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by | October 13, 2015 · 9:00 am

Feminist Halloween Costumes for 2015

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Last year there was the Sexy Bunch of Grapes. This year it’s the Sexy Pizza Rat. The more things change, the more you need a list of feminist Halloween costume ideas. In honor of WEIRD SISTER’s upcoming first birthday (!!!!) I’m updating last year’s hoary old list of literary feminist costume ideas with some Totally Topical Feminist Costumes for 2015, including plenty of references drawn from WEIRD SISTER’s first twelve months! (Don’t forget to review last year’s list of Feminist Halloween Do’s and Don’ts to make sure your Edgy Feminist Halloween Costume is feminist fun for everyone.) Continue reading →

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by | October 8, 2015 · 8:00 am

The Universe Doesn’t Know You Exist : An Interview with Meghan O’Neil Pennie of Super Unison, ex-Punch

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Super Unison, photo by Matthew Kadi

There’s this tree growing behind my apartment that took me five years to really notice. It’s huge. Twenty feet taller than our three-story building, with dense leaves, a squirrel’s nest, and a rotating cast of birds. I don’t understand why I took it for granted for so long. Maybe I needed to live in New York City for a few years before I realized how special it was to have an epic, dynamic, vital being growing in your backyard. Anyway, Meghan O’Neil Pennie, the lead singer and bassist of Super Unison, and former lead singer of PUNCH, is like that for me too. Meghan was the big sister of the drummer in my high school punk band. She was always lurking when we practiced in his parent’s living room. In college she was my best friend’s roommate, so we would often cook dinner together and hang. She felt like a family member who had always been around and always would be. So when she started singing for PUNCH, I hardly noticed. I feel stupid about that now. Her vocals on  the five(!) PUNCH records released by 625, Deathwish, Discos Huelgas, are so fucking ferocious and unrelenting it hurts my throat and heart to listen. Meghan also has this incredibly powerful stage presence. I’m watching old  YOUTUBE videos and found one of her performing at a festival in the Czech Republic and she’s leaping about stage with one broken foot while people stagedive around her. Meghan derived the title of PUNCH’s last record, “They Don’t Have to Believe” from the Kathleen Hanna documentary, The Punk Singer, in which Hanna says “she doesn’t expect everyone to understand or believe in feminism or her personal battle with illness, but they should have to stay out of her way.” Meghan’s work in her new band, Super Unison, continues in this lineage. Her vocals are upfront and unapologetic, slightly more melodic than before, a little less thrash and a little more riot grrrl. Here, Meghan and I talk about her new band, her lyrics, and how she became the musician she is today. Continue reading →

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by | October 1, 2015 · 9:00 am

28 LESSONS LEARNED FROM A YEAR OF ‘BEING UNREASONABLE’; FOR BROWN AND BLACK POETS & OUR CHOSEN FAMILIES

a status report on my piece from earlier this year: “To Being Unreasonable in 2015”

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LESSON #1:  Embrace your hostility. Be angry. Be a stain. Be what others call a “negative” person.  Create a “zone of hostility so large it creates a forcefield of care for yourself and your kin.”* Pick every last fight. Learn the words “go fuck yourself.” Wake up each morning and say: “Our mothers didn’t bring us here to shut up.” Those who do not want to hear your anger do not want to hear you at all. Those who wonder why you are so negative all the time don’t realize how vocalizing this anger publicly and loudly might, in fact, be part of your survival. 

LESSON #2: As a result of lesson 1, your inbox will become an unsafe space; don’t check it in public or late at night or too early in the morning. Or at the bar. Or on the train. Or before work. Take special care with emails from well-meaning white friends who have been confused by you: Are you referring to me in that tweet from 2 weeks ago???  2PM is the best time to check e-mail—far enough into the day that you can still make it through.

LESSON #3: Learn that your first English words, at the age of four, were HI! & PLEASE! & THANK YOU!—and that you were taught these words before you really knew what they meant. Learn that you performed them like a parrot to try to pass as American at an airport in Texas. Learn that from the moment you’ve entered this country, you’ve been excelling at passing, so this heartbreak you are feeling now, this unlearning that feels like death, this feeling that you’ve been a phony your whole life, is actually somewhat real, because, who are you? who have you been? Continue reading →

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by | September 25, 2015 · 9:00 am

Rah! Rah! Roundup

Check out Purvi Shah’s work for VIDA on the unbearable white maleness of poetry and the economy of Best American Poetry: “…[I]t is shocking to put these two facts together: 1) in his language, Hudson used an Asian American woman’s name to place his poems; 2) there has been only 1 identifiable woman of color editor and 0 Asian American editors of the Best American Poetry series. It is abysmal when poetry, which could be the most democratic of art forms, is reinforced as the locus of the privileged White male.”

