The public cry-in for Ana Mendieta organized by Jennifer Tamayo is going down today! Bring your paprika, chalk dust, and blood tears for siluetas in the snow:
silueta erasure by Jennifer Tamayo
Fifty Shades of Grey & Why I Keep Defending Women’s Trash
In this fantasy he shows up at my boring job and we have an awkward but meaningful conversation. In this fantasy he just happens to walk by my house when I’m outside reading a Victorian novel and wearing a really flattering top. In this fantasy he shows up at the bar and I don’t accidentally have my first kiss ever with the wrong guy. In this fantasy he wants me so much that it drives him insane. In this fantasy he can barely control himself.
I went to see Fifty Shades of Grey in NYC’s Union Square at noon on a Tuesday. It had been out for ten days. The Internet had said the stars had no chemistry and obviously hated sex. A lot of my Facebook friends had said I should boycott it because it romanticized an abusive relationship. Rory and Alison had told me the sex scenes were incredibly boring, but the paperwork scenes were delightful. Marisa had posted a photo on Instagram of her and Matt looking sad after they watched it. So I basically knew what to expect. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV
The Feminist Bachelor Recap, Episode 11: The Womyn Tell All
These womyn are about to tell us so much.
Oh man, oh WOMAN, the women certainly told all this week, and oh how amazing their stories were. The Women Tell All episode started with Chris Harrison babbling about how every Bachelor season they have the Women Tell All Episode, and sometimes, ya know, there’s just not that much to talk about, but this season is SO special and dramatic. Oh please Chris Harrison, we’re not idiots. The Women Tell All consists necessarily each season of a stage full of women, and we all know that The Bachelor‘s very most favorite thing to do is pitting women against each other.
It’s kind of darkly funny—jealousy between women is a thing that we learn from a sexist culture that tells us women have to fight each other for a man or a job or a book deal; it’s a biproduct of a culture that makes us feel invisible and starved for attention through making it harder for women to get the material stuff that many men get easily. As feminists we have to work to unlearn that internalized misogyny. But the thing is: The Bachelor takes that social message and makes it real in order to further perpetuate it. There is actually one boring dude that these lovely womyn have to fight over. They’re perpetuating competition amongst women because they are literally competing. And so the social norm of female jealousy and competition is so, and so on forever. And we get to watch it in its fullest force on The Women Tell All. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV
Why You Should Read The Meatgirl Whatever by Kristin Hatch
Image via Fence Books
This book is so good that I’m afraid of writing an essay about it because essays are kind of this fake vehicle for the essayist to sound/feel clever about herself and how she noticed this or that pattern in whatever book and ignored passages x or y that really don’t fit with said pattern and maybe things are supposed to be messy and cryptic and unknowable and that’s the beauty of it all, whatever “it” is. Thus:
1. From “Meatgirl Training Shift #1”
open your mouth wide.
your eater should see fur down your throat.
you have to stay like this as long as he eats.
sometimes after they try to throw the bones in your mouth.
don’t get mad.
they think we like it, like they’re telling us we’re doing good.
Filed under Books + Literature, Reviews
Rah! Rah! Roundup
Gigantic news: The FCC approved net neutrality rules this week, reclassifying the internet as a public utility—a HUGE victory for a free, open internet, and essential for the future of feminist online media.
“If among feminists, black women are always asked to do the uncompensated labor of educating white women about how they have effed up, is this also not a form of wage inequality?” — Read Brittney Cooper’s awesome, incredibly important response to Patricia Arquette’s Oscars speech.
In literary news, Jenn Marie Nunes talks about her forthcoming first book, AND/OR, the winner of Switchback Books‘ inaugural Queer Voices contest, in this great interview with Room 220.
A public service announcement on how not to write misogynist literature.
Image via Sundress Publications
“We believe that poetry (& any art form, for that matter) is at its most electric, irreverent, & intimate when it exists outside institutions.” Check out the Indiegogo campaign for POETRY JAWNS, a poetry podcast from Emma Sanders & Alina Pleskova.
The last episode of Parks & Recreation aired this week (though some of us are in denial and still haven’t watched it.). Look back on some of Leslie Knope’s greatest feminist moments on the Ms. blog.
Image via Ms.
Speaking of Ms., HBO is making a mini-series about the creation of Ms. Magazine—omg. And we of 90s childhood (and the name Marisa with one ‘s’) could not be more delighted that Marisa Tomei is playing Gloria Steinem.
Oh Joy Sex Toy looks at the BDSM practices of 50 Shades of Grey alongside those of Secretary.
And last but defs not least, check out Women, Action & the Media’s first-ever WAM! Entertainment Guide for feminist movie, book, and other media recommendations.
What did we miss this week? Let us know in the comments! <3
Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
She Was an American Girl: What American Girl Dolls (Mis)taught Me About Race and Class
I grew up in rural New Mexico, north of Santa Fe, an area sharply striated along race and class divisions. My quasi-hippie mom banned Barbie because she feared bad body image. American Girl dolls seemed like a healthy alternative to her—and to many other families in the 90s. They were multicultural, historical, and aligned nicely with a “progressive” education. They were the PBS of doll-dom.
