Ampersand

In Steven Universe, Healing Comes Through Introspection

Steven Universe became a sensation in part because of its studied and mature examination of difficult issues. Framed with bright colours and catchy tunes, the show gave audiences a young male protagonist who was always concerned about the welfare of others, deeply committed to striving for equitable solutions and extremely invested in the happiness of those he loved. But Steven was always able to approach the world with the naive optimism of a young child. As he finally gets older, Steven’s struggle with the difficulties of the world reflect his growing understanding of the hard choices we must all make in life. Now that the broken heart is his own, we get to see the hard work that goes into healing emotional wounds instead of just physical ones.

American Son and Watchmen Show America Has A Policing Problem

The two stories give different entry points to the same idea: police are the problem. If in even a fantastical world where they are the ostensible victims of the story, police officers still manage to make white supremacists the underdogs, then there is a rot at the root of the very institution. Watchmen reveals that the much-beloved police chief whose lynching catalyzes the story was secretly a racist with a Klan hood hidden among his things. The moment manages to be both shocking and entirely mundane, because, in the real world, police officers dedicated to battling white supremacy are the aberration, not the norm.

Respecting The Dilettante: Elle Woods And The Power of Pink

Legally Blonde’s construction of Elle’s transformation is significant because it casts aside the assumption that women are the characters who need to assimilate into hostile conditions. Elle adapts, but she remains her true self, bending her circumstances to fit into her world on her own terms. The film demonstrates an understanding that there are different kinds of knowledge that are all contextually important. The likelihood that after-perm care will factor into a murder case are slim to none, but that small detail of the story allows the audience to enter into Elle’s area of expertise and gives her a venue to display the hard-won knowledge she has earned through her cultivation of the feminine.

All The Women in The World: An Argument in Favour of Women Onscreen

The women like Regina George who wore pink and played up their feminine wiles are just as valuable and necessary as the ones like Imperator Furiosa who picked up a gun and ran into battle. It’s time we recognize them as different individual points along the same spectrum of the expression of femininity, instead of as competing versions of an outdated and incalculable ideal. 

There is no one way to be a woman. There are many.

Sell/Day/Date Sells Sex Workers Down The River

Jones is an artist with an agenda and a specific point of view, and it makes her work engaging because her passion is clear. But Sell/Buy/Date is a perfect example of the ways in which feminist praxis can be weaponized against women who do not have the luxury of making more palatable choices. Jones attempts to explore the ways in which women of this era are served up for male consumption and how we navigate our own set of severely limited choices as we search for true cultural, spiritual and bodily autonomy, but she never manages to find a way to truly bring all women along.