girlhood

This week has been chock-full of awesome articles and online conversations! Here's some of what we've been reading:

• The Black Women Film Festival happens this weekend in Atlanta, Georgia!
• Heather at AfterEllen gives her two cents on the events surrounding Glee's Dianna Agron performing in a t-shirt that says "LIKES GIRLS." For more, I recommend Jenny Aisenberg's piece at Velvet Park.
• The Times speculates on "why women don't get caught up in sex scandals." (via Briar Levit)
• Bust responds to recent articles that suggested women "grow up" and be less "girly." What Tami Said comments on the racialized aspects of the personae in question.
• The Daily Beast elaborates on just how horrifically anti-gay Presidential contender Michele Bachmann really is.
• Tiger Beatdown and Original Plumbing introduce their new bloggers, including Bitch contributors s.e. smith and Emily Manuel at TB and Thomas Page McBee at OP.
• Stinkin' Thinkin' opines on "Why Addiction Recovery Should Be A Feminist Issue."
• Clutch talks about a shockingly racist and sexist online ad by a Tea Party group.
• ColorLines and KABOBfest continue the conversation about Tom MacMaster and Bill Graber pretending to be high-profile lesbian bloggers. At TransGriot, Monica recalls her online run-in with Graber.
• Pam's House Blend provides statistics on same-sex couples to encourage the New York Senate to pass marriage equality.
• TransGriot pays homage to late rapper Tupac on what would have been his fortieth birthday.
• Shakesville's Melissa McEwan shakes her head at Mitt Romney's joking about unemployment.
• Liz at Our Turn admires ass-kicking female characters and shares her take on the Double Dare documentary.
• TransQueers XXX and TransErotica on Tumblr provide places for trans* individuals to share naked and/or erotic photos of themselves. (Both pages NSFW.)
• Queerty wants to know what it can do to better serve its female readership! Ideas? Go go go!

Share your thoughts (and/or other awesome articles) below!

The series' penultimate post reciprocates holiday cheer with House and Coraline, two films about girls who live in haunted houses.

Relative to Breillat's other movies, 2001's Fat Girl is fairly tame until its problematic conclusion. Documenting the misadventures of fifteen-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and her younger sister Anaïs (Reboux) while on a family vacation, the movie highlights the disparity between the girls' attitudes toward sex despite their shared virginity. The older sister, who is slender and conventionally attractive, is interested in entertaining men's spirited advances and harbors a romantic naïveté when embarking on a dalliance with Italian law student Fernando (Libero De Rienzo) that she mistakes as more than a fling. Though only twelve, Anaïs, whose beauty is often ignored because of her size, is far more cynical. She wants her first time to be with someone she does not love and watches in horror as her sister gets played, her warnings ignored.

Writer-director Spike Lee is a contentious figure, especially regarding gender politics. His debut feature, She's Gotta Have It, established this reputation by depicting rape as consensual between the polyamorist female lead and her vindictive partner, resulting in bell hooks' seminal essay, "Whose Pussy Is This?" In subsequent releases, Lee has been criticized as sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic in his constructions of relatively unformed, castrating women and the limited narrative arcs they traverse. Thus, many detractors may not think a movie of his could pass the Bechdel Test, much less have a complex black girl character at its center.

In Two Friends, leads Emma Coles and Kris Bidenko deliver nuanced, ingenuous performances as polar opposites Louise and Kelly. The movie documents the dissolution of their childhood friendship following Louise's acceptance into an elite girls' academy that Kelly's stepfather refuses to let her attend. I chose 1986's Two Friends for a few reasons. Its status as an Australian TV movie is exceptional, though it screened at the Cannes Film Festival as well. Helen Garner's script unfolds in reverse chronology. Though she only wrote a few screenplays, Garner has since enjoyed a long career in her native Australia as a novelist and journalist. Finally, as a follow-up to Campion's breakthrough short film, A Girl's Own Story, Two Friends is one of Campion's few films to foreground the fragile nature of adolescence and female homosocial bonding. Typical of her output, it does so with nary a hint of condescension.

A look ahead at Miley Cyrus's transition out of Hannah Montana, which airs its final season on the Disney Channel this summer.