6. Halloween Episode

Resources:

Why Can’t Black Witches Get Some Respect in Popular Culture? - Angelica Jade Bastién, Vulture.com

Witches and the Myth of Medieval ‘Burning Times’ -Anita Obermeier, Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture

Evolution of the Final Girl: Exploring Feminism and Femininity in Halloween (1978-2018)  -Maya Zhou, Claremont Colleges

The “Bad Girl” Turned Feminist: The Femme Fatale and the Performance of Theory -Michelle Mercure, Bridgewater State University

Unraveling the Many Mysteries of Tituba, the Star Witness of the Salem Witch Trials-Stacy Schiff, Smithsonian Magazine

Transcript:

Lapis:So it's this idea that, Oh, there's a very sexually active woman, but she's also duplicitous and dangerous, and she's trying to lead you to your doom, you better watch out.

[Intro Theme Starts]

Phuong:Yeah, there's the spy iteration of this that we see in every single James Bond film. It's not just the woman that walks into your office in the film noire, it's the villain that wants to kill so many people, but oh my God, her boobs are just banging. Maybe I should just let her kill people because she's just so hot. Like, what do I do?

Welcome to the Rising Roses.

L:A podcast, the deconstruct concepts and reconstruct stories.

P:We are your hosts Phuong...

L:And Lapis.

[Intro Music Continues and ends]

P:I think now, when people think of Halloween, they think of pumpkins, we think of jack-o'-lanterns and they think of trick or treat, which is the best part of Halloween. I think arguably why everybody loves Halloween because, you know, this is the one night of the year you can go to people's doors, complete strangers, and ask them for candy and you will get candy for free. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me, especially as a little kid. When I first came to Canada and I didn't know what Halloween was, I thought it was super interesting that there would be an entire holiday in which I could ask people for candy, but the caveat is I had to dress up, which was also fun in and of itself. But do you know about the origins of where costumes came from, and things like that?

L:Weirdly enough, the costumes are a very modern thing. The first record we have of kids wearing costumes while going out came from a little over 100 years ago. But before that there was this tradition called “souling,” which was a much lamer version of trick-or-treating, where all of the people in the town, kids and adults, would go to the rich and they'd be like, "Give us some soul cakes." And the rich would be like, "Fine. Here, have these cakes. Go away from my door peasants!" And that is how trick-or-treating started, or at least that's the treating part. With Mischief Night, it was a night where a bunch of kids would play a bunch of pranks on all of the olds that we're walking around. So, you know, they'd toilet paper houses, they'd throw eggs at cars, etc. And so Halloween used to be associated with a giant crime surge just before the 31st of October, and it used to be more about the trick then the treat for the kids.

P:Oh, so it was like an interesting combination of the two to combine them and say "trick or treat!" And I guess now we will segway into the part of our podcast about the cultural appropriation that can happen on Halloween and has happened to Halloween. Because what the definition of a costume is, has, I think, changed over time in terms of what is socially acceptable. But we can also delve a little bit deeper into this idea of having one day where you can pretend to be somebody you're not, right? And unless you're a frequent theater actor, you don't often get a chance to feel like somebody else, so what does this look like, what does this feel like? I think we can delve into that.

L:Pretending to be like someone else, kind of, I think came from the Roman holiday of Saturnalias, which was kinda held around the same time as Christmas. It was a day where all the slaves would pretend to be masters and all the masters would pretend to be slaves or some other sort of weird topsy-turvy sort of combination that changed the social order. So it is kind of an odd thing to see people think, "Well, okay, now I wanna change the social order in my own way, I want to pretend to be an ethnicity." Not a character from an ethnicity, but an ethnicity itself. 

P:Yeah.Absolutely, and I think we can have those conversations about yellow face, black face and red face, because I don't think people actually even know Halloween in that way as a way to reconstruct the social order. I think what happens is that people just reduce an entire ethnicity. I think, actually, this is where the conflation of ethnicity and race comes in, right, because the thing is, race is a socially constructed category that is based on "physical" characteristics that seemingly a group of people may have in common, but ethnicity is about socio-linguistic and cultural ties which can vary greatly. For example, I, as a Vietnamese person, am technically "of the same race" as somebody who's Chinese, but we have completely different languages with completely different cultures and histories, and that isn't recognized when you reduce it only to race. And by dressing up as an "Asian person" on Halloween and having a weird discombobulated of different Asian cultures, it doesn't actually accurately represent Asian cultures at all because there is such a vast differentiation between these cultures. And I don't think, for the record it’s any better if you dress up as a Chinese person, okay? Even if you've got all of the details of the costume correct or whatever. Okay, I really don't think that it's any better to do so.

