The world wants you to find extraordinary women threatening. Undo that training. When you feel threatened, it’s a great sign that you have just found an ally who will bring you new energy and insight and together you will rise. Never stop growing your crew. There is always room for another homie if you find someone special enough. Give them everything and they will give back in return. Have faith in the women in your life and you will be ok out there. Also, HR departments work for your company, not you. You can’t tell on patriarchy to dad. Brace yourself for things to be exactly as bad as they say it is, and go out in the world anyway. If your work is good, you will always land on your feet.
—The New Inquiry founder Rachel Rosenfelt’s advice for women
I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them: You’re not just imagining things. It’s tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times. Girls now are also faced with different problems. I’ve been guilty of one thing: After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned—the hard way—that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they—men—had the ideas. I became really good at this and I don’t even notice it myself. I don’t really have an ego. I’m not that bothered. I just want the whole thing to be good.
—Björk in an interview at Pitchfork about her new album Vulnicura, which she just released early after it was leaked online
This Congress still needs to pass a law that makes sure a woman is paid the same as a man for doing the same work. It’s 2015. It’s time.
—President Obama in his State of the Union address, one of the top five feminist moments of the night according to Ms.
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, the nonprofit organization founded to raise awareness of gender equality issues in literary culture, announces that this year we will release a Women of Color VIDA Count as part of our annual VIDA Count data.
—exciting news about this year’s VIDA Count
I always feel the internet offers spaces where identities can be reinvented and reclaimed; it’s always a place of contestation. The best thing about it is how it makes it much easier to meet and have meaningful conversations with likeminded people. Hence the much derided “Twitter feminism” or “Tumblr feminism”, which I really see as young people being vocal about their politics, if not at least trying to connect to other people to do socially transformative things together.
—Jennifer Chan on the relationship between feminism and the internet, part of an interview about the online exhibit she co-curated with Leah Schrager, Body Anxiety, which launches today
I didn’t have to write a new poem about this because I constantly am writing a poem about this because this is an ever-present phenomenon in our lives […] I have far too many poems in which black people have to face a gun. My whole life as a black woman in America, I’ve had to face white people at the other end of their guns.
—Samiya Bashir quoted in Minal Hajratwala’s article on #BlackPoetsSpeakOut
… he basically said ‘No good girl walks home alone at night,’ which implies she deserved it or provoked it. I immediately realized the problem of sexual violence in India is not a legal issue but a cultural problem.
—Ram Devineni on the impetus for creating his rape-fighting Indian comic book heroine, Priya
Prescience isn’t the right word. For something to be prescient it must precede. Rankine’s work would have been as electric in any year, expressing for us what she feels (meeting the definition of lyric, yep) has gone unsaid, or at least unheard: the fatigue of the constant threat, how low-level aggressions like remarks or looks or not-seeing slowly build and burden. How when someone is finally shot or choked in the street, some of us may be shocked, but lots of us knew it was coming. Every day, even from friends, even in situations that should be safe.
—Shanna Compton on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, named the best book of poetry of 2014 by Coldfront
“If Mariah Carey can overcome Glitter,” yelled Stephanie Young, “we can overthrow the government.”
—Cassandra Gillig, from her pop poetic feminist dystopian-utopian extravaganza, “From the Papers of The Mariah Carey Institute for the Coming Insurrection (The New Order of St Agatha): The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Burning Riots”
As sun turns to snow,
assholes seek
approval
from their bros.
—the first stanza of Maureen Thorson’s poem “Orange Crush” from the new issue of Big Lucks
