I made sure to check out a camera. On Thursday evening, I met my friend Manu and showed her the first cut of the film. My plan is, from the reactions I get to this cut, work on the final one. I can turn in this first cut as my capstone project, that´s fine, I´m thinking beyond that: maybe the short documentary I want to have on my resume is not the same one that I´m turning in as a graduation project....aja! see where I´m going? I´m using my capstone project as a step towards the project I really want to produce.
So I showed her my capstone. Her thoughts will help me visualize where to go now. We talked for an hour and a half, but I selected the best 10 minutes.
Ladies and gentlemen: Manu´s reactions.
(BTW: Can subtitles be more annoying? Jesus! Someone should PLEASE improve Final Cut! It took me 8 hours just to subtitle this thing! and then an hour of rendering! and then, compressing! too much!)
"Maite, it is so hard to take you out of your own world!" he texted. Or something on the lines, but gramatically correct. My own world? Call it my recipe for happiness: lots reading, writing and editing--in that order. Caffeine, sometimes chocolate. Cuban, British, and Argentinean music in the background. That´s all I need in life. Dating you is not on the list.
Two days ago, I highlighted my timeline and hit "delete." Yep, I intentionally erased my whole project. I couldn´t stand the cut, I just hated it. Yesterday night, a long brainstorming night, I discovered Susannah Breslin´s amazing blog: today´s post is about how she just threw away a novel she had been working on for 2 years. I say that two strangers with the same insane reaction in a 30 hours frame is enough to declare this a normal behavior.
This weekend is going to be an interesting one, tough: my project is due exactly six days from now. In case you were wondering, I wasn´t on drugs when I hit the delete key.
( Isn´t the pic a piece of gold? It´s from 1910, there is this great Canadian pic archive)
I was thinking about this note I wrote the other day and well, maybe it is not so true. Sometimes I do feel everything even being behind the camera. I´m thinking about the interviews with Aiden. Yeah, definitely: when it is about people´s intimacy, people´s memories, people´s feelings, the “animal” stops. On those moments, I hide behind the camera so I can “take” what the person is saying. I mean, on normal circumstances, my face would be the one of a shocked, affected person, or maybe I would have tears in my eyes, but when I have the camera I just hide all that emotion by saying to myself “do NOT put the camera down. Keep filming. Do your job.” Actually, maybe being hidden behind the lens allows me to feel more: I am a pretty cold person. I don´t cry, I have trouble showing people what I feel. I block my emotions. Something really compelling comes to me and I close myself like an oyster. But when I am with the camera, I don´t have to do that, I can feel it all: I just make sure my eyes are on the viewfinder, and not on the person. The camera is my shell, but I am actually allowing myself to feel more than what I would under normal circumstances. Aiden, for example: sometimes I´m filming him, and he says something really, really compelling, really strong. I give myself the moment I need and then, when I´m ready, I take my eyes away from the viewfinder and look at him. In normal circumstances, you are always looking at the person, and you don´t have that moment. If you take it, if you look somewhere else, the person feels it. Not here, or not so much. It is just one moment, but a crucial one. Knowing that I have that moment makes me lower the guard and allow myself to connect and feel whatever I´m receiving while filming.
Aiden lives with 2 other guys. I assume all of them are interested in discussing gender identity and sexual orientation issues, since their house has plenty of art pieces and popular culture icons raising up gender-related questions. At their house, there are lots of intriguing pictures, films, books, posters, etc. All of them are quite confrontational, but there was one in particular that would make me feel extremly uncomfortable: in the living room, there is a fan with the word "FOAM" written in red letters. Next to it, a dirty pad. I swear. For months, litteraly, I ignored its presence. It would make me feel uncomfortable to the point where denial was the only choice. I would just not look at it, especially when Aiden was around. I´m not showing you the footage because I´ll use it in the film, but please trust me.
What is it about menstruation that makes us so uncomfortable? I´m a pretty liberal woman of the 21st century, and still. It has always been a tabu topic-- why? I think that, when things makes us unreasonably unfomfortable is exactly when we need to stop and force ourselves to examine what is going on, what makes us react that way. Tiding things up, let´s not forget that this was one of the reasons for me to make this video: I was a supporter of gay rights, but when it was about transgender people I would draw a line. Transvestites would make me unformfortable. It wasn´t rational, it just was. Heck, effeminate gay men would make me uncomfortable back then! So, while filming I explored what was really going on in my mind and that´s how this story helped me raise the bar for myself. Hopefully, it would do something similar for viewers, too.