L:What is your opinion on white people dressing up as historical figures that happen to be from different ethnicities? Do you think that there is a nuance that needs to be explored there, or we should just say no? And to be clear, I wouldn't do yellow face. That should immediately be obvious to people that that is not acceptable to do ever. So that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking like wearing the outfit and having the costume be explicitly about a historical figure from another ethnicity.

P:Yeah, that's interesting. I think we should explicitly go into the harms of what happens when you do yellow face, black face. Obviously with Blackface, it comes from a long history of minstrel shows and the kind of caricaturization of black people into a very dehumanizing portrayal of black folks, right? And I think that in the same vein, whenever you put on make-up to change the colour of your skin tone, to change your facial features to "match" that ethnicity, I think that it's disconcerting because you can always go home and take off that make-up, right? You can always stop being whoever that you chose to be that day. But Black people, Asian people, Indigenous people can't stop that right? Our facial features are coded and we are judged on what we look like every single day, and it feels just kind of like a slap in the face to the kind of lived realities of what these people go through and people like me go through. 

So I think that even if you don't need any harm and you genuinely just have incredible makeup skills, because I used to actually watch a YouTuber who used to transform herself into different celebrities, and some of the celebrities were not of her race. And she's Asian, okay, just for context. And at the time that I watched them, I thought they were just fun transformations. But then afterwards I realized how it's probably not the best that she would transform herself into like celebrities such as Beyonce and kind of used super dark foundation and change her eye shape and her nose shape to Beyonce. But I think there's different ways to showcase your make-up, that doesn't make the people from marginalized communities, even if you yourself come from a marginalized community, uncomfortable. I think that there's definitely a distinction there.

Sorry, to answer your question about what if you were to dress a specific historical figure, I definitely still think that it's possible, but I think it also depends on the context. If you go with a group of friends who are a bunch of history nerds and know exactly who you are, or you go to a costume party that is specifically themed on empresses and emperors of the Chinese dynasties specifically, I think they would make a lot of sense because then people can place you as that specific empress. But if you're going out in public dressed like that, I think a lot of people would automatically assume that you're just some "generic" Chinese person and I think that can still cause some issues. I guess, as with anything, I think it's very context-dependent.

L:That is a very good explanation of why it is a bad to put on yellow face or any other kind of "racial make-up." And I would also say that even though I don't think people are aware of the origins in Saturnalia, it does have a weird sort of similarity, in that it's still people from a privileged demographic putting on the face or the mask of the people who are being oppressed by them. In the Romans' case, it was the slaves. In this case, it's White people who, since we live in a White supremacy, are oppressing Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and Asian people. 

P:Yeah and there's definitely problems within this hierarchy of non-Black people or non- Indigenous people putting on costumes of Black and Indigenous people too, right? Like I think that what is macabrely sad about this is the temporality of that experience, right? And how for people who truly are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, it's a sick joke because it's not something temporary for them. It's something that they have to continue on with even after the holidays over. To that it also brings up interesting questions of what is the concept of culture? How can you capture something as complex as that? What does it mean to be Asian? What does it mean to be Vietnamese? It's more than just wearing my áo dài and eating bánh chưng like during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year. It's more than that, it's more than even just the language of Vietnamese. It's something so intrinsic in the way that I was raised, in the way that I think of myself that, I think, it's also just fairly insulting to say that you can just capture all of this complexity by putting on an article of clothing or eating a dish. I just also think that that's an added layer of kind of salt to the wound of the appropriate nature of these costumes.

L:I think culture is a story. It's an experience that you live your whole life in, and that your friends and family may live as well. And when we treat culture as a costume, we treat it as a commodity. Something to be bought and sold and taken off at any sort of will. When in actuality, to the people who actually live within that culture, it will stay with them.

P:Yeah, absolutely, and there's something to be said here about the difference between artistic impression and appreciation of a culture, and the stealing and appropriating of it. Right, and I think that line is always who is profiting off of this. Because I think if a Black drag queen was imitating Beyonce at a drag show and made it part of her drag act and was kind of embracing her black femininity and the art of drag which comes from black trans women, and just the black community in general. To embrace that part of herself, I think would be super different for people who aren't black to be profiting off of something that is black. And I think also it reinforces that idea that black people are only to be profited off of it, right? And that we can take the cultural aspects that we like: the hair, the make-up, the vernacular that we use. A lot of AV now becomes "internet slang," even though again, it's been used by black community in America for decades and centuries, right? It's this idea of that, as you said, it could just be not just even taken and traded, but stolen without any kind of regard for what it means for the people was taken from.

[Break music]

L: One of the things I find very striking actually about our culture is the way womanhood is often associated with evil and corruption. Halloween being the most evil day of the year, it's really the perfect time to tackle a topic like this. 

P:Yes, I completely agree. And Halloween is also a day about narratives because people often dress up as the stories that they see, right? Especially when we talk about characters, like some of the most common costumes we always see are characters from books, characters from movies. And it's all of these narratives that are present in our lives, and I have made an impact on us that make us want to see what it feels like to embody those characters. 

A very common costume is always witches, and so we can, I think, delve deeper into the representation of women as witches. Witches are always kind of shown as either very old and wrinkly and spiteful, or they're seen as extremely sexualized Jezebels which I think plays into a lot of how womanhood is portrayed in a lot of narratives that we see in books and in other forms of media as well.

L:Yeah, the witch as an old woman, actually, we can trace it back to the Narns. In Norse mythology where they would be these old women who spun the threads of fate. Just like in Greek mythology as well, they had this representation of old women as these really powerful and mysterious beings that manipulated the world around them in ways that were very difficult to understand. And unfortunately, this idea had a tendency to lead to bloodshed, and I think the most striking instance of this bloodshed was the 60000 executed witches during the Renaissance. And probably the best authority on witchcraft was a book called "The Malleus Maleficarum." The theory behind this book was kind of a misogynistic one, and they're like, "Okay, well, witches are basically like these hags.They can't give birth anymore, they don't have their good looks anymore, so how are they gonna get power over men? Oh, I know, they need to make a deal with Satan. They need to make a deal." They're like, "they'll trade their souls for the ability to use demons to make life harder for men."

P:Yeah, oftentimes, that's how this portrayal of women as beings with incredible power has been used. I think it's interesting that it was first conceived as women who are old and disposable and no longer useful to society. When I think of the Salem Witch trials, a lot of the women who were accused of being witches I think we're very young and very beautiful. Which I think is a reflection of how women have been limited into these boxes and what you could be for so long, and how women acknowledging and accepting their sexuality was seen as something terrifying. And I think it's still the case now, unfortunately, and I just think that that's very interesting in the way that that's reflected in how witches are seen in movies. 

L:Yeah. I think it's worth noting about the Salem Witch trials is that the first woman to be arrested was this woman called Tituba, who was an indigenous Caribbean woman who had been brought to Salem as a slave. And she had suggested this kind of... basically, I think of it as alternative medicine, to cure the seizures of this little girl who had suddenly broken out into seizures and stiff-necked Puritans understood her weird bit of alternative medicine as, "Oh my God, it's witchcraft! Throw her in jail!" And this was the first bit in the series of events that eventually led to tragic 16 deaths. Now one of the weirder things about witchcraft is that men did die as well. About a quarter of the witch burnings were men because men can be warlocks. It's not just a women's game. However, the idea of the witch was usually feminine, and that's why it was three-quarters of the people killed and the witch trials were women. And one of the weirder things is that there was often a sort of obsession with sex. The women will fly off in their broomstick and then they'll go to these wild orgies where they're all having sex with Satan. 

P:I think it also feeds into the idea of the danger that witches possess, right? It's not just that witches are powerful and that they can curse you to... I guess, I think that there's the two types of danger, danger of the old hag that's just petty and spiteful, and then the danger of a beautiful witch who you never suspect and then she comes in out of nowhere and literally eats your heart out, you know? [P laughs] Which is again, I think a way to shame women who are confident in themselves and who have a sense of being that goes beyond the need for male approval. And I think that instead of embracing that, it was seen as a threat to that patriarchal standard and so what's the solution? It's to make those women look dangerous and look undesirable to the masses.

[Break Music plays]

L:You're onto something very important there about it being the witch as like the opposite of the patriarchal approved idea of what women should be. So on one hand, the ideal woman in the Renaissance period, okay, well, she birthed a lot of children and she's a happy homemaker that cleans the house. Well, instead of using a broom to clean the house, what does the witch use the broom to do? She uses it to fly around! Oh, and instead of having children, she kills the children! Instead of having sex only with her godly husband, who does the witch have sex with? Everybody, even Satan's invited! So the witch is in this way the opposite of what a woman is supposed to be, and the fact that she has power outside of what men can give her. Her power didn't come from men, it comes from the demons and Satan that she made a deal with. Oh my goodness, her power is not coming from men anymore? It's coming from these mysterious forces beyond. That was the most terrifying thing to people at the time.

