2009 Recapitulation: Let the Linking Begin!

Since you haven't seen much new content here I've decided to spend the rest of the day clearing out the ol' link bin and writing a bit about where, at the end of this year/decade people's heads seem to be at. I'm going to follow up my recapitulation with that most blogy of all end of year posts, the volumes of lists! Starting tomorrow, I'm going to start talking about 2010, and try as the subtitle of my blog so suggests to talk about franchises for girls and women with a little more consistency.

But a recap of my own 2009 for you, or at least what I've been doing on this hiatus, I've obviously been writing more for publications that aren't this one, and hopefully, I'll be doing more of that in 2010 I was working on a big case study for the past month, which, it now seems I'm turning into an article for yet another publication in the new year, which is exciting and hopefully the dozens of pages I've turned out will get more than 500 words. But rest assured, once that's wrapped I'll be talking in more depth about THAT particular case study here as well.

But on to the wider world, first up, a grab bag:


Is James Cameron a Closet Feminist?- I've seen a lot of interviews, I even did some work on the extended universe of Avatar, I wouldn't say there's anything closeted about his desire for strong female characters, but he also pays more attention to his characters, supporting and main, than others I've worked with. While you don't always see the full scope of that in the final cut, what you do end up seeing tends to be the result of a really mammoth amount of work, and I think that's a lot of what you see in his films, female characters with more substance behind them than average, and frankly, I think they rock.
Latoya Peterson at Jezebel wrote Memo to the Media: In 2010, Add More Dynamic Female Characters, and suggested some examples of how to treat female characters from Manga and Anime as models.

Part of the issue with finding dynamic female characters is our strict gender binary in the US, which divides entertainment into "male" and "female" with a heavy emphasis on capturing the coveted "male, 18-30" audience and their advertising dollars. However, this has lead to our current environment of condescending programing. How can we fix this? One possible way would be to look toward Japan's pop culture landscape - and its unique view of gender, content creation, and marketing.

I'm going to say strait off, that the best 2010 can hope for is people who were thinking this way in 2008 who got their projects off the ground (tune in tomorrow for lists on how many that looks like) but hopefully by 2011, there will be some seriously interesting, mainstream female characters that have had the influence of this years particularly loud interest in female characters and issues in entertainment.

More Costume Designers Should Be Household Names- yes, I'm an adornment and production design junkie, it's what I majored in in college and I'm unabashedly biased. The art of crafting the visual interpretation of a character and all of the elements that go into that end result, they're monumental and deeply affect the viewer and the pop culture that surrounds a popular narrative in ways that people don't expect or always anticipate.

Rethinking Beauty- a friend of a friend's site, interesting, very compelling visuals, worth checking out.

Check back in a little while for the next installment of my recap: The Cultural Zeitgeist coming out of 2009.