I've told a couple people in the class I would post an article about female directors (and why there only about three of them) so here it is:

http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/feature/2002/08/27/women_directors/index.html?pn=1

In both mainstream and independent films, female directors are a rare and diminishing species. This article interviews various female directors, asking why this is going on. It seems to be a combination of Hollywood money (old dudes don't like financing young women) and film schools attempting to mimic Hollywood's standards:

"In the hallways of San Diego State, says Professor Lauzen, "I have heard male professors say to female students, 'Don't even think about directing or being a cinematographer. Get into producing.'"

For those who wanted to see, here's the percentages I calculated (sorry it took forever, I can do the rest if people show interest but for now I'm stopping with these)

Our class has created an estimated:
4 songs per woman
142 songs per man

1035 stories per woman (one 10,000 estimate skewed it a little)
141 stories/man

843 poems per woman
29 poems per man

11 dances/woman
.8 dance/man

8 videos/woman
17.5 videos/man

One of my main motivations for doing this survey came from something written a leaflet in my first Propagandhi album:

"Go look at your record collection. Your television. Your bookshelf. If you're like me, chances are that between 75 and 100 percent of the artistic expression you consume is made by white, heterosexual, middle to upper-class males. Maybe we should be asking ourselves: AREN'T WE BEING CHEATED?? White heterosexual middle-class males make up a miniscule portion of the people on this planet! Think of all the emotions and thoughts we're missing! The incredible variety of voices that are lost due to our society's sexism! Feminism's primary concern is social justice, and wrapped up in that concern is the potential of every individual to be more complete, more informed and, well... happy."

At the risk of this sounding like a cop-out, I must say I have absolutely no idea how to respond to Marchessault’s article, aside from complaining about my inability to understand her point. I found the beginning (meaning, the paragraph about her adventure in the bathroom) and the last section interesting, beyond that her article made me want to cry. I think, in part, this is because I am unfamiliar with a majority of the theorists she references (aside from good ol’ Barthes), and in part because I can’t concentrate on an article which requires me to “unpack” each sentence.

...that was, until I got a hold of Janine Marchessault.

It's not that I didn't understand most of the words she was using, it's just that when they all came together into sentences - or even worse, paragraphs - they didn't make quite enough sense to me.

When I say they didn't make quite enough sense, I mean that most of the time they didn't make any sense. This forced my mind to wander. I read the entire essay before I realized that I was thinking about girls the entire time. And not in the way that Ms. Marchessault would appreciate.

I think Marchessault's problem is that she loves words so much that she feels the need to use every single one she knows when she writes something. If she would write more like people speak - and understand - I would have gotten a lot more information out of this essay.

I'm not sure if its me being distracted, me being incompetent, or the fact that it is approaching 1 am, but am I the only one out there who doesn't have a freaking clue what Marchessault is talking about? I just read and reread pretty much every sentence in that essay and I haven't the faintest clue what ol' Janine's argument is. Example number one: "If, in the post-structuralist scheme, an author is man in his purest expression, then the dead author is indeed a woman - a 'fluid' phantom, 'unfixed' and 'multiply' existing always in the elsewhere." I mean honsetly? Is there anyone that could explain this sentence to me in plain English? Another little gem of a quote from an earlier passage suggests that perhaps "the ideological stench of the author might indeed be greater in death than life." Is there some meaning for stench in the dictionary that I am not seeing, or am I just completely missing the point of this article?

Reading Janine Marchessault’s “Is the Dead Author A Woman“, there was an excerpt that really stood out for me in defining authorship in relations with women. Marchessault writes, “If there is a resistance to feminism on the part of some women, a desire not to identify, and a desire not to identify with women, it is perhaps because a history, without memory, continues to divide us negatively” (Marchessault 88). A “history without memory” is no history at all, especially when it concerns a collective identity where memory is the cornerstone of defining that identity. In the case of women’s authorship, this lack of history leads to a dissipation of influence, authority, and control of women’s identity as authors that instead of bringing about a powerful source of affirmation of women author’s collective identity both socially and politically, “continues to divide… negatively.”