It isn’t difficult to notice the similarity between the title of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child, and the famous tune sung by Billie Holiday, “God Bless the Child.” Holiday’s tune speaks measures to how we see and treat vulnerable members of our society. It contains a problematic message about who is deserving of help. As the song goes: “God bless the child that’s got his own….”
Filed under Books + Literature, Everything Else
Photo by: Amos Mac
Erin Markey is a New York-based performance artist, writer, comedian, actress, musician and all-around inspiration. I flipped out so hard when I heard that she was performing something called Deleted Scenes from Fun Home that she had to tell me to cool my jets. (You’ll see.) This week, in the middle of doing a thousand different things including prepping for this show, Erin took the time to answer a few questions.
Cathy de la Cruz: When and how did you come up with the idea for Deleted Scenes from Fun Home?
Erin Markey: A couple of months ago I accidentally became pretty obsessed with the Fun Home score, which is not generally how I behave with most Broadway scores. I was most personally scandalized by “I’m Changing My Major to Joan” and I played it at really humiliating volume levels in a car with the windows open (passenger seat). I couldn’t stop. I felt compulsively drawn in and for largely unnameable or unknowable reasons, I was activated in a strange way that I had no control over.
Filed under Art + Comics, Everything Else, Interviews, We Were There
This is an ad for a kitschy brand of wine cynically marketed at feminist housewives, so it’s basically the best possible illustration for this quiz.
Dedicated readers of WEIRD SISTER know that you can be a feminist housewife. Morgan Parker wrote the manifesto; Becca Klaver and Lauren Besser provide case studies in their podcast, The Real Housewives of Bohemia; I’m kind of a part-time feminist housewife myself. Or a part-time feminist SAHM, which is a stay-at-home mom or a student-artist-home-working-mom. So, like, don’t worry about whether women who don’t work outside the home or who do unpaid caretaking labor or who don’t directly contribute income to their families can be feminists. ISSUE RESOLVED.
But there’s been some debate lately about this kind of ridiculous book, Primates of Park Avenue, in which anthropologist-turned-Park-Avenue mom Wednesday Martin describes the bizarre culture of super-rich New York families. See Martin’s op-ed in the New York Times, or this hilarious contribution in the Post from a somewhat aspirational Wife Bonus-getter who wants us to “STFU,” or this interview on NPR, which I haven’t listened to, but in which I’m pretty sure Martin uses the phrase “going native,” which, uhh, nope. Also see various accounts of the inaccuracies in Martin’s book: her PhD is actually in comp lit (ooooh does this mean I get to write a book called Primates of Ditmas Park?), she misrepresents when she was pregnant and what fancy gym she went to, and she pretends you could get macarons on the UES during a time when you could CLEARLY ONLY GET THEM IN FRANCE. Hopeless lower-class poseur or not, Martin gives us a shocking glimpse of a forbidden world in which highly-educated skinny moms spend their days Mean-Girlsing each other, grooming their toddlers to be captains of industry, and having weird gender-segregated dinner parties and going on vacations where they all wear the same color (well, come on, that sounds pretty fun. It’s not like I’m not going on an all-you-can-drink-rosé booze cruise this month where we all have to wear something pink. No, I seriously am.) The big shocker, though, is that some of these rich moms, many of whom have MBAs and formerly held high-income, high-pressure jobs like Business Lady and Captainess of Industry and Executrix and Lawyeress and Bankerina and Stock Market Girl Wonder and Political Risks Insurance Brokeress and a bunch of jobs I don’t know about because I don’t understand and will never be allowed to understand the language of Wealth and Power, apparently get Wife Bonuses, probably so they can feel like they still have a high-stakes Rich Person job. The bonuses are distributed by their husbands, who are their bosses, and they’re often based on their Wife Performance that year, which usually involves getting the kids into a school that will help them become Captains of Industry or the wives of Captains of Industry or maybe Bankerinas. The Wife Performance may also involve blow jobs BUT that might just be Martin trying to titillate us, since we know the wives and husbands never see each other for the length of time that a really bonus-worthy blow job requires.
Filed under Everything Else
I’ve loved my last six months of interviewing feminist comedians and creative types for my monthly WEIRD SISTER “Funny Feminism” column, but have recently started to feel like I needed to take a break from the traditional profile or interview style I had grown accustomed to. I was wondering when I would feel inclined to just write exactly how I felt about feminism and comedy. Lucky for me, fate gave me this opportunity when an image I posted on Twitter went viral over the last few days.
As I type this, my original Tweet has been reposted and liked 1,948 times and feminist-journalist-superstar Ann Friedman’s almost-immediate repost of my Tweet has been shared and liked 6,678 times. In the last 24 hours, The New York Times via Women In the World, The Huffington Post, Hello Giggles, The Daily Dot, Boing Boing, Bustle, Someecards and The Daily Edge have all published pieces on the phenomena of this Tweet I called, “Mansplaining: The Statue.” The Writing Center at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia turned the Tweet’s image into a meme. The Tweet has been translated and reposted in various languages. People have started posting photos of themselves with the statues. Art critic Jerry Saltz appropriated the Tweet as his own joke on Twitter, which was then reposted by writer Rebecca Solnit whose essay (and later book by the same name), “Men Explain Things To Me” is often cited as the concept for the term “mansplaining.”