So, keeping the spirit, what is the deal with menstruation? What worries me is that, as a woman, I feel like I should have a good reaction when confronted to art pieces questioning the taboos around menstruation. I feel like my bad reaction (not wanting to even look at it) probably comes from some sort of internalized misogyny. When I can´t look at that stupid pad at Aiden´s house, I feel like an anti-feminist woman of the 60s´. Or 40s´.
There is this video art piece done by a great Chilean architect/artist: Juan Downey. I can´t understand it, but at least I can look at it now. It is some progress. I need to figure this out...
The interesting detail is that, even though I wouldn´t look at the video and wouldn´t examine what does it make me feel and why, I "favorited" it and saved it in my YouTube account a while ago. Maybe I wasn´t in complete denial, but just needing some time.
Publishing these notes is just so embarrassing. It makes me want to edit them a lot. I know that would be cheating, and I want to publish them as they reflect my journey while reporting on Aiden´s own journey, but still! I´m publishing the notes from September and October: a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then, and I would write them so differently now! This Thursday I´ll be meeting Aiden, and he is probably going to point out to the stuff I wrote back in September, like “so, what´s up with THIS note?” just so embarrassing. I´m meeting him in less than 48 hours, and I still haven´t said anything to him about this blog. I have “evolved” quite a bit, I promise! Darwin would be proud. Aiden, and all of you, need to wait until I have posted all the notes so you can see that there WAS a learning curve. If after that you still consider that I didn´t learn anything, well, then we can discuss, argue, fight, and all that fun stuff.
It´s taking some self-control not to edit those old posts too much.
You can cross-dress if you are a hot/cute girl and you have already proved it. It will actually make you look more cute, and/or hotter. Just make sure to make it obvious that you are just playing with it. It's all good.
I'm a little bit obsessed with the presence and portrayal of cross-dressing and transgender folks in the media and popular culture icons. What about literature, also? I feel like I have to read all the classics again; are transsexuals always prostitutes in literature? I'm pretty sure there is more to find. Is there any big-big classic piece slightly talking about cross-dressing? I can imagine this being a topic among the Victorians. The Romans, maybe? I'm not surprised, though, at the intensity of this interest. This is really who I am: all my research as a history student was on representation, otherness, that sort of stuff. Identity construction, yes, but more on the artistic representation of "others." A lot of image-based analysis. What happens is that I ended up reading my own context through the same lens. I over analyze the PR industry, music videos, commercials, advertisement on the public transportation...
Below, two videos: Fey (so 90s!) and Gloria Trevi. In Spanish, sorry, but I'm not so sure you really need to understand the lyrics, and most of Americans can deal with some Spanish anyways. I said I'm obsessed with this, so it is for sure I'll be posting about English-based stuff soon.
Oh, wait! I'm so cool that I found it with English subtitles ;)
A word about G.Trevi: she got involved in really, really messed up stuff, and then spent several years in jail. And then, this song came. It was weird, this song to be her "comeback." I think she saw a thing or two in jail.
Seriously? These are the things that make me mad! What else are they going to come up with to ban gay marriage in DC?
We shouldn´t even worry, tough. It is an unstoppable force. It´s gonna happen, and they better be prepared to accept it. Marx comes to my mind: "Un fantasma recorre Europa..."
Don´t know the quote in Eng XD!
Stop! I found it, I found it. It would be: A spectre is haunting DC. The spectre of....GAY MARRIAGE :))))))
After this project, I can see myself reacting differently to some things. Some of them are stupid, some are really important, and some seem stupid but actually mean a lot.
For example, Mickey. I have always been a fan. I am also a fan of costume parties. When I turned 22 years-old, I celebrated with a costume party and dressed up as Minnie. I "conformed" with Minnie: I look back now and I see that what I really wanted to be was Mickey, but I just didn't have the guts. It wasn't even a matter of sluttiness: I wasn't "sexy Minnie" anyways. I welcomed my friends with the dress, and then put black pants under the skirt. I feel like I could be Mickey now. OR ELVIS! Instead of the Backstreet Boys, I had a pic of Elvis in my bedroom when I was 15: would LOVE to be Elvis for Halloween or something, but I really don't think I could have ever gathered the guts for that if it weren't for this project :)
All this might sound exaggerated for some, but keep in mind that I'm SHY, OK? SHY! Being Mickey or Elvis would mean a lot!
