Changing Culture

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, Dr. Randi Rashkover laid out the idea that in old Judaism, they used stories— stories that became the Talmud, which then became the template upon which the Christian Bible was made—to define law. In today’s feminist theosophical circles, they are looking again at these stories to find ways to pull apart the stories and “re-read” them for a different interpretation. Sometimes these reinterpretations lead to different conclusions in the stories. Why would they do this? Because if you change the interpretation of a story, then you can ultimately change the law that protects the story. The laws protect the stories of a people. The laws that govern a people are based on stories. Who tells these stories? Writers, musicians, artists, basic storytellers. These are the people who have a hand in defining moral 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 the marriage laws soon change, millions of gays and lesbians can live lives without being criminalized or treated differently.

Look at what Charles Perrault did to the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Perrault was from a wealthy family; he’d studied law and literature and was appointed to the French court of Louis XIV. Later in his life, Perrault devoted himself to collecting the folk tales of the peasantry so that he could influence the general moral values of children. His moral certainty came from the fact that the royal court felt that its superior duty, perhaps right, was to be the seat of judgment and arbiter of moral truth. Thus, Le Petite Chaperone Rouge, once a story to help girls to psychically navigate female sexuality, menstruation, etc., was “moralized” to reflect more formal Christian values of waiting for marriage. This story’s persistence over the centuries attests to not only the Christian church’s ideological strangle-hold on culture, but of the willingness of publishing houses to make money on such an ideologies. What does it say about parents' obliviousness to these dominant ideologies and their willingness to mindlessly saturate their kids with it?

The reason I am telling you this big long story is that you actually DO have a say in culture, and as an artist you have a unique 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 political cartoonist has influenced his viewers --whether they grudgingly accept, smile and shake their heads no, or laugh out loud in their helplessness about the truth of a political situation.  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.

Many feminist writers such as Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, and Angela Carter, who take on the task of writing and rewriting the stories of childhood are determined to explode the myths that culture builds to keep us goose-stepping to the same old lies. Musicians like Melissa Etheridge, fiction writers like Alice Walker and Tony Morrison, artists like Keith Haring and Sue Coe, have done much to change the hearts and minds of culture by sharing their stories and ideas with the rest of us.  

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