The Sydney Feminists

If you've ever seen The Princess Diaries, you’ll be familiar with the scene where Mia transforms into the Princess of Genovia. She straightens her hair and takes off her glasses, and suddenly she’s beautiful and popular. You might not think it’s a big deal, but these tropes were and are damaging to a lot of children, particularly those like me, who look more like the first version of Mia.  Image Description:  two freeze frames from The Princess Diaries (2001). The left shows Mia before her makeover, with frizzy hair, glasses and an unattractive facial expression. The right shows Mia after her makeover with straight hair, no glasses and a straight-teethed smile. When I first started school, I was the only non-white child. All of my classmates asked me why I was brown and made up their own derogatory racial slurs for me. I don’t believe these children were inherently racist. Prejudice isn’t part of human nature. The cruel comments were simply because they had n...

It has always been the ambition of the media to appeal to the masses and invoke desire, whether through films or advertising. For a long time, and even still today, the masses that mattered were men. In feminist theory, the concept of the ‘Male Gaze’ explores the way viewers and consumers engage with visual media in a way that sexualises women in order to empower men. It is specifically targeted at heterosexual men and sees the objectification of women as a fulfillment of male desire. The term was coined in the 1970s by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey. She used it to analyse the structure, characters, plotline and overall nature of films of the time. Mulvey’s theory challenged previously accepted ideas and social norms and questioned why audiences and viewers of films and other media were positioned to view women only from the perspective of a straight male. Over the last 40 years, the progression of female representation in films years has increased exponen...

If you've been following the news stories around Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific sex crimes, you might already be familiar with the term, "underage women". It’s frequently used by mainstream media, including MSNBC and CNN, as well as Epstein's legal team to describe his victims, some of whom were as young as 14 years old. The term is problematic in more than one sense. The most obvious problem is that it's completely farcical - no "woman" is underage. An underaged woman is a girl. A girl is, by definition, a child. But the far more insidious nature of the term is that it muddies the waters and minimises the severity of the crimes in question, which are undeniably horrific. Many news agencies stated they used the term to avoid confusion over whether the victims involved were legally considered children (that is, pre-pubescent, which they were not). But their usage points to a larger and more disturbing cultural trend surrounding female victims: a tend...

  “Hidden Figures” made waves in the movie industry for portraying the brilliant, female, collective, computational minds behind one of the greatest scientific and engineering feats in history: putting humans on the moon. This movie showed us that there has been no lack of brilliant women contributing to STEM fields through history. We also know that women’s contributions to science, math, technology and engineering have been systematically written out of our history books.   All this complaining about not enough women idols in STEM fields for our future generations and we never stopped to wonder at what point in history we decided women were bad at math and science?  The history of patriarchy is hard to identify. For so many years, in the majority of societies around the world, patriarchy has been so widely accepted that it wasn’t even identified as a type of operating system until recently. The word “patriarchy” literally means “rule of the father” and did not em...

In the early 1900s, Australia had a well-established film industry while Hollywood was still in its infancy. Most early American silent films were made in New York by companies such as Biograph and Edison Productions. Hollywood began to be a popular production location in the early 1910s. It didn’t take long for it to become the world’s leading film capital. Australia had made the first feature-length film, The Story of the Kelly Gang , in 1906 but was soon lagging behind. Early Australian actors and actresses made the move across the ocean to try their luck in American movies. Louise Lovely was among the first to have a successful career. She appeared in a handful of films at home before gracing the silver screen alongside other big names of the silent era. She was frequently compared to Mary Pickford, the most famous and highest paid actress at the time. She was even considered a rival. Lovely was born on the 28 th February, 1895, in Paddington, a suburb close to Sy...

A big influence on the modern Hollywood acting style comes from Stella Adler. She had done away with the earlier big gestures used in silent film acting, such as an actor placing both hands on their heart to indicate sorrow. She bridged the gap between early twentieth-century Russian theatre and what was becoming popular in film at the time. Adler drew from the imagination rather than personal experience. She had a name in American theatre, appeared in a handful of films and has taught some of the greatest actors of all time. She was known for her harsh, but fair analysis of student’s skills. Some included Marlon Brando and James Dean. Even after her passing, the likes of Mark Ruffalo and Angelina Jolie have studied at her acting schools. Stella Adler was born on the 10 th of February, 1901. Her father, Jacob P. Adler, was a famous actor on the Yiddish Theatre circuit. She was only four-years-old when he had her star in one of his productions, Broken Hearts . Adler had ...