One of my favorite music videos of 2014 featured California indie dream rocker Jenny Lewis singing her song “Just One of the Guys” backed by a celebrity-studded band, including Kristen Stewart and Anne Hathaway. Now, there’s new Sleater-Kinney video for the title track from their surprise album No Cities To Love (what do you call a surprise album when the surprise party’s over?), and the band has “asked some of their friends to film themselves singing the title track”:
Filed under Everything Else
We asked our regular contributors to write about the feminist books that they love—books that struck a chord, for one reason or another, books they couldn’t put down, that they’ll never donate, that are underlined and dog-eared and bookmarked eternally, that you can maybe borrow, but you most definitely have to give back. Here’s Caolan on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:
I last read these books on my Kindle, which promptly broke; here I am with the broken title page of the Ballantine e-book of The Mists of Avalon.
I wanted to talk about these two books together because, for me, they’re two sides of the same coin. Marion Zimmer Bradley‘s The Mists of Avalon (1983) is a feminist revision of the King Arthur mythos, but also a reconstruction of a dreamed-of matriarchal prehistory; Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a feminist dystopian nightmare. In one novel, a society of priestess-revering, Goddess-fearing, woman-respecting Picts and Celts—everybody smeared in woad, wreathed in holly, rising with the sun and running with the deer—is slowly but inevitably crushed by the cold patriarchal grip of early Christianity, with its tyrannical, sex-negative priests making sure that every woman is the property of a man, and/or an illiterate virgin. In the other, a society of somewhat troubled but reasonably happy white North American 70s feminists—a lot of hairy armpits, conflicting attitudes about sex work, militant second-wave moms with casual, complacent daughters—is suddenly and terrifyingly crushed by the cold patriarchal grip of televangelist-style fundamentalist Christianity, as a military coup restructures the US as a theocracy, sends infertile women and feminist rabble-rousers and various other traitors to their deaths in radioactive work camps, and redistributes fertile nonbelievers as property—”handmaids”—to creepy powerful old couples, