I think it’s interesting to see the reactions to today’s Dracula Daily that are like, “He did a racism! He used the g-slur!” and don’t go deeper than that. I was born in the early 80s and didn’t know the g-slur was a slur until like between 5 and 10 years ago. I mean, there was a whole Disney movie that used the word like it was no big deal when I was in middle school. I’m not saying Disney wouldn’t do a racism, I’m saying Disney wouldn’t have put language in a 90s kids’ movie that wasn’t considered “politically correct” in mainstream America at the time. Anyway, my point is that until sometime in the mid 2010s, I honestly thought G****** was just what that group of people were called, or was a term for nomadic people in general. I guarantee there are well-meaning Americans in the year 2022 who aren’t tuned into online antiracist discourse who still think that. Stoker could’ve easily used the word thinking it was no different than calling someone an Englishman or a cowboy.
The blatant racism here is how the Romani are portrayed. They are “without religion, save superstition,” i.e. Godless heathens, i.e. their religion isn’t a version of Christianity so it isn’t a legitimate religion. They’re ignorant for only speaking their own language, even though Jonathan doesn’t speak or understand it and doesn’t understand most of the foreign language he’s encountered on this trip. They act overtly deferential and subservient to Jonathan. They take his money and then sell him out to the Count.
If this narrative had only used the word Romani or the name that this particular group of Romani used for themselves (I’m seeing meta that Szgany is a slur, too, but I haven’t looked into it), this depiction would still be racist. While it is important to update our language as we gain better information, I think terminology is ultimately less important than whether a marginalized character or group is being portrayed as an offensive racial stereotype. I see all kinds of writing by modern writers, professional and amateur, that uses all the correct 2020s terminology but still portrays characters as the invulnerable black woman, the submissive Asian woman, the predatory brown man, the Jewish moneylender, etc. Again, I’m not saying terminology doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be critiqued in older writing, I’m just saying we shouldn’t let terminology distract from content.
Biological sex is not and has never been a binary. The complexity of the natural world cannot be contained in neat little societal boxes. Stop using science to justify your bigotry.
I’m currently doing a PhD in linguistics. I have a BA and MA degree in linguistics. I am being funded by one of only seven research councils in the UK and was offered funding by another too.
Yesterday at a party I had to listen to a guy, who has never studied linguistics, tell me how women talk far more than men and “dominate” conversations.
Even when I tried to present him with studies that show that men typically hold 75% of conversations, will view a woman as dominating if she takes up more than 25% of the conversation, and interrupt far more frequently than women, he would just talk over me to tell me all about how women talk too much.
He actually said at one point “women just talk loads and say nothing. Men don’t have to say much because we can just get our point across without the chat”.
All while he was giving me his opinion and refusing to listen to anything I had to say based on my 5 years of linguistic knowledge and 24 years of experience as a woman.
Is it really asking for too much to be able to go out alone at night as a woman and not get sexually harassed or assaulted? We can’t even have this basic freedom; then men say “Just don’t go out if you’re so afraid.” Way to avoid the actual issue. ♀️
What if I say we ban all cishet men from going out at night for the safety of everyone else. There would be an uproar. Men only see the absurdity of their arguments when they’re directed against them.
As Women’s History Month begins, I find myself wishing I’d planned a series of blog posts about amazing women in history (similar to my daily posts for horror movies in October); unfortunately, however, I only thought of this today and this month is looking to be a beast, so that won’t be happening. I’m going to try to post more than once this month, but I can make no promises! I wanted to begin…
Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of Research & Higher Education at the Globe introduces our forthcoming Women & Power Festival that takes place 13-18 May.
The Women and Power Festival is designed to ask questions about women and leadership in all sorts of areas, so we’re interested in the arts and culture, we’re interested in politics and society, we’re interested in education and academic studies.
Obviously, in the last couple of years conversations have exploded about the role of women in society and whether or not women have access to power and how much access to power we have. So it’s this relationship between women and power specifically that this festival is really interested in.
We’re having this conversation now because of the precarious relationship between structures of power and women. So we see in some parts of the world women not having gained power at all. We see in some parts of the world women’s power being taken away from them as we speak. I think there’s a lot of fear out there about women having power but actually what women want is equal access to power and I think it’s these kind of conversations that we need to have here.
It’s important at Shakespeare’s Globe because we are interested in particular in what theatre and art-making can do in particular to those conversations. So we’re going to have some platform events where we invite female directors to come in and talk to people about what it means to direct theatre in the twenty first century as women, as women of colour.
We also want to have a panel event which discusses politics and activism and who these women are who are sort of on the front lines of society at the moment. Then we’re going to have the one day symposium which just examines women and leadership really quite intensively. So we’re going to be looking at the relationship between women and leadership and culture and art and politics and education specifically as well. What the imbalances are between the different genders.
The kind of impact that we are hoping this women and power festival will have is getting people to talk, getting people to think about these questions about the role of women in society very critically instead of just skimming the surface of social media and picking a side. It’s really looking at the grey areas what it means to be a woman today when we are faced with all of these struggles and imbalances. It’s really about getting people to talk and ask more questions, maybe even put on more events, but we just need to keep talking about it.
Art and theatre is about creativity and I suppose they’ve been domains that have been male dominated. I suppose that women have had to elbow their way in to important positions, taking over theatres, deciding content, curating museums. It’s all those kinds of things. Those have been in the domains of men and I feel like the potential particularly for theatre is basically exploding a conversation that women are determining. What kinds of performances are we going to see, whose story are we going to tell, are we always going to tell the same old stories that have been dominating society for hundreds of years. I think when women come into the scene, they start to provide alternative narratives and ideas that actually propel more creativity, and that’s really exciting.
You can hear Farah alongside playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, actor Clare Perkins, fight director Yarit Dor and Globe artistic director Michelle Terry talking about women and equality in theatre in our podcast, Such Stuff. Tune into Episode 2, Season 4: International Women’s Day. Full transcript available.
Dr Farah Karim-Cooper reflects on International Women’s Day.
Dr Farah Karim-Cooper is the Head of Higher Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe. In this blog, written for International Women’s Day, Farah reflects on her position as a woman of colour, and a Shakespeare scholar and how these facts play a part in her everyday life.
I’m a mother, a partner, a daughter, a Shakespeare scholar, a woman of colour and as it’s International Women’s Day, I am thinking hard about all of those labels and how I have to negotiate between them all the time. At the Globe this year we are examining what it means to be a woman; what our relationship to power might be; how women are perceived when they are in leadership positions; and what, if anything, did Shakespeare–that great paragon of white male excellence–have to say about these questions? Given our extraordinary experimental production of Richard II with a cast of women of colour and the West End production of Emilia, a play born here at the Globe, consisting also of mainly women of colour, the subject of this blog will focus on Shakespeare’s notions of women of colour and what it means to me to be one.
Please note: this blog contains offensive language.
Last year I curated a festival about Shakespeare and Race. Coming home from a planning meeting that I happened to bring my 15-year-old daughter to, I was feeling excited and enthused about the important work we were doing to draw attention to race and intersectionality at Shakespeare’s Globe. But while my daughter and I were waiting at the pedestrian crossing, a white man rode by on his bike and told us ‘fucking Pakis to go home’. It was deflating, of course, and I was deeply worried about what my daughter would think. How she might internalise that comment and see herself as something alien in the country where she had been born. She didn’t quite catch what he said–thank goodness–but I did. After living here 22 years, I fear the word ‘Paki’ and always will, I suppose. Would he get off his bike and hit me? Would my daughter be attacked? Questions like this zip into your head until you brush them away quickly. By the time I got home, I felt even more motivated to be proactive in discussions about race and gender at my institution and beyond. I am inspired by the many women of colour who have had to overcome the same horrible effects of our visibility as well as the deflating effects of the invisibility that also come with being a woman of colour. This invisibility, being overlooked, being one of the last on the list make up the daily acts of erasure that gall and hurt.
The scholar Kim F. Hall who was last year’s Sam Wanamaker Fellow wrote a game-changing book about the early modern intersections of race and gender and in so doing unearthed and made visible an entire network of texts, poems and images that comment on, satirise or celebrate women of colour. She reminds us about Shakespeare’s dark women: Hermia ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Rosalind (Love’s Labour’s Lost), the dark lady of the Sonnets, for example. While her book shows us how blackness served in early modern England to highlight the superiority of the white European; she tells us that black female beauty was a possibility back then. Many have tried to identify who the dark lady of the sonnets was–perhaps it was Emilia Bassano, perhaps it was nothing more than a fantasy of a woman of colour. Maybe Shakespeare was imagining an alternative to the much-repeated ideal in renaissance poetry of a ‘fair’ or white, wealthy, chaste lady with golden locks, rosy cheeks and glassy bright eyes. Shakespeare in fact, never really describes the perfect beauty the way many other Elizabethan poets did. With his dark lady sonnets, he describes instead the raw, visceral reality of a woman of colour who was the opposite of the conventional ideal, but who his narrator/speaker desired above all else. She is bold, assertive, sexually autonomous and real. I don’t know if Shakespeare knew such a woman, but we do know that Tudor-Stuart London was not a singularly white city. We know that people of colour populated Southwark in fact; that ‘blackamoor’ kitchen maids, servants, metal workers, musicians and more, lived and worked in the metropolis. This is a London we don’t know well enough, a result of centuries of archival research that shows bias towards crafting a purely white history. Women of colour occupied Shakespeare’s imagination and his city; and he offers a beautiful alternative to what he must have felt was the tedious, conventional ideal. Women of colour of Britain must always remember that we have always been here. We belong here too and we aren’t going anywhere.
Further reading
Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England by Kim F. Hall
Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama by Dr Farah Karim-Cooper
AstronautMae Jemison was the first African American woman in space… but before that, she was a Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia.
These protesters are certainly not alone in feeling that Brock Turner deserved a more severe punishment for his crime. But responding with violent vigilante justice addresses a symptom of rape culture rather than its roots. And it conflates Turner with those larger issues instead of addressing them.
