Changing Tides

In my undergrad, I took feminist courses in which the class, Women in Religion, really stood out. It became a defining semester for me. During the course, our professor explained that in old Judaism, they used stories to delineate the law. Stories became the Talmud, the book of the covenant between a people and their god. This very specific set of stories, The Old Testament, became the foundation upon which the Christian Bible was made. What I didn't know is that modern feminist theologians have been looking at these stories for a while to find ways to pull apart the stories and “re-read” them for a different interpretation. 

Sometimes these reinterpretations and reading in-between the lines of story lead to different conclusions in the stories. Huh? Of course, re-interpreting is what many translators have done for centuries, but why would anybody do this? Because if you change the interpretation of a story, then you can ultimately change the law that protects the story. Wow and duh. Laws protect, and enshrine in a way, the stories of a group of people; the laws that govern a people are based on stories. Who tells these stories? Well, anybody who wants a hand in shaping culture.

What does it matter if the law changes? Who cares? Well, millions of women in 1920  cared when they got the right to vote. Millions of blacks cared when slavery and segregation was abolished. And when marriage laws change, gays and lesbians can live their lives without being criminalized or treated differently.

The persistence of one story over another is the essence of cultural struggle. We can witness it today in the political arena between the conservatives' stories about the plight of the business class vs. the progressives' stories about the plight of the poor. Stories are packages of information that disseminate the ideology of the teller. 

Le Petite Chaperone Rouge, or Little Red Riding Hood, once a pagan folktale to help girls to psychically navigate female sexuality, menstruation, and rape, was “moralized” by Charles Perrault, to reflect conservative French court values of marriage.* This version has persistence because of the Christian church’s hold on western culture and the subsequent wide dissemination of said story in the technology of publication. Parents today may be frustrated if feel that they have no say in the ideology of a culture that bombards their kids incessantly with flavored stories.

However,  you actually DO have a say in culture, and as an artist you are in a unique position to do so. You have an interesting weapon to change the predominant ideas and stories out there in culture. Every science fiction illustrator has contributed to the imaginations of countless science professionals, geeks, dreamers, anyone who thinks that going to the stars would be the coolest thing ever. Every funny political YouTube video-maker out there has the power to influence an audience (I'm looking at you, Nicepeter!).  Every creator of a graphic novel, whether building worlds or tearing them down, is offering the viewer some other alternative to the present state of things. Inch by inch, we move culture forward. Inexorably. Surely.

  

This is how bigotry and small-mindedness is changed in America. One story, one image at a time.

* Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. Psychology Press, 1991.