What A Woman

Introduced to a standing ovation and preceded by her high-heeled gait, the audience at Colorado State University saw all woman in Laverne Cox.

On Oct. 23, every seat in the Lory Student Center Grand Ballroom was filled as Cox took the stage that First Lady Michelle Obama had spoken on just hours before. Venturing not so far from the topic of the greater good, Cox relayed her personal story to the crowd in order to bring transgender and gender binary issues to the forefront of conversation.

“It took me a long time –many, many years—to be able to truly say to myself and believe that being trans is beautiful and that if someone can look at me and tell that I’m trans that’s a beautiful thing.”

Cox made history appearing on the cover of TIME. Courtesy of abcnews.com.

As part of a national college campus tour, Cox spoke on the need for freedom of self-determination for American youth, especially for the LGBT community. To have self-governance as an identity that garners little to no recognition is pivotal in a life lived happily. Cox revealed that during her transition and periodically, she is estranged and deemed “the other” in environments when her identity triggers discomfort in those around her.

Drawing on several of her favorite advocates and sociologists, such as Brené Brown and Sojourner Truth, Cox offered to the audience that the human tendency to police one another is destructive. The same woman who is now idolized for living authentically, was once “spooked”—which is the term for a transgender individual who is publicly revealed to be in a state of gendered transition—in order for her hetero-normative  peers to make sense of Cox’s situation.

No anecdote was off limits during the hour-long speech, as Cox regaled the crowd with childhood stories.

“She’s just very confident both on the show and in person and I think that’s an accurate representation of transgendered women,” said Aleya Jones, a student at Colorado State University. In addition to the star-quality that Cox has, Jones offered that many people in line for the event were hopeful to learn more about the identity of transgendered people.

“I think it’s important in life to go out there and experience the things we’re unsure about, so we live in a place with people who aren’t one-track minded,” said Jones.

Known for her role as Sophia Burset, an incarcerated transgendered female, in the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black”, Cox has gained notoriety for her own identity as a transgendered female over the last year. In 2014, Cox has been the first openly transgendered female to both be nominated for an Emmy and to appear in Time magazine.

Since her breakout performance on Netflix, Cox has appeared in the public as an activist for the LGBT community. On October 17, MTV and Logo TV debuted a documentary hosted by Cox, called “The T Word”. Addressing topics from dating to anti-trans violence, the documentary was created to inform audiences much like Cox is doing for college campus audiences this fall.

“We have misconceptions about people who are different from us. If we just get to know them as people, I believe that al those misconceptions will melt away.” 

Watch Laverne speak about advocacy on Katie Couric.

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A Girl's Girl

A buzzword that has been decorated across the Twitter decks of celebrities and even Beyoncé’s block-lettered background for her performance during the MTV Video Music Awards, the word ‘feminism’ has garnered a trendiness all its own.

In a whirl of non-fiction spun around a slew of fictional social rebels, the sit-com “Girls” has been referred to as the realistic take on “Sex and the City”. With a gleaming needle of counter hegemony, Lena Dunham asserts herself as the creative seamstress responsible for threading the controversial television episodes together.

If situational comedies were founded upon the idea of recreating reality for the masses, then Dunham is the writer to remind us of just that. In an article from Elle Magazine, Virginia Vitzthum writes, “Among Dunham's gifts to womankind is her frontline example that some asshole may call you undesirable or worse, and it won't kill you. Your version matters more.” Referring to Dunham’s insistence on honesty in an era of hyperbolic airbrushing, the show “Girls” features Dunham’s character in nude scenes that rival the mainstream women whose idealistic bodies dominate television.

Photo courtesy of thetimes.co.uk.

One size does not fit all and “Girls” reminds audiences of this in the unabashed platform that HBO and three seasons worth of sexual health righteousness will allow. While the upfront stylings that take place on screen in “Girls”, such as the testing of sexually transmitted infections and overt discussions of body awareness are a pivotal ingredient for a good Friday night in with your own misfit friends, critics have something to say about the deviance of this sit-com.

On his SiruisXM radio show in 2013, Howard Stern said of the sit-com, “It's a little fat girl who kinda looks like Jonah Hill and she keeps taking her clothes off and it kind of feels like rape. She seems -- it's like -- I don't want to see that." Met with much backlash, Stern eventually issued a public apology after the public accused him of delusion over the realistic image of the American woman.

At the tip of the messy multitude of pens with chewed up caps that spew the script Dunham writes for herself and her cast mates, is the promotion of learning in media that has yet to take place. By affirming the average woman’s body and doing it in a way that weaves satire and comedy into the lot, HBO has allowed audiences the re-birth of our favorite New York City socialites. Trading Carrie Bradshaw’s closet for Hannah Horvath’s love for expletives, audiences are already exposed to a more honest viewing experience.

Mixing in the need for appreciation versus tolerance for the American woman makes Dunham more of a feminist than any of her star-studded Hollywood colleagues. Because, according to Dunham’s scrawlings, gender equity is not a topic to be covered up so easily with a glittery illusion. It is an issue worth talking about and talking about fairly.

