So it’s 2020 can we talk about how Avatar portrays femininity as well as just gender in general?
You have Katara, Toph, Suki, and like 800 other amazing female characters who are out here being warriors and making a point that women can be incredible fighters too, and there’s an episode that addresses this explicitly where Katara duels Pakku and basically explodes his reductive view of women (best scene in the whole thing is when everyone carts her in to apologize to him.)
And there’s a lot about women being encouraged to take part in traditionally masculine spaces, particularly again with Toph and Katara. Katara is great too because the show doesn’t draw a dichotomy between a fighter and a healer. Katara can be gentle and motherly and a good shoulder to cry on, while also being a hundred percent badass.
But then also the show is really good (albeit a bit subtler) about the value in men embracing traditionally feminine traits and activities.
Our main character is pacifist vegetarian soft-boi who wears flower crowns and makes jewelry and spends a lot of time talking about his feelings and he is by and far the most morally sound character in the series who is completely at ease with who he is.
Then you have Sokka who a lot of people have pointed out has an arc that’s basically “chug respect women juice,” and part of that arc includes him wearing the Kiyoshi uniform, something he feels emasculates him, (and which the show makes a joke about tbf) but then they turn it around and make the ensemble genuinely badass.
And then sweet Zuko who is absolutely someone who is portrayed as caring and sensitive in his childhood (by no small part due to his mother’s influence) who is raised in probably the most toxically masculine environment in the show. The Fire Nation might have women in its ranks, but feminine traits like compassion, mercy, and basically any emotion that isn’t a desire for destruction are seen as disgraceful. It’s notable what gets Zuko banished is his refusal to fight his own father, and how that is labeled disrespectful.
It’s also notable that the people and places that change Zuko are more feminine in nature. He works in a shop, cleaning and preparing tea. He meets two young women who drastically change his view on Earth Kingdom civilians. He spends time helping a family with children. And through all this he’s there with Iroh, a guy who enjoys music, culture, and natural beauty, who’s sensitive and dedicated to humble acts of kindness for others, and who Ozai dismisses as an embarassing failure.
And the show ends with Zuko ditching all this toxicity and just being the guy he wants to be. He even hugs Aang at the end, something Season 1 Zuko would never do with anybody. Our boy hugs!
Like the show doesn’t just empower women by letting them fight, it also shows the power and value in emotional vulnerability and compassion that is usually only reserved for women. It empowers women to fight and kick ass while also deconstructing toxic masculinity.
Tl:dr: Avatar says let women fight, and let men be emotionally open with each other and hug!
this tweet is such a perfect encapsulation of what the brain trust on twitter considers activism at this point, i swear to god
she was a child
she was a child trapped in a legendarily abusive studio contract where she was being pumped full of drugs and sexually abused by producers
what is the point? “think about this the next time you watch the wizard of oz”? and do what? this tweet is so pointless
not for nothing but she was also a lifelong advocate of the civil rights movement and held a whole press conference to denounce white supremacist terrorism after the 16th street baptist church bombing
there are politicians who did blackface in office right now
judy garland has been dead for 50 slutty, slutty years
In a similar vein I would also recommend the Marlon Riggs documentaries EthnicNotions, which covers anti-Black stereotypes in popular culture from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights movement, and Color Adjustment, which covers the representation of African Americans on television from its advent through the 1990s.
You’re not going to raise your consciousness by watching The Wizard of Oz and feeling bad that Judy Garland did blackface (in not just Everybody Sing, but also Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway, for the record) because she was a minor under the thumb of her abusive stage mother and legally obligated to perform in these films because of her contract with MGM. Engage with the work of Black activists on the subject instead and think about or criticize how the stereotypes from minstrel performances still manifest in popular culture today in different forms.
this isn’t showing up in my replies because of the links so i’m boosting it, tumblr user thehours2002 is smart and thoughtful as always
ID: a tweet reading “just a quick reminder that a society exists to serve the people within it. there’s no such thing as a person being ‘useless’ to a society, only a society that is useless to a person”