Continue reading →

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by | September 24, 2015 · 9:00 am

IN DEFENSE OF SORROW: The Sad Girl Internet Aesthetic

“Being a woman is the saddest thing,” I said in a recent therapy session. I felt overwhelmed by daily experiences that are felt by many women, like: having a body that is treated as public property, legal and professional injustices, the price of tampons, article after article preaching how not to get raped, how to make him fall in love with you (in only seven easy steps! Step one: change everything about yourself), a constant fear of attack, seeing little to no representation of oneself in movies and television, online hate. The list goes on.

These things make me angry. They make me want to shout and protest, but I also feel saddened by them. Usually, I keep those feelings hidden. Sadness is often viewed, socially, as a passing emotion that can and should be overcome; an unproductive state that should be actively avoided.

the way things are by mollysoda newhive.com/mollysoda/depressedprincess

the way things are by mollysoda newhive.com/mollysoda/depressedprincess

Today, young female artists, part of an emerging “sad girls” trend, are using the Internet as the outlet for performing their heartache, sorrow and despair, creating complex work on the web that deals with the double-binds women today face. Continue reading →

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by | September 23, 2015 · 9:00 am

EDITING A NATIONAL JOURNAL WHILE MESSY & DEPRESSED

This summer, I found myself barely capable of editing Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color in collaboration with the Lambda Literary Foundation.

I spent my last couple weeks in NYC displaced from my house before moving to Cali (where I couch surfed with friends for a while). Housing was unstable for a few months.

This affects how I sleep, breathe, eat, think, act.

After two months of couches, I finally found a room to sublet. My first night subletting, about fifteen shots were fired outside my window. I hit the floor and crawled into the living room…. In the morning, I heard that police killed my neighbor, Antonio Clements, in Oakland.

As I’m writing this, it has been ten days since that incident. Continue reading →

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by | September 9, 2015 · 9:00 am

BEYOND HUMILITY

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Image by Matt L Rohrer

Folks are always trying to compress the talented brown GURLS!!! OMG, my friend said “YOU NEED TO BE MORE HUMBLE!!!””

Bitch, humble about what???!!

I’VE OVERCOME DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, I’VE OVERCOME HOMELESSNESS, I GOT TWO COLLEGE DEGREES WHILE STILL RESISTING ASSIMILATION! YOU WANT ME TO BE HUMBLE ABOUT WUTT??!!

Bitch, I’m one of the greatest things I’ve ever witnessed.

Do you understand what it takes to be this fierce & faggoty & confident & ALIVE!! How dare you tell me to be humble. NOW BOW BEFORE YOUR QUEEN / BEFORE I BEHEAD YOU.

Lately, I’ve come to understand that humility is a privilege. Continue reading →

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by | September 1, 2015 · 9:00 am

Breastfeeding and Capitalism: A Provocation

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National Breastfeeding Month ended yesterday. So did Black Breastfeeding Week. World Breastfeeding Week was apparently at the beginning of August. Over the course of the month, I read and heard a lot of stuff that made me angry and sad and confused: medical professionals promoting breastfeeding with a disturbing prescriptive zeal, mothers pointing to their bleeding nipples as evidence of a glorious martyrdom, other mothers and doctors claiming that breastfeeding is already mainstream, that it needs no further promotion or celebration, that to do so is to shame parents who feed their infants formula, white mothers claiming that Black Breastfeeding Week was unnecessary. In the middle of all of this I sort of started to wean my daughter, who turned two smack in the middle of World Breastfeeding Month, and I cried a lot, and I sort of stopped weaning, and felt weird about that, too. I wanted to write something about these thoughts and feelings. A manifesto, or a well-researched, well-reasoned essay about how we’re living at a historical moment when parents are shamed for formula feeding and for breastfeeding; the precise level of shame may vary by region or race or ethnicity or socioeconomic background, but in my experience you can feel deeply ashamed of both of these choices in the same city, the same neighborhood, the same pediatrics practice. (Oh wait, did I say that this is a historical moment when an issue primarily affecting women results in the shaming of women’s bodies and the removal of their agency? Ha ha ha ha. Sorry, I meant to say, Infant feeding is primarily a women’s issue, so of course it’s a fucking nightmare.) I always stopped, too daunted to grapple with the tangle of social, cultural, emotional, biological, economic, and public-health issues surrounding infant feeding. Now Breastfeeding Month is over and I’m swamped with work and I definitely don’t have time to work out a nuanced response to “The Skeptical OB”’s kind of horrifying dismissal of breastfeeding advocacy, or the weird structure of the Wikipedia page about breastfeeding (they start telling you The Way You Should Do It in the second sentence). I just have time for a provocation, followed by a rant. Here it is:

DID YOU NOTICE that breastfeeding was only allowed to return to the mainstream when it could be fully integrated into capitalism? Continue reading →

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by | August 18, 2015 · 9:37 am

My London Diary 2: Teen Mom

This is part 2 of a serial comic about travel-as-time-travel between 15 and 35, family vacations and research trips, and learning about being a daughter & a mom & a woman or whatever in London, the place where I had my first training in independence & dependence & terror & writing & adventure & desire.

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