Alexis Clements wrote an essay for Hyperallergic about her experience attending the Poetry Project’s live event, “White Room,” a conversation dealing with how to dismantle white supremacy among American poets. Among many other observations, she notes: “People have been walking away from and refusing the white room, the male room, the straight room, the able-bodied room, all the rooms, for a long time. Alternative spaces and radical political movements did not get “killed” in this country. Narratives of failure around radical politics often look at too short a time span, too little of a sweep of history.”
Lee & Low’s 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey results showed, essentially, that straight white women run the publishing industry: it’s 79% white, 78% women, and 88% straight.
Morgan Jenkins wrote about creating black women characters in her fiction for Literary Hub: “[T]he black woman has to deal with a triple-consciousness, as being American, black, and a woman can all come into conflict within one individual.”
Mixed Up, the Mixed Race Queer & Feminist Zine, has put out a call for submissions for its second issue, which will have “a special focus on food: how we’ve learned to nourish ourselves, how we come to the table while healing wounds to get there, how cooking shapes and manifests our intersecting identities, and how we connect to heritage and ancestors through eating (together).”
In The Guardian, David Shariatmadari explores eight words that reveal the sexism inherent in the English language: “The denigration of half of the population has embedded itself in the language in ways you may not even be aware of. Often this takes the form of ‘pejoration’: when the meaning of the word “gets worse” over time. Linguists have long observed that words referring to women undergo this process more often than those referring to men.”
If you’re in NYC between now and March, check out “The Letdown Reflex,” an art exhibition that “attempts to recognize the complexities of parenting in the art world, and asks if a better alternative for families can exist.” The exhibition runs 1/30 through 3/12.
Bad news: In most Disney princess movies, the men speak more frequently than the women. (Surprise!) According to linguist Carmen Fought, “There’s one isolated princess trying to get someone to marry her, but there are no women doing any other things…. Everybody who’s doing anything else, other than finding a husband in the movie, pretty much, is a male.”
Women made up 100% of the US Senate this Tuesday in the wake of the blizzard. As senator Lisa Murkowski noted, “Now, this was not orchestrated in any way, shape or form. We came in this morning and looked around and thought, ‘Something is different this morning,’ — different in a good way, I might add.”
What did we miss this week? Let us know in the comments! <3