BUT I would have a follow-up question for this person: if it's so overrated, why would you make it the center of your activism? Aren´t there any other more urgent causes?
I imported the footage from the vigil. The sound is not as bad as I thought it would be. I wish I had a boom mic, but well, I guess I can´t do it all. I´m not a magician.
I was going through the clips and, for the first time, I feared something could happen to Aiden. Something bad, something violent, because of being trans. Just the idea of it is like, no. No. My brain just rejects it; after meeting all these people, I can´t even stand the possibility of something like that to happen to any of them, or to Aiden.
I would be guilty, too. Not only I would feel guilty, but I would be guilty if something bad were to happen to Aiden. It is his decision to go so public about being trans and he is doing it on many platforms, but he is also doing it through resources that I, as a journalist, am making available to him. So, whether I like it or not, I would be responsible, too, if something bad were to happen to him. I know most journalists would disagree. Not that I really care: too much about individual rights and too little about social compromise among journalists.
It´s interesting how these feelings came when I was editing, but not when I was filming. Is it because of the repetition? Because I look 20 times to the same 20 seconds of footage? Is it because I´m alone in the editing room, and it´s late at night? Or is it because, when you are filming, you hide behind the viewfinder and “filter” whatever is going on? It´s funny because, when you watch a documentary you are like “oh, my God, look what he had a chance to witness; it must have been so hard to be there,” but that´s not how the filmmaker experiences what he films. I am learning about it now. It´s like not being there. During the vigil, every once in a while I would put my camera down so I could connect with what was happening. But during the actual filming, I feel more like an animal. A machine, a beast, you name it. I only begin to process things in the editing room.
They say this is dangerous. Think about war reporters: you just get closer and closer to the action, because you are not feeling it is real. Heck! What am I talking about! I´m CHILEAN! We know about this: Henrichsen. This foreign reporter filmed his own death during Chile´s dark days. He got trapped in his filmmaking and, well, the Chilean military men of the 80´s know nothing about limits …
Confirmed. I goggled and did my homework. The main issue is invisibility: transgender people are not always targeted by the studies and statistics regarding HIV. Sometimes, M to F folks are just treated as MSM (MEN who have sex with men!) because the statistics don´t include gender identity as something different from sex. Alternatives had been proposed regarding data-collecting methodology. M to F individuals tend to work as prostitutes and engage in risky behaviors. F to M individuals tend to engage in high-risk sexual behavior, too, even though, so far, the disease isn´t badly spread among them. I found this very nice article at The Body, from where I´m quoting (bolds are mine):
Inclusion of FTMs in studies is not as common. The limited data shows that, compared to MTFs, HIV-infection levels among FTMs are low (e.g., 2% in San Francisco and 3% in Washington, D.C.). The available data on HIV risk, though, gives cause for concern. For example, a colleague and I analyzed data from two needs assessment studies in Philadelphia and Chicago, which included FTMs, to compare risk for HIV infection between MTFs and FTMs.We found that compared to MTFs, FTMs were significantly less likely to have used protection the last time they had sex and significantly more likely to have engaged in recent high-risk sexual activity.
I have been working on a short documentary for three months. It is about gender identity and art: I´m featuring Aiden, a young photographer who transitioned from a female to a male body and who deals with gender identity in his art work.
I kept a "production book," but it soon became a journal reflecting what would be my own journey unlearning what I knew about gender and rewriting it.
Many times I considered blogging these notes, but thought nobody would be interested. That, until Aiden began asking about my reactions, my ideas, my feelings, my own experience of gender.
He and his story made it so hard to stay at the corner and report. I knew that sharing my thoughts during the production would change his responses as an interviewee, so I shut up. The harder it became, the more I wrote. Here are my notes.
I´m a full-time graduate student of journalism at Georgetown University, in Washington DC.
I came to the United States as soon as I finished my undergraduate studies in history at Pontifical Catholic University, in Santiago de Chile.
I´m passionate about the religions, history, and arts of the south of Asia.I also love radio and visual storytelling, and I plan to combine all these passions in a career devoted to strenghten intercultural dialogue.