Watch Lena Dunham in an interview with Good Morning America as she translates her sit-com hilarity into her new book, Not That Kind of Girl.

Raving Over Race

As Raven-Symoné’s work draws her from the television screen to the Broadway stage, Oprah Winfrey sat down with Symoné to bridge the gap from adolescence to her adult presence.

Though hers was not the namesake for the television show, Raven-Symoné gained a unanimous “Aww” from America in her role as Olivia on The Cosby Show. As a child star and, later, a figure many youth associated with Disney Channel works such as That’s So Raven and The Cheetah Girls, Symoné has recently made a subdued leap to Broadway, starring in the stage adaptation of “Sister Act”.

Symoné as Olivia in The Cosby Show. Photo courtesy of style blazer.com

Despite her continued body of work and aptitude to stay out of the public eye, Symoné’s recent interview on Oprah Winfrey’s “Where Are They Now?” is making up for missed tabloids of years past.

Concerning her identity, Symoné told Oprah:

“I don’t need language [for identity]. I don’t need a categorizing statement for it. I don’t want to be labeled gay. I want to be labeled a human who loves humans. I’m an American. I’m not an African-American. I don’t know where my roots go to. I do know that my roots are in Louisiana. And that’s a colorless person.”

Before the full interview debuted on the OWN network, American audiences erupted on Twitter with refute to Symoné’s thoughts on racial identity.

In an act that makes a clear delineation from her sit-com history, Symoné’s re-definition of racial classification takes several steps from the comfortable categorization of race that was apparent in The Cosby Show era.

The New York Post writes of the interview in defense of Symoné and her progressive act, which offers that individuals should accept and deny the labels that society subjects us to. The article titled, “She’s So Raven”, reads, “In short, any honest person looking at what she said knows this woman didn’t reject either her race or her sexuality. All she rejected were the labels.”

Symoné and Oprah Winfrey on the set of the "Where Are They Now?" interview. Photo courtesy of people.com

For public figures, media purports a monopolization of ideas. Even our most prized media forms define people and events in definitive manners. It is this narrow nature of media that Symoné defies in her OWN interview.

In a short span of time, Symoné expands on the ways in which audiences should be able to relate with those they see on television and on stage. If sit-coms intend to re-create reality and the people within it, sit-coms need also to advance in real-time with the reality of policy and identity and the individuality that comes with the labeling of Americans today. Because, according to Symoné’s reminder, this country is a melting pot.

Symoné’s childhood character, Olivia, was known to stir the plot and create profound ideas to linger for her cast-mates and audiences alike. To that end, it wasn’t so out-of-character for Symoné to re-align the American tendency to regulate race. With a friendly approach and enough quirky character as she held two decades ago, Symoné pushes race into relevant representation.

Watch the trailer of Raven-Symoné's interview above. 

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Going Jazzy for Gaga

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga for their duet album, Cheek to Cheek. Courtesy of billboard.com.

On the stages of modern pop music, the descriptors ‘grand’, ‘outlandish’, and ‘guise’ serve as the glittered trail leading you straight to Lady Gaga’s stiletto-clad feet. With red carpet ruses fit for the Mad Hatter, Lady Gaga nestled a niche of her own in the music scene.

Since her collaborative album with jazz icon, Tony Bennett, however, Lady Gaga’s niche as a musician has been under fire. Since her ‘Just Dance’ debut six years ago, her music and wardrobe selections alike have been befitting of the pop image. Like a categorical sorting process by the public, Lady Gaga has been primed as unpredictable in many ways, but not in terms of which genre she her songs belong to.

In the album, “Cheek to Cheek” with Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga’s achievements and accolades as a performer attached to a jazz album are not living up to the entertainer’s prior successes as a pop star according to album reviews. In the LA Times, one reviewer shook a show tune finger at Lady Gaga’s ensembles in classic songs, like “Anything Goes” offering that, “she sometimes blasts away at these songs rather than relaxing into them.”

In the schema, or category, that the public has outlined Lady Gaga in, there is no room for the artist to move laterally into the theatrical and show-tune stems of her past. After all, before she was glitz and Gaga, she was Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. Rooted in the melodic ballads of theatre, Germanotta is the antithesis of Gaga and her audience has taken note of it.

Despite “Cheek to Cheek” topping the Billboard 200 chart, there is a detachment between the duo and their audience, as Lady Gaga is disputed for her worthiness in singing alongside a jazz legend. Because of her steadfast denotation as a Queen of Pop by the masses, there is a royal order for what queens mustn’t do. And evading her pop image by topping the charts in an alternate genre is not cohesive with the permissions, nor the capabilities that the public is accustomed to allowing Lady Gaga to have.

While the LA Times includes reviews that acknowledge the raspy tone of Lady Gaga’s that, quite literally, jives with Bennett’s voice so well, more than just her Little Monster fan base is left wondering where the electronic flare of Gaga’s character fits alongside this theatric persona. Transported outside of the Art Pop world of Gaga’s past, the multi-faceted schema of Lady Gaga has yet to enter into full bravado with listeners. For now, definitive silhouettes and abilities are preferred of our artists, but perhaps there will be room in the future for jazz on Gaga’s outlandish stage.

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