Wait, did some sister white girls just get Brown-Girled?
Like when brilliant Greta Gerwig and amazing Margot Robbie didn’t get nominated for the blockbuster of 2023
BARBIE!
Now I know all of you have already heard, read, and watched all about this, but I didn’t know till I just watched Ayman on CNN report on how a lot of feminists are furious that Gerwig and Robbie didn’t get nominated, leave alone win anything for BARBIE, when you couldn’t get Kenough of nominations for Ryan Gosling, our very own Ken.
At which Gosling himself, so sweet he is, no?, said, “There is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film.”
And to worsen matters, Kady Ruth Ashcraft then writes in JEZEBEL that “folks are taking issue specifically with Gerwig and Robbie’s names not gracing the shortlist for the ceremony’s top honors and frankly, it’s a self-serving, overblown reaction to something that happens almost every year. . . . I am just suggesting that folks who are sharpening their needles to knit pink pussy hats . . . . might consider that this inconsistency isn’t just about them—a big ask of a certain brand of liberal feminism.”
Oy Vey. (Where are those brown pussy hats, anyway?)
And if you think Ashcraft is withering, do read Hannah Ryan: ““Barbie” is neither smart enough nor interesting enough to be inspiring this level of uproar.”
Ahem. And, “There is nothing radical about the feminism that “Barbie” puts forward. In fact, I feel that it actually lets patriarchy off the hook far too easily by suggesting – through the proxy of Ken – that men’s misogyny comes from a place of idiocy rather than malice.”
And then, as if this reality check weren’t KENOUGH, Aschcraft concludes, “Barbie’s snubs are disappointing to some. Sure. But I’d argue that the out-of-proportion outrage fans are feeling highlights the film’s failure to convey a core tenet of feminism to its audience: A personal slight against some high-profile, privileged (white) women is not an affront to the gains of womanhood overall.
There you have it, and I didn’t write this. A personal slight against some high-profile, privileged (white) women is not an affront to the gains of womanhood overall.
And while that all might send some soft-hearted ladies wailing to the girls’ room at the heartless, thoughtlessness of a perspective that suggests that sometimes some white girls aren’t going to get all the limelight they surely deserve because they are competing with other white girls, maybe—just maybe—this could be a salutary moment for them to be reminded that this sort of thing happens to brown girls again and again.
This is sort of even the sort of thing brown girls are trained and steeled to expect—that in a stiff, wide competition, sometimes their stuff, just as good as anyone else’s stuff in the fray—black, white, brown or polkadot—is going to get overlooked, or passed over, or marginalized, or just told to wait till next time.
Brown Girls and other Women of Color will know this is true, and don’t kill the messenger.
As, case in point, guess who else didn’t get nominated for Oscars for great work? As Ashcraft reminds us: “In fact, this conundrum is concurrently happening to Celine Song and Greta Lee this year, the director and lead actress of Past Lives, a film also nominated for Best Picture and one that, frankly, did a remarkably restrained job at not beating its message over the audience’s head.”
Two Korean artists also not nominated but Hilary Clinton hasn’t tweeted her personal support and outrage to them yet (last I checked).
Conclusions. We are sorry Gerwig and Robbie weren’t nominated. They should have been. But neither were Song and Lee. They should have been, too. Let’s talk about both oversights and injustices when we talk about this, okay?
The itty bitties:
Folks, I was born and raised in India and have called the United States my second continent for the last thirty-odd years. Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve generally turned to books for the answers to life’s questions, big or small (that includes philosophy and recipes). My first novel Love’s Garden was published in October 2020. Some nice people have said some nice things about it (Buzzfeed; Medium.com; Foreword Reviews; Goodreads). I’m currently working on Homeland Blues, my second novel, about love, colorism, racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America.
My short stories have been published or will be in in Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021, the Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press, 2021), the Gardan Anthology of the Craigardan Artists Residency, Funny Pearls, The Bombay Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Storyscape Journal, Raising Mothers, The Bangalore Review, PANK, OyeDrum, and more. I’ve attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center residency, the VONA residency, Centrum Writer’s Residency, and others. I was first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), a finalist for the Reynolds-Price International Women’s Literary Award (2019), and received Honorable Mention for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, 2021.
In a related avatar, I’m Professor of English at Texas A&M University, USA and teach and write about English literature, South Asia Studies, Indian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies, Colonial Discourse Analysis, Gender Theory, Film Studies, and Critical Theory. I founded and directed (2007-2017) the South Asia Working Group of the Glasscock Humanities Center at Texas A&M University, and rom 2012 -2014 directed the Graduate Studies program of the English department at Texas A&M University. I’ve published three academic monographs and many articles on film, world literature, feminism and visual culture, colonial and postcolonial discourse analyses of literature from the eighteenth century onwards, gender in South Asia, and travel writing. The latest of these is Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012). I’ve received grants and fellowships from the Huntington Library Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Regional Worlds Program of the Globalization Project (Ford Foundation) at the Chicago Humanities Institute, and the Lilly Foundation.
I also play at Youtube; Amazon; Author’s Guild; Twitter; Instagram; Facebook; Blog; LinkedIn; Goodreads; and Nandini’s Writing, Treehugging and Reading Outfit
I was sighted at these spots recently:
Invited Featured Speaker at the Washington DC South Asian Literary Festival; 60-minute reading, and Q&A on my novelLove’ Garden; Moderator Dr. Betty Joseph, Professor of English, Rice University, April 16, 2022
Moderator and Commentator, Featured Speaker Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni reading from The Last Queen, at the Washington DC South Asia Literary Festival; April 17, 2022
Featured Panelist on “Shapes of History” panel, 3rd Tasveer South Asian LitFest (TSAL), part of Tasveer Festival: Watch, Read, Talk; October 1st-24th, 2021; also available here with a ticket or pass; October 19th, 2021, 9 pm CST
Featured Reading of Love’s Garden, Bright Hill Press Reading, July 8, 2021
Invited Reading at Lit Balm: an Interactive Livestream Reading Series, February 27, 2021
Invited Workshop and Reading with a focus on Love’s Garden at Dev Samaj College for Women, Panjab University, India, February 2, 2021
Featured Reading from Love’s Garden in the Hidden Timber Book Reading Series, January 24, 2021
Reading from Love’s Garden at Readings on the Pike, December 10, 2020, 7-8 PM EST
Reading at the KGB Bar, New York City, Nov 15, 2020, 7-9 PM EST
Reading at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Nov 13, 6-7 PM CST
Book Launch at Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX, Oct 27, 2020, 7–8 PM CST
Cambridge Writers Workshop and IEE Benefit Reading, July 24, 8-9 PM:
Podcasts: Desi Books Episode 21
Interviews: Nandini Bhattacharya speaks on “Tell Me Your Story” Digital Conversation, April 10, 2021, 8 am CDT, on MONEY/MOOLAH/THAT THING THAT THEY SAY MAKES THE WORLD GO AROUND, and Colonialism, Gender and Writing; Oyedrum; Lois Lane Investigates; Tupelo Quarterly; Critical Flame
Leave a comment