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Hai guyz!
I haven't been around much lately, but I found this scholarly feminist article and I thought you would be interested in it. Before you go "AUGGHh, it's just a TV show! Don't be so SERIAL"- it's fun sometimes. And in the end, a good TV show has a lot of serious thought put into it, and it can be interesting to analyze the decisions that are made.

Anyway.
It's old, so I'm sure most of you have at least seen it before, but didn't see any threads on it. And I think it's really interesting how much feminist discourse Whedon seems to generate. I guess he's declared himself a feminist, so he ends up being examined more closely. I was debating putting in in the Inara character thread as she is the main focus, but it has some interesting things to say about the series as a whole too.
Here is the Whedonesque page from which you can download the PDF:

http://whedonesque.com/comments/13373

I could go on and on, but let me just pick a couple of things to mention. For the most part, I don't particularly agree with what she says, but there are some aspects of her argument that I kind of jive with. For Example:

I agree with what she says about the sort of generic "orientalist" vibe the show gives off. Whedon always talks about China specifically being the influence in the show, but I never really read China in it. I mean, Inara and her shuttle read as Indian more than anything. And what scenes that took place in an elite setting always indicated a strongly European influence (the Shindig ball, anyone? Those dresses did not read Chinese at all). Besides the speaking Chinese, I felt the influence was just sort of a zesty asian blend. And that aspect, honestly, I never really liked. It always felt sort of stiff, and it was clearly not a natural code-switching. But it's not like the actors had time to fluently learn Chinese.

However, I don't necessarily believe that stuff to be a huge flaw. Without getting into sexualizing women of color, as she says, I don't feel it stereotypes anyone. And it's hard to balance out what the future would look like with making sure people see cultural roots. And in the end, TV has to convey CHINESE as quickly as possible, and presumably doesn't assume their audience will have a sophisticated knowledge Chinese culture.

*gasp*

That isn't even really one of her main points. Eventually I'd like to get a post in about Inara and the cultural view of sex in the future, but this has gone on long enough.

This is the sort of thing I'm doing at uni, but with children's texts. It's a rather well written essay, though I must admit, I had to stop reading after a while because my eyes hurt. I'm so tired gonk

So far, I've agreed with everything she's said, but I haven't got up to the negatives re: Inara xp

Hahaha, I've been out of school for summer so I guess I'm finally bored enough to start reading stuff like this again.

@Out to the Black: That is certainly the biggest problem analyzing something like FireFly. It didn't have much time to go anywhere. However, I feel that in television it is always so important to establish setting really early that SURELY more China could have been worked in there. But the very necessity of conveying that is probably what set up the generic orient anyway.

I feel that the view of the author gets really prominent when she starts talking about how Inara was a lost chance to show a sex positive society/ alternatives to current hetero-normative relationships. I agree that would have been a really interesting way to go with it, but I don't remember Joss ever stating that he wanted her to go in that direction. Hell, he may think monogamy is the way to go.

@Quixotic Faye: I think that's pretty much her point- that the Orient is supposedly/has been historically represented as this mystical erotic place where white guys go to have sex. So Asian women/Inara who represents the Asian influence become sexual objects.

Any opinions on what she says about the scene where Jubal Early threatens to rape Kaylee?


I do remember seeing that scene for the first time and thinking that it was pretty awkward.

Maybe it's just me but when I saw that scene with Early, I didn't think about it as a black man threatening to rape a white woman. My reaction was just that this is a really creepy and intelligent guy. It wasn't about him being black and her being white for me. He'd been observing them all and decided that this was the best way to frighten and control the essentialy innocent and cheerful Kaylee. It's about personalities not colors.

And I will admit to not reading the whole piece in detail. I tried but found myself skimming. Now if it had been a scholarly essay on ancient burial practices, you'd have had me. I'm a history nut.

I know they (and by they I mean Joss/one of the producers or someone) talk about Jubal in the commentary and I don't think that they said anything about it being written for a particular race/with the actor who played him in mind. I'm re-watching it right now, and Joss said that the actor had to audition for the part, so that means he hadn't been pre-cast or anything.

But even if it had been, Jubal certainly isn't played in a way that strikes me as being a stereotyped 'dangerous black man'. Or, I don't know how to word this. I feel that if the performance was exactly the same by an actor of a different skin color it wouldn't have been an issue because that wasn't part of the character.

So, forgive my ignorance and perhaps I missed it, but I am not quite certain why the author kept calling Inara a "whore of colour." The actress playing Inara, Morena Baccarin, seemed quite Caucasian-pigmented to me (regardless of the actress's name, lol)...

I know I don't post here too terribly often, but I couldn't pass up a good literary analysis. xd

I think poor Joss has been getting worked over by feminists ever since he declared himself one. The writer of this article sure does go on about Inara's wasted potential. But Joss likes to take his time with his stories. Look at Willow from Buffy. Who expected her to end up the way she did? Who expected anybody to end up the way they did? The man writes an intricate plot.

It's explicitly stated in the series that a companion such as Inara is a respected member of society and is not just a whore. While the article was written very intelligently, it's full of holes, and I'm not sure it was written by someone familiar with Whedon's full line of work.

As for the scene with Jubal Early...I'm pretty convinced that the actor cast just happened to be black. A similar situation happened to me and my acting troupe last year. We were doing a theatrical poetry reading and one of the poems happened to describe a brutal rape. The only man who was available to portray the rapist happened to be a black man, and we don't go to school in a racially forgiving area. The director's opinion of "an actor's an actor" stuck and it went off without a problem, despite our concerns.

I'm sure the casting directors and Joss himself had the same concerns, but it's true that an actor's an actor, sacrificing talent for "safety" is of no benefit to anyone.