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Rah! Rah! Roundup

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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

 

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundupIn exciting literary news this week, Bloof Books announced their 2015 chapbook series, which includes the brillz Khadijah Queen, Ginger Ko, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and more.

Becca Klaver talked about her book LA Liminal, 90s nostalgia and more as Brooklyn Poets’ Poet of the Week, and Jennifer Tamayo’s YOU DA ONE was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly. JT’s piece from and in response to the Poetry Project event “My Kind of Happening: Short Texts on the Future Nature of the Reading” continues to raise important questions about community and accountability. And Morgan Parker knocks our socks off with her virtual reading for Bruce Covey’s What’s New in Poetry video series on Real Pants.

Thanks in part to hostesses with the mostesses Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, the Golden Globes had no shortage of feminist moments this year. We’ve been following all the discussion this week about Margaret Cho’s performance, and thinking about women comedians and rape jokes in relation to Amy and Tina’s Bill Cosby joke as well as this week’s Broad City Season 2 premiere. And speaking of Broad City, we adore Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. Continue reading

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

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LITERARY LINKS

We’ve been following conversations on Facebook about this week’s Poetry Project event, “Short Texts on the Future Nature of the Reading.” CAConrad writes: “THOSE OF US WHO WERE AT THE POETRY PROJECT LAST NIGHT WILL NEVER EVER FORGET WHAT EILEEN MYLES SAID!! There are some FUCKED UP old man poets who are the Bill Cosby’s of the poetry world RIGHT NOW. LET THE RAPIST, MYSOGYNIST CREEPS BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE!!” Jennifer Tamayo asks: “I have questions about accountability. what happens after names have been named. what happens after bodies have been counted. WHAT HAPPENS AFTER.”

Slate logs the textual alterations Claudia Rankine has made before each printing of Citizen, such an instant classic that it’s now in its third printing.

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

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How better to access and understand the urgency behind the #BlackLivesMatter call than to hear such striking, poignant, heartbreaking poems read by a Black body?” – WEIRD SISTER contributor Morgan Parker writes about the importance of #BlackPoetsSpeakOut over at FANZINE.

“Even though Austen wasn’t out there smashing the system, her books are all about filtering a very patriarchial society through a female point view through the use of irony and wit.” – Flavorwire Editor Sarah Seltzer blows our minds with her comparison of Jane Austen and online feminism.

The new issue of Sink Review is here, featuring poems by WEIRD SISTERs Emily Brandt and Morgan Parker, plus work by WS pals Monica McClure, Cynthia Arrieu-King, and many other greats. Continue reading

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

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A video roundup!

MUSIC

Watch Beyoncé’s Yours and Mine, a short film celebrating the release of her self-titled album around this time last year:

PLUS: Pussy Riot and JD Samson of Le Tigre are collaborating, the Juliana Hatfield Three are getting back together for the first time since 1993, and Bitch has a great roundup of this year’s feminist music by Katie Presley, the music critic I have to thank for introducing me to my favorite musical discovery of the year, Lowell.

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

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As the non-indictment for Mike Brown’s death rolled downhill into the non-indictment for Eric Garner’s death this week, and the big white snowball of racist America continued to grow too big to bear, we took to the streets, bore witness to the pain of Garner’s widowwrote and read responses to the events, interrogated our roles as allies, and thought about the relationship between self-care and social resistance.

Elsewhere, we’ve been following Delirious Hem‘s December features, including this one on feminism and fitness curated by Amanda Montei and Elizabeth Hall, and the annual Advent calendar, this year edited by Susan Gardner and Jessica Smith and featuring poetry about rape culture.

Best of 2014 music lists have been rolling out, and many feature our fave women musicians like Jenny Lewis, Lykke Li, FKA twigs, St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, and Hurray for the Riff Raff, whose music video for their song “The Body Electric” features the Marissa Alexander story:

In other music news, we can’t wait for the Lana del Rey / Courtney Love tour planned for 2015 and the new Sleater-Kinney album, No Cities to Love, out January 20 (S-K also appeared on the Chris Gethard show this week).

Also, we just discovered Autostraddle’s Saturday morning cartoons: this one’s for anyone with a case of the winter- and current events-induced SADs.

Finally, even though–

All I want for Christmas

(substitute Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice)

 

–we thought we’d point you toward some feminist gift guides. Bitch is running a series of them, and Feministing introduces us to The Guardian Princess Alliance, a series of books about culturally and racially diverse princesses fighting for social justice, for the princess-loving little feminist in your life. You might want to give Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please or Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist to the not-so-little feminists in your life, or the think-they’re-not-feminists in your life who will soon see the light. xoJane has a #FeministShelfie article that will spark more gift ideas. We wish these novels by Toni Morrison and Miranda July and this book of poems by PJ Harvey were out already, but then again, we need something to look forward to about now. Also, look out for WEIRD SISTER’s own series on feminist books we love, coming soon!

Feel free to post links in support of the abolition of imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy in the comments!

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Rah! Rah! Roundup: Resources for Anti-Racist Feminists and White Allies

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Like many of you, this week we at WEIRD SISTER have found it difficult to think about much else besides the non-indictment of Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and the many protests that erupted in response. So, we’re devoting this week’s Rah! Rah! Roundup to links to resources for anti-racist feminists and allies. As a white feminist, I’m compiling these resources in the spirit of the anti-racist philosophy that it is the job of white people, not people of color, to educate white people about racism. Please feel free to share additional resources in the comments!

 

Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (book by bell hooks)

A great place to start. In her usual highly accessible, conceptually complex prose, hooks organizes her chapters around specific topics (e.g., “Feminist Class Struggle,” “Women at Work,” “Ending Violence”) that usually take up intersectional issues in feminism. The book is available as a free PDF here, and from South End Press here.  (For the record, it is the opinion of the WEIRD SISTER editors that bell hooks deserves your money!) There’s another e-option, too: the book was originally published in 2000, but the Kindle edition from Routledge was just released in October 2014.

 

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (book by Audre Lorde)

Many of the essays from the transformative Sister Outsider speak to the need to use difference–and the feelings of guilt, fear, and anger linked to difference–in order to fight racism and sexism through activist work and in our everyday lives. When we read Sister Outsider for a feminist book club that included several WEIRD SISTER contributors, many of us felt dismayed by the fact that we had never been assigned to read it in our undergraduate English and creative writing MFA programs. Let’s make sure this book gets shared and taught and talked about for a very long time. You can start with these excerpts available online:

“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” | “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” | “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” | “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” | “Poetry is Not a Luxury”

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

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While we meant to invite debate about some ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice.” – TIME apologizes for including “feminist” on its list of banned words for 2015 (but not for the fact that the entire list is basically language used by people other than straight white men, so like, whatevs, thanks TIME).

WEIRD SISTER’s own Morgan Parker’s brilliant personal essay “White People Love Me: Dispatches from the Token” over on VIDA: Women in Literary Arts’ site brings up really important ideas about tokenism and “diversity,” specifically within literary communities.

Transgender pioneer and author of Stone Butch Blues Leslie Feinberg died this week. We’re so grateful for hir incredibly important, insightful, beautiful work. Read Feinberg’s obituary, written by hir partner Minnie Bruce Pratt, here. Continue reading

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

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On Banning “Feminist”

This week, the internet got annoyed at TIME’s idea to include the word “feminist” in its list of words and phrases to ban in 2014. For the record, they insist that “You have nothing against feminism itself,” but then go on to snark it up: “when did it become a thing that every celebrity had to state their position on whether this word applies to them, like some politician declaring a party?”

TIME also wants to ban “bossy,” as the Lean In corporation decreed, further evidence that they might be on the wrong side of feminism. (Check out WEIRD SISTER’s own Marisa Crawford’s take on banning “bossy” and Baby-sitters Club-style leadership from earlier this year.)

Do we now have to reclaim the word “feminist” in an act of feminist reclamation? It seems so. Sorry, TIME baes, but the word “feminist” is obvi literally more delicious than a kale salad, om nom nom nom. These writers agree:

In The Washington Post, Roxane Gay points out that TIME’s entire list of words to ban “is largely a policing of the vernacular of anyone who isn’t a white, heterosexual man.” At Refinery29, Lili Loofbourow offers a satirical take-down, comparing the TIME poll to “the drunk friend who wants to know which animal you’d be if you got turned into an animal.” Jezebel explains why the word “feminist” is leading in the poll: “troll emporiums” 4chan and 9gag are sending their readers to vote in droves.

But when the internet taketh away, it also giveth back, usually in the form of petitions and hashtags:

The Feminist Majority Foundation provides an online form letter that lets you protest TIME’s choice with just a few clicks, and Anne Thériault’s complaint about TIME’s poll led to the gift of the #feministprincessbride hashtag, as BuzzFeed reports:

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundupPart Two of the Female Aesthetic(s) Symposium, moderated by Metta Sáma, went up this week on The Conversant. It features Racquel Goodison, Monica A. Hand, Patricia Spears Jones, Tracy Chiles McGhee, and Arisa White.

“Avant-garde poetry’s attitudes towards race have been no different than that of mainstream institutions.” – Cathy Park Hong in her essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.”

Delirious Hem’s forum on Rape Culture and the Poetics of Alt Lit continues during November.

Sarah Seltzer’s interesting take on the Lena Dunham controversy explores the distinctions between triggering art and abuse.

Various cartoonists give their perspectives on writing characters of different races than your own.

Read an interview with Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, the artist behind the “Stop Telling Women To Smile” anti-street harassment campaign.

Women, Action and the Media (WAM) has partnered with Twitter to support women experiencing gender-based harassment on the social media platform. You can report any instances of harassment through this online form.

Poets in NYC met this week to talk about sexism and accountability in local poetry circles. Read the meeting handout here.

What did we miss? Share your links in the comments.

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