in which "Orlando" helped me find much needed inner peace.

Orlando is one of those movies that leaves me scratching my head several hours (or days, as the case may be) after I've seen it. Nonlinear films are sort of a hit-and-miss for me when it comes to trying to understand them, and more often than not, it's a miss. Sifting through my notes on the movie while I read this week's readings did help a bit, though. In her article "Sexuality, Feminism, Media Studies," Lisa Henderson asks, "how might we recognize the embodiment of both sex and gender without collapsing that embodiment into immutability?" I think we can avoid that by addressing the relative artificiality of gender. That isn't to say it's shameful to associate strongly with what our culture defines as manliness or womanliness, only it really is imperative to acknowledge that it IS constructed. Then of course follows the notion that a person's sex does not necessarily need to correlate to the gender with which it is associated. We see this in Orlando when it is expressed that "it was not privilege he sought, but company," and when he says, "I no longer care for a career, only love." Both are sentiments I would have expected to see a typical female character value (as we have seen with many such heroines even in more recent times, where we tend to believe we are more politically correct). Similarly, she is a willful and independent poet. In the early half of the twentieth century, she is a single parent who rides a motorcycle. Orlando represents the very opposite of "immutable." I struggled to fully identify feminist themes in the first half of the film. Yes I knew Tilda Swinton was playing Orlando as a male character, and the Queen was played by a man. I noticed the use of men singing soprano parts. Lines like "the treachery of men!" and "the treachery of women!" caught my ear, but I missed an overlying issue. Then Orlando wakes up and we see her reflection, and from that point on, the feminist overtones were pretty difficult to miss. While wondering and trying to articulate why that was, this quote from Elspeth Probyn's "Teaching in the Field" jumped out at me: "the ['space-off'] is the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible." The first half of the film seems to be giving us a typical male perspective, where the issues of women are unimportant and not of much value or interest. Their issues are not visible in the frame, so we don't care. When the film then centers around a female protagonist, however, the dialogue is very much centered on her femaleness. Every scene seems to exist to encourage a feminist conversation, as if to say- "here's your story about a woman. Being a woman is hard. If you want feminism to be an issue in your story, it's all your story is going to be about." To me, the film was thus calling out people who see gender/sexuality issues as a separate study, as opposed to a lens to be looked through. Lastly, I want to say that I realize a lot of my conclusions I reach in this class will probably be old news to many of you. Until relatively recently, I had a fairly rigid idea of what gender and sexuality were, and what they should be. The definitions were simple for me. A while ago I was with some old high school friends and one of them showed me facebook pictures of a guy who had added her recently. I was instantly attracted to him, and the more pictures I saw, the hotter he seemed to get (sorry if this isn't very academic sounding...). Then my friend informed me it was an old classmate of ours who was FTM trans. I was shocked, even though this person was fairly masculine as it was, even in middle school. I wasn't disgusted by my attraction to him, but I was incredibly confused by it. What did it say about me, and what did it say about him? Surely it had to matter. This film helped me see otherwise. When Orlando awakes and sees her naked body in the mirror, it was the first time I saw a character break the fourth wall and actually felt as if she were speaking directly to me. In a beautifully reassuring voice, she declares herself "the same person. No different at all. Just another sex."