Filed under Everything Else
Lady Liberty and Sarah Palin are lit by the same torch —Michele Bachmann
And what a bizarre time we’re in, when a judge will say to little children that you can’t say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it —Michele Bachmann
Before we get started, let’s all say ‘Happy Birthday’ to Elvis Presley today —Michele Bachmann
The rumors are true. Pero por fa, do not unfriend me yet. Do you know how hard it is to accept this in public after I ranted on Facebook about the idiocy of the gay movement’s focus on marriage? Am I throwing myself over the gay cliff right now? Maybe. Pero reinita, hear me out: Republicans are stubborn people! And I didn’t even see it coming. It was all so quick. Bam bam bam and before you could say ay juepuchica Michele Bachmann is sitting next to my mother picking some pork residue from her teeth, bonding with her over the apocalypse. How was I supposed to say “no” to the hottest bae over 50 in the Midwest? I have a soft spot for right-wing women, tu sabe. Also I don’t think we’ve given Michele proper credit on her party abilities, she’s raised like 30 foster kids plus Marcus in one house (we don’t know the exact number because she won’t fill the census!), she’s held so many racists/homophobic fundraisers we can’t even keep count (talk about a white Christian party monster, am I right?)! AND, girlfriend really wanted to blow up our party balloons (she’s so good!). Plus, she will tell me later, I heard immigrants are really good at the macarena. Dios mío. We are! All of us. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else
As protests around police brutality continue in Baltimore, this Salon/Radical Faggot article breaks down why “smashing police cars” and rioting are “legitimate political strategy,” and how calling protesters and rioters “uncivilized” or unconstitutional is racist and hypocritical.
This Washington Post article discusses the disgusting and unsurprising celebration by mainstream media of a mother desperately striking her son who is protesting in Baltimore: “Beatings are not transformative. They don’t empower. They simply punish the victims and accelerate the trauma, bringing the pain from the streets into the home.”
Black Girl Dangerous discusses the glaring double standards in media treatment of trans POC vs. trans rich white people like Bruce Jenner. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else
Marisa and I chatted about WEIRD SISTER over at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog:
JT: What is a “weird sister”? How does one identify as or become a weird sister?
Marisa: I don’t think of a weird sister as a set or limited identity so much as a name that has a lot of literary, glittery, magic, strange, dark, dazzling and otherworldly connotations. A weird sister can be a witch, it can be a feminist, it can be someone who feels a little out of place or a little extra-awesome in her family or her community or the world…
Check out the full interview here…
Filed under Everything Else
A monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.
***
I don’t actually remember how Heather Jewett and I met. Our introduction to each other could have been related to the riot grrrl movement, our many mutual friends or through simply living in Los Angeles at the same time. As a member of the now infamous queer electro-punk-pop band from the Bay Area, Gravy Train!!!!, Heather went by the name, ‘Chunx’ for eight years. Always a fan of Heather’s trailblazing honesty and fiercely feminist sense of humor, I clamored at the chance to interview her. Influenced by the campy and raw aesthetic of early John Waters films as much as she is by 80s and 90s blue-collar sitcom humor and by absurdist comedy, Heather Jewett is a force whose work cracks me up as much as it does inspire me to share my own voice with the world.
Photo credit: Tom Stratton
Equal pay shmequal shmay, I just wanna be able to eat bananas in public.
–Heather Jewett via Twitter
Filed under Everything Else, Funny Feminism, Interviews
When I first heard about artist and filmmaker Miranda July‘s Somebody app (an extremely buggy version for the iPhone debuted last fall) I was pretty skeptical. I was like, ” Okay, Miranda July invented an app that makes strangers talk to each other? Whoop-de-do, it’s like poop-back-and-forth 2.0, how quirky.”
But, like, who am I kidding, I love quirky. And I kind of love talking to strangers.
So when Becca, a Miranda July superfan, texted a bunch of our friends last week and told us to download the new, actually functional version of Somebody, I was like, “oh, too bad they don’t have an Android version. None of those hipster apps have an Android version.” And when Becca posted on Facebook in real time about her first “terrifying and thrilling” experience using Somebody, in which a strange man appeared on her block and started yelling her name, I was like, “that sounds insane, but I really wish they had an Android version.” And then I checked, and they did have an Android version, and I installed it. (Don’t worry, it worked out okay for Becca! Download episode 23 of Becca’s podcast The Real Housewives of Bohemia to hear the full story of her encounter with Somebody.)
Filed under Everything Else
Dear Jacob,
I just want you to know that I don’t want to hear from you. I don’t want you to try to prove your worth to me as a friend, because you already have. I wish things could have been different, but I need to move forward from everything that happened. You really have no idea how hard it was for me to get pregnant in the middle of my semester and to have to keep my abortion secret, to keep everything a secret because I was basically protecting your reputation. I wish you could have gone through that with me in a substantial way. It would have helped so much.
Please, if you care about me at all, do not respond to this email, and please don’t try to communicate with me again in any way. That’s what I need from you. If you want your books back you can ask Ken or Aaron or someone to ask me for them. I don’t want to hear from you.
I truly wish you the best. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else