P:Yeah, of course, because what's scary than a woman that doesn't buy into patriarchy? What is scarier than a woman that thinks for herself and wants a life that is more than what you told her she could have, right? I think in many ways, that's why there's been a resurgence, I think, in a lot of people researching witchcraft. And witchcraft is also a spirituality, and I myself don't practice witchcraft and I myself don't express my spirituality through witchcraft, but for me, I don't have any ill will against the people who want to explore that as an aspect of their spirituality. Because I think that it's important to recognize the origins of how witchcraft was used and developed and how it was weaponized against women. And I think that young girls on tiktok now who wanna reclaim that and take witchcraft as something that is a good thing and something that gives them that power. Who are we to sit here and say that you're doing something bad? I think if we were to do that, we would just be reinforcing the very same dynamics that perpetuated this very skewed version of what acceptable femininity was. 

L:And the thing about this resurgence of witch spirituality I find really interesting is that witches at the time did not exist.There was no sort of underground religious movement of satanists. Literally was just like older women or beautiful women who were disliked and feared by their neighbors and, "Oh, oh, I know. She's the witch. That's why I don't like her." And it was just these poor women going about their day, we're being blamed, especially for crop failure. That was the biggest thing that would lead to a spike in prosecution of witches was a crop failure. But I think we need to be careful of assuming that we've kind of moved beyond the idea of the evil woman that drains life from men and that subverts the roles that women are supposed to have, because it is still very much a popular trope in media. Enter the femme fatale.

P:Yeah, what I was trying to say was, I think there is some history of practicing herbal spells or practicing what we associate with witchcraft. But I think the modern iteration of what we see now is definitely very different from just women being blamed in the history past. And it's not just in Europe. The idea that there's power in nature and there's power in natural forces is not a new idea, and it's something that has existed in literally so many cultures from Indigenous cultures to Eastern ways of practicing medicine. I would just, I guess, be careful to dismiss it because it might truly mean something important to somebody is I guess what I was just trying to say. But yes, onto the femme fetale. I think it's a more sexualized version of the witch trope. The focus is more on the sexual aspect of a woman and how her sexual powers are the thing that is dangerous.

L:So for people who aren't familiar, the femme fatal is this trope where there's this sexy alluring woman, she's usually a brunette, and she like waltzes into your office one day and she's like, "Oh, help me! I have a problem." And then she basically seduces you with her feminine wiles, but oh no! Be careful men, she's leading you into a trap! So it's this idea that, oh, there's a very sexually active woman, but she's also duplicitous and dangerous, and she's trying to lead you to your doom so you better watch out.

P:Yeah, there's the spy iteration of this that we see in every single James Bond film, right? It's not just the woman that walks into your office in the film noir. It's the villain that wants to kill so many people, but oh my God, her boobs are just banging. Maybe I should just let her kill people because she's just so hot. Like, what do I do?

[Break music plays]

L:One of the more interesting synonyms for femme fetale (which by the way, in French, it just means "fatal woman") is the vamp. And it just kind of draws back on this idea, and you have mentioned this earlier, but you do especially see it in film noir of "Oh, the woman who's seducing this detective? She's basically vampiric." She's dragging the life out of him. She's making him a weaker person, ready to fall into some sort of trap, into the greater villain scheme. You see this a lot of older movies like "The Maltese Falcon," and you also see it in more modern ones. I kind of thought that, "Wow, 'Inception' really has Mal as the femme fetale." Her presence in the movie is basically,  "Fall into the dream. Commit suicide. Join me in my womanly delusion." But she's also, you know, the main character's wife. She's also a very sexualized woman, and she's using a gun to make all of his problems in the movie that much worse. And this is a really popular movie that came out like 10 years ago, and the trope is still there.

P:Yeah.The femme fetale trope is  everywhere the idea of the main character's downfall being his attraction to this woman. And I'm very much generously saying "him" because a lot of movies still have men as the central characters and women are still very much treated as plot devices. As one of our writing teachers said, "You can just replace the women characters with a sexy lamp and it really doesn't make a difference." I think it's very much still true now.

L:Yeah, it definitely is. And that's even in positive iterations around girl characters. Let's talk about the whole final girl trope in a lot of the slasher movies that we see. So in slasher movies, it's usually like some five or six odd teenagers and they go to some sort of secluded location and oh my goodness! All the other girls in the group, they're so slutty and sexual. All they ever wanna do is bang all the hot guys in the group, and they smoke weed! Oh my goodness!

