{"id":20832,"date":"2022-12-08T08:40:39","date_gmt":"2022-12-08T13:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20832"},"modified":"2022-12-08T12:40:24","modified_gmt":"2022-12-08T17:40:24","slug":"puff-piece-we-are-lady-parts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2022\/12\/08\/puff-piece-we-are-lady-parts\/","title":{"rendered":"Puff Piece: We Are Lady Parts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger recently came across the Adrienne Rich poem \u201cWhat Kind of Times Are These\u201d, which is an answer to the Bertoldt Brecht poem \u201cAn die Nachgeborenen<\/a><\/i>\u201d. When I wrote about that poem, six years ago, I concluded that it was important, in dark times, to talk about trees, to share our joys in small and large things, even as we also did whatever we could to fight our fears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I haven\u2019t done much of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know that I will do much of it next year, either. I hope to! But I have been hoping to for six years, or more, and we\u2019ll see what I actually write and post. Ah, well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For now: I really enjoyed the television series We are Lady Parts<\/i>. It\u2019s a\u2026 sitcom? It\u2019s one of those British shows that\u2019s more or less a single story told over six half-hour episodes, with comic bits and dramatic bits. To the extent that it\u2019s a sitcom, the comic situation is that our main character, Amina, is a studious and shy young woman who finds herself the lead guitarist in a Muslim-feminist punk band, despite terrible performance anxiety. The performances are great, the music is great (well, terrible, but also great) (I would totally put \u201cBashir With the Good Beard\u201d in my music collection), the writing is pretty good, the visuals are often entertaining, and I just enjoyed it a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not the type<\/i> of thing I enjoy\u2014for one thing, I don\u2019t really like the whole dramedy thing, and I have very little patience for what is called \u201ccharacter-based\u201d comedy, which generally means that the scripts have very few actual jokes. Also, there\u2019s a fair amount of Humor of Humiliation, which generally makes me igry<\/a>. And I found those things frustrating about this show, sure. But I also really enjoyed the stuff that I really enjoyed, so the Sources of Viewer Pleasure totally outweighed the Sources of Viewer Irritation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the things I really enjoyed about it was the portrayal of the five (or so) women in the center of the plot\u2014the women in the band, mostly, including the manager, are all British Muslim women, and otherwise have very little in common\u2014their religious traditions are different, their ethnicities are different, their family situations and backgrounds, gender presentations, sexual orientations, work lives, all are different. They all feel really specific to me, although of course I don\u2019t actually know anything about being British Muslim woman, so it\u2019s possible that it\u2019s all terribly vague and shallow. Still, it feels<\/i> really specific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It fits in to a group of films and television shows about people who are British and Muslim that I have been watching for years and years, going back to My Beautiful Laundrette<\/cite> and East is East<\/cite> and Goodness Gracious Me<\/cite>. In the last, oh, ten years or so, I have increasingly found that I\u2019m more likely to want to see a film or series that is at least part concerned with the British Muslim community (or communities, since obviously there are vast differences between those different groups). I don\u2019t know if that background is important to enjoying this particular thing, but I suspect it\u2019s part of my enjoyment\u2014I was delighted, for instance, that the main character avoids the now overused trope of having an overbearing traditionalist parent whose overprotective and stifling love must be escaped without severing the true and honest bonds of family. Instead, Amina\u2019s mother and father are pretty clearly the people who went through that as teenagers thirty years previously, so Amina has to instead rebel against their loose and ineffectual encouragement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slight Digression:<\/i> I wonder also if this is why I ultimately was disappointed in the Ms. Marvel<\/cite> series\u2014I enjoyed some of it, but I felt like it didn\u2019t really do much new with what I considered to be old and worn-out tropes. It was pointed out to me at one point that I hadn\u2019t seen those tropes set in New Jersey (other than in the comic), which is totally true, but after the first couple of episodes I felt they did very little with the New Jersey setting. And, of course, I hadn\u2019t seen those tropes in a superhero story (again, other than in the comic) which is, again, totally true, but somehow also, meh. End Digression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do wonder if the appeal these kinds of shows have for me is connected with my own background, growing up in a religious minority. The specifics are wildly different, of course, but some of the concerns are similar. There\u2019s a strange combination, in this show, of community insularity and minoritized status\u2014our characters almost never interact with anyone who was not raised in Islam, but they are also a small group within a country that largely views them as somewhere between odd and dangerous, and certainly as foreign. That experience binds them in common\u2014as I feel with other American Jews\u2014but does not in any way erase their differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, I suppose in the end, it is a found-family movie, and that\u2019s what I really liked about it. I mean, spoiler, yes: the band breaks up and then gets back together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/i>
-Vardibidian.

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