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.
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.
