“The responses reflect a spectrum of experience among the writers,” she explained. “But I did notice that several poems discussed discovery, social justice, and resistance through existence and survival.”–Tabia Alexine, a Los Angeles-based curator on “reaching out to young writers of color she admired” to share their favorite poems
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“… I discovered the Riot Grrrl movement, and that really changed everything for me. Girls were picking and choosing pieces of ‘female’ fashion and twisting them: lipstick and baby doll dresses paired with dirty Converse and a skateboard; a cute pageboy haircut and a child’s barrette with hairy armpits and a guitar. I stopped seeing makeup, shaved legs, and dresses as the enemy. They aren’t imperatives of being female; they’re part of a costume that people of any gender can choose to wear or not.”–Beth Ditto
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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.”
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“Sexist attitudes and simple lust may fuel some men’s desire to become a sexual predator, but impunity allows them to act on that desire. If the goal is for women to be able to operate in the music industry (or anywhere) free of harassment, assaults, discrimination, and predation, removing that impunity would seem like a good place to start. And that might—might—be what’s happening right now.”–From “Breaking the Silence in the Music Industry”
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“I was trying to figure out why, in 2009, we were still being treated the same way, if not worse, then when I was 14 and listening to Bikini Kill.”–Tom Tom founder Mindy Abovitz on why there are “so few female drummers.”
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Happy New Year! NOT. “The Texas Department of State Health Services announced that at the start of 2016 it would cut off about $600,000 in funding for HIV prevention services provided by Planned Parenthood. The state has provided this funding to the women’s health provider for nearly 30 years. The state gave no reason, saying simply that ‘there will be no further renewals of this contract’ in its notice to Planned Parenthood. ‘The state cuts these programs in an attempt to score political points,’ Rochelle Tafolla, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, told the Texas Tribune. ‘The true victims here are tens of thousands of women and men who no longer have access to health care that they need.’
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Happy 2016, Weird Sisters!
Finally, major media outlets are taking notice of the lack of diversity in film criticism. “Because men make up the vast majority of critics — 78% of the top critics appearing on the Rotten Tomatoes website in spring 2013 were male — films with male directors and/or writers receive greater exposure from critics…Niche entertainment sites have the worst record for publishing women, who make up only 9 percent of their critics.” Chaz Ebert reminds us that “a wide spectrum of voices is critical in challenging the mainstream white male-dominated narrative that drives much of Hollywood and the popular media. Being introduced to diverse critical voices and opinions in the arts not only affects how we see the world but also has a profound influence on how we begin to heal it.” Continue reading
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Maria Qamar, a Desi artist based in Canada, gave an interview for Dazed about her process, cultural appropriation, and much more: “It is really funny, because the whole point of this pop-art Indian thing was so that I could take the most American – the most western thing – I could find, which were American romance comics or novels. I wanted to take the most iconic thing, which is the soap opera, and blend them together. Right now it feels like I’m taking their shit and throwing it back at them, saying, ‘Here it is, you made this. This is all you.’”
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Cady Noland’s Bluewald (1989) sold at Christie’s New York this year for close to $9.8 million—a record for an American artist. Curious who the “top 10 most expensive living female artists of 2015” are? Click here. Additionally, “In 2016, all of the solo shows at SculptureCenter in Queens, New York, will be by women.”
Bluewald (1989)
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Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
