In Elle, Melissa Harris-Perry “sent out a call of [her] own to writers and thinkers who center black women and girls in their work.” She says: “It is no secret that I am a platinum member of the Beyhive….But this is not just another music video. It is not just another Beyoncé video. Something different happened here, didn’t it?” The responses to MHP’s call are brilliant.
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“Just as the late David Bowie influenced gender-questioning and queer kids during the height of his career, so did Prince, especially for brown kids who relished being different.” RIP Prince <3
“Yes, I have been upset with white supremacy and trans-misogyny and classism within the poetry community too. How I choose to deal with it is by creating space for badass writers of color.” — Christopher Soto AKA Loma
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“There is no better person than me to explore the male gaze because we share initials. MG. Myriam Gurba. Male gaze. Male gays. Mail gaze. (I once dated a mailman. He had a hardcore male gaze. He told me if I ever cut my hair short he would stop talking to me. I totally Ruby Rosed my hair and now he no longer calls me his slot).”–Myriam Gurba on “AMERICAN OBJECT I: SCOPOPHILIA, MEN, AND ME”
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“TV keeps killing off lesbian characters” and fans are revolting. “LGBT characters, characters of color and disabled characters are often ‘given secondary or tertiary storylines that can be thrown away.’ We’re getting to a point where we can’t accept that anymore.”
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“I expected to feel his presence oppressively, but instead, in that small space, I registered him as being barely there—an empty vacuum into which the winds of whiteness, maleness, money, bigotry, and big talk were constantly rushing. Rather than being drawn toward a vortex of charisma, I found myself floating away from Trump entirely, preferring to apply my mind to anything else in the room—toward the people around me, who told me unequivocally that he speaks for them.”–Read about Patricia Lockwood’s long, dark night in Trumplandia here.
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“Even when the work is about the Self, we want and expect that others will weigh in on it, critically, as art. But many poets—especially, I wager, queer, feminist, marginalized, and young poets—read a Myles poem and see, beyond the work as literature, a vision of the self we would like to enact in the world: brash, confident, living large.”–Arielle Greenberg on Eileen Myles
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Go here to watch a documentary on Discwoman, “a New York-based DJ collective and booking agency, exploring the role of women in electronic music”.
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“This law closes most abortion facilities in the state, puts extreme stress on the few facilities that remain open, and exponentially increases the obstacles confronting women who seek abortions in the state. And it does all of that on the basis of a medical justification that cannot withstand any meaningful scrutiny that the American Medical Association has told you is groundless and that the district court found will actually operate in practice to increase health risks to women.”
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Molly McArdle spoke to fifty people across the industry about diversity in publishing, and the results are in Brooklyn magazine. From Tony Tulathimutte: “You will be tokenized. Even when you get to write about your own experience of being a minority in America—you know, even that can be turned against you. Are you going to be used later on as leverage against an accusation of racism? Will you then be seen as a collaborator? In most cases the answer is yes.”
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“…I’ll admit that many times over the last year when I was feeling too burnt-out from work to produce a really high-quality joke about second-wave feminist ghosts or something, I’d give in to social media’s seductive promise of instant validation, and I’d go for the easy joke about being a sad single lady who likes chocolate and wants a man because: ACK! I told myself I was making these jokes ironically, but the reality was, I was often writing them when I was feeling scared or guilty or angry about things that had nothing to do with being single, but I filtered my emotions through the relationship lens because it was easy. Rather than use those ‘negative’ emotional periods to create raw rough drafts that I would refine when I was feeling more balanced, I acted out in the hopes of getting some sign that my voice mattered.”–Sarah Rainone on what she’s “learned about love after a year alone (and a lot of bad jokes)”
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