P:Not the Devil's Lettuce Lapis![L dies of laughter]

L:Look, I have to return to the final girl.So unlike all of these awful women, all of these bad girls, there's one good girl in the group. She doesn't have [gasp] pre-marital sex! She doesn't do drug, and she dress modestly. But uh oh, all of her classmates, they're dying left and right to this killer. And instead of seeing it from the reaction of, "Oh my goodness! Wow, I'm going to be killed. So scary." We see it from the killer's perspective as the knife descends on the sinful young people who are doing all of the bad things that are not supposed to be doing. But the good girl, she survives. She escapes the serial killer over and over again until he overcomes it at the end of the movie. Of course, she'll probably be killed off in the next movie for no good reason really, but the message here is clear. Girls, if you're not like other girls, if you're nice, are a good Christian girl, you will survive. You will thrive where all of your other people will fall into sin and spiritual death,

P:I think it's super interesting because it reinforces the Madonna whore complex. If you are attractive and you are comfortable in your sexuality, and that is something that you want and that you claim, the price of that is your intelligence first of all. Because of course, all these other "slutty" girls in the slasher movies are all incredibly stupid. Like incredibly vapid and have zero brain cells, even less than me which is saying a lot. That's the price you pay, or the price you pay is the fact that you'll never find happiness. You'll never find true love because you're boiled goods essentially. Meanwhile, if you are the virtuous Madonna who doesn't fall into the traps of wanting to have sex before marriage, then you are most likely very intelligent, but you're also very ugly. You're not desirable at all, right? And I think this is reinforced in what you see, even in Scooby Doo. Daphne is the pretty but kind of dumb one. And Velma is very smart, but kind of undesirable.

You have to be one or the other, and either or is scary. Because what's scarier than an extremely desirable sexy woman that would eventually lead you to all of death? Or a very smart and virtuous woman, but who you could never bang? Like those are both the patriarchy's worst nightmare because you're always missing something essential.

L:Yeah, because it's supposed to be about the men! It's not about the women, it's not about their desires. It's about what the women characters mean to the male audience and the male characters and how beautiful they are is filtered through their eyes.

P:Yeah, absolutely, and that it becomes a war between the men who are like, "No, I would rather have a smart intelligent girl, but who is completely unbangable. It's fine, I'll just wank it out." And the other guys were like, "What do you mean? I need to have a dumb girl with double Ds because like I don't need to have a conversation with her if we're banging all the time." And then there are women on the sidelines that are like, "You know, you can be both beautiful and smart? Oh my god, what a concept." 

L:Shocking, I know. And weirdly enough, women who are both beautiful and smart are usually in the villain role. Hmm,I wonder why. Maybe that's the most threatening thing of all.

P:There you go. Women that are both are witches and witches are bad, so I guess really there's no winning here. Ladies, we are just stuck in this horrible role, but I guess to wrap up our episode. We hope you have a great Halloween and that you come up with cool, interesting costumes. Please send us any pictures of your costumes that would be really lovely for us. We would be more than happy to receive them and also I guess we can try and leave the audience with a question about Halloween. What's something that you'd like to ask Lapis?

L:I would like to ask the audience: what does Halloween mean to you? What do you use Halloween to do? Is Halloween an escape or is Halloween an opportunity to connect with friends? Is Halloween an opportunity to eat popcorn on the couch and watch terrible slasher movies to laugh at them and how sexist? Or is Halloween a chance for you to enjoy playing that Bridget O'Shaughnessy cosplay that you've been desperately dreaming of doing for a long time? And I am totally going to do this and I will send you the screen shots. So that was a meandering question, but it is a question.

P:Yeah, I think my question to the audience would be: have you witnessed culturally appropriate costumes? Have you seen it in school and your friend groups, or even just examples of celebrities? And how did this make you feel? Did you ever partake in having questionable costumes growing up because I know I definitely did, and it took me some time to unpack that. So I guess that's also a question I would love to ask the audience.

L:Alright everyone, stay spooky, hail Satan, and have a wonderful Halloween.

[Outro music starts]

P:Be sure to check out our website, www.therisingroses.ca for show notes and other resources.

L:This episode was...

P:...edited and produced by Vu Hai Linh. The theme music was composed by Oscar Abley. 

L:All other sounds are from Zappslapp.com. Cover art is designed by Bridget Lee. 

P:Until next time!

[Closing theme ends. Record beeps.]

L:Like Satan can take any shape and form and if he can take the shape or form of a man and a woman, doesn't that mean that Satan is, like, gender fluid? I don't know, I think the possibilities are endless here. What is Satan's sexuality? Why did the Bible queerbait us?