When I first paged my stubby baby-fingers through the Pleasant Company catalog in the back of our Volvo, the cast was composed of Felicity Merriman, a Revolutionary War-era firecracker; Kirsten Larson, a pioneer from Sweden to Minnesota; Samantha Parkington, an Edwardian orphan raised by her mega-rich, stuffy grandmary; and Molly McIntyre, whose father is a soldier in World War II. Addy Walker, who escapes slavery and was the first non-white character, had just been launched like a token ship.
While I was still old enough to vaguely care, Josephina Montoya, from a rancho in 1820’s New Mexico, was released. All of Santa Fe was super-stoked. Not much happens there.
The classism and status anxiety embedded in American Girl dolls were integral parts of ownership, often trumping any historical or cultural knowledge gleaned. $95 (now $110) a pop was flat-out unaffordable to most of the kids in elementary school, where I was one of the only white students. I could tell precisely how rich my white friends at my after-school acting class in Santa Fe were by how many dolls and accessories they owned.
Filed under Everything Else
FUNNY FEMINISM #3: Laughing All the Way to the Museum – An Interview with Jill Dawsey
A monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with and about feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.
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“Laugh-in: Art, Comedy, Performance explores the recent turn toward comedic performance in contemporary art. The exhibition features twenty artists who engage the strategies and themes of stand-up comedy as a means to rethink questions of artistic performativity, audience participation, and public speech.“
—Jill Dawsey, Associate Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Laugh-in’s curator, Jill Dawsey about the group exhibit and its feminist inclinations. The show opened at MCASD on January 23rd and runs through April 19th.
Cathy de la Cruz: Can you tell me about Laugh-in, and how the show relates to feminism and comedy?
Jill Dawsey: I’m pleased that you picked up on the feminist aspect of the show. The broader theme is artists who are thinking about stand-up comedy, borrowing from the strategies and aesthetics of stand-up. It has to do with a lot of things: questions of public speech and communication and finding audiences, and what can and can’t be said at this moment in time.
One of the larger threads that runs throughout the show is the way that comedy can create a space in which hierarchies can be inverted and power relations can be challenged. There are many women artists in the show and there’s a lot of explicitly feminist work.
Filed under Everything Else, Funny Feminism
The Feminist Bachelor Recap, Episode 10: Sex & the Single Girl
Just wearin’ some clothes that we totally understand the cultural significance of!
Ugh Bachelor Nation, we are getting to that point in the show where we should all be glued to our TVs, but instead I am bored. Jade is gone, and I am sad. Britt is gone, and I miss her inspiring makeup and red Chucks. Farmer Chris is boring, and Whitney is boring, and Becca is boring, and Kaitlyn is refreshingly not that boring which makes it all the more depressing that she’s vying for a chance to live with a boring guy in a desolate town in Iowa. I don’t even know who to root for anymore—the one I like best? That she be banished to Arlington, Iowa?!
We’re in Bali, and it’s rully pretty. The first date is with Kaitlyn, at a local temple where they basically go because they’re not allowed to kiss and I guess The Bachelor thought that sacred aspect of this place would be a fun kitchy restraint. Chris has maje pit stains and a monkey jumps on his head and Kaitlyn makes a weird metaphor about going after what you want and wishing she was a monkey. Kaitlyn tells Chris she’s falling in love, and I thought Farmer Chris was only allowed to say things like “thank you” and “it means so much to hear you say that” and *silent tongue kiss* in response, but in an unprecedented Bach move, he says “I’m falling in love with you as well.” Wow, Farmer Chris, “as well,” aren’t you a fancy genius. They go to the fantasy suite together. I am so bored you guys, someone please give me a lobotomy. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV
Winter Blues Feminist Mixtape
Mixtapes got me through high school. Now, they’re getting me through this brutally cold Brooklyn winter. The cassette’s been making a comeback. I even just overhead some teenagers talking about how they wanted cassette players so they could make mixtapes. Because they heard that’s cool. If I see those kids again, I’ll tell them to grab that thrift shop cassette player and push record on these feminist tracks to help get them through the cold winter days and long winter nights.
Filed under Everything Else
Three Pieces of Feminist Advice From Jackie “Moms” Mabley
Before there was a Paul Mooney, a Red Foxx, or a Richard Pryor, there was a hilarious woman on the comedy scene who could probably get a shoe to giggle. If you haven’t heard of Moms Mabley or listened to some of her stand-up, you have been missing out on a beautiful piece of American cultural history and downright comedic genius. To put it simply, Moms was fly. Her artistic prowess traversed the lines of singing, acting, and comedy. Mabley’s career spanned nearly forty years and included performance on film, television, and in clubs throughout the nation and abroad. In the 1930s she performed regularly at the Apollo alongside artists such as Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and Billie Holiday. By the 1960s she had crossed over into the mainstream, making multiple appearances on shows such as The Merv Griffin Show and The Ed Sullivan Show. Moms not only used her voice to garner laughs but also to engage in political activism. She became famous for her rendition of “Abraham, Martin, and John,” a song about social change, which hit the top forty in 1969. Moms was also one of the boldest pre-sexual revolution celebrity voices of the 50s and 60s. Through her comedy she perfected the art of sexual innuendo. Moms was feminist. She was funny. And she said what was on her mind for the good of us all.
Check out a few of my favorite pieces of Moms Mabley feminist advice below.
Filed under Everything Else
