From this post forward, Kathy Kiefer’s Soap Lake blog is going open sesame. No longer a kernel of Soap Lake only news, bee-bops, happen-ins and postscripts, I’m opening the floodgates and writing about all the cool things I am doing, seeing, feeling, partaking in, happening by, overstepping, undoing and observing; in, on, and around Grant County and wherever the aforementioned things take me. Here’s to open floodgates, and all the news that wends forth from my keyboard.  Here's the first tid-bit: 

 

Boobalogues: Our Breasts, Our Lives was released on Mother’s Day 2004. Since then it has won several awards and has made its small, but indelible mark on the world. I thank my seven associate producers for their efforts and all the people who have supported the film. It is now sold or viewed through Netflix and through my distributor, Filmbaby.

 

Last weekend I was invited to screen Boobalogues at Ohio Wesleyan University (OWU). Back to my home state I flew. Don’t ya just hate how the airlines charges $25 for a checked bag both coming and going? Also – NO FOOD of any kind on the planes except the over-priced, puny snack packs that you can buy only with a credit card. Okay, so enough of that.

 

Alex Hutchings and Katie Kristensen, my two young co-creators for the promotion and screening of the film had distributed posters for the film around campus, and in the nearby mostly rural, pretty small town of Delaware. This is where the story gets interesting. The poster is the same image as the cover of the DVD, which is a very artistic and tasteful image of a nude woman with one hand on her head and one hand on her breast. The image is sepia toned and, I have been advised, a beautiful work of art. Not much different than what you would see in a museum exhibit or in an art or anatomy book. Apparently the “powers that be” on campus, all remaining unnamed, did not agree with this aesthetic assessment and asked Alex and Katie to censor the image. Apparently some within the unnamed thought it was pornographic.

 

Alex and Katie, both in their early twenties, independent thinkers, honor students, and self-described feminists, persisted. They were finally told that the poster could be placed on campus if they covered up the “vagina” on the image. About this time, Alex called to update me on the unfolding events. When she told me that the “vagina had to be covered,” I laughed out loud. Another affirmation of why I made this film; so women would be inspired to talk about their bodies. And, most notable, of all, there is NO VAGINA in the image. There is a woman kneeling with her pubis in the shadow of her torso. I’m thinking, ‘you mean to tell me that the administrators of a prominent mid-western university don’t know the difference between a vagina and a pubis?’ Nuf said.

 

Alex and Katie were given permission to continue placing posters on campus if they covered the bottom half of the poster. Within 24 hours, their fellow students were removing or pulling down the paper over the censored portion of the image. This, needless to say, was much to the young women’s delight, deepening their by then, already rich experiences of promoting the film. At the same time they were placing posters in businesses throughout town and discovering that several businesses were not censoring the image, though several did, including one proprietor that covered the woman’s entire body. However, the poster remained on the wall in that establishment.

 

The unfolding events prior to the screening revealed attitudes, concerns, a few episodes of censorship and the joy of bringing the remarkable film Boobalogues to OWU in rural Delaware, Ohio. Two remarkable young women got to place themselves on the front line of activism while promoting a film that stakes itself on a woman’s right to claim herself and define her body as she sees it, not as the media defines it. There were over fifty people at the screening, making it the largest attendance of any film in the 2010 OWU Women’s Center film series. Utmost gratitude goes to Alex and Katie and all the young women who shared with me during my visit and to the Women’s Resource Center at OWU for supporting me bringing the film to the university, to all the men and women who took time out of their busy semester-end studies to show up at the screening, and to the administrators at OWU for allowing the self-inflicted controversy to attract more attention to the film, therefore hitting a home run for a film that strives to achieve greater dialogue.