Like any reclaimed identity, this stems from within but attempts to fight against the oppressive system.īecause the worst of my mental illness is/was defined by total isolation, the group experience of Autumn's asylum and Crumpets is, for me, the least successful aspect of her work, although I realize what it achieves and how. Idealization is a tool used against and by the mentally ill: waif-like ill women, manic pixie dream girls, correlations between madness and creativity, and the sense that there's anything redeeming at all about mental illness, either for the sufferer or the individuals and society that surround themwhich there's not, and insisting that there is denies the true experiences of sufferers but the illness can so completely define its sufferers that idealizing it, and creating identity and community within it, is the only recourse. Sucker Punch encounters a lot of this Autumn's work, especially on the topic of mental illness, evades much of it by being a self-aware, ironic idealization combined with explicit statements about the problems surrounding such. 'Punk movements and anything else that measures idealization against anxiety run the risk that the audience will see them for the former and not the latter, see: the problem with steampunk. Sucker Punch rises and falls: on one hand, it's a powerful representation of dissociation as a result of trauma and sexual violence, and it's an attempt to attain agency using the sexualized female bodywomen gaining power via a tool used to take power from women on the other, it gets swept up in its own aesthetic, is culturally appropriative, and objectifies conventionally attractive cis-gendered skinny young women in a way that doesn't defy the system in the least but instead buys into it. It's about the objectification and commodification of women, and reclaiming the female bodyespecially the sexualized female bodyas a tool to gain personal power. It's asylumpunk, if you will: the combined idealization and anxiety around mental illness in women, and the historical connection between women and mental illnessthe trifecta of society creating it in women, and diagnosing it on the basis of non-normative/-socially acceptable behavior, and using it as a tool to control women's bodies and behavior. The closest analog I can find for Emilie Autumn's Fight Like A Girl tour is the film Sucker Punch Sucker Punch meets burlesque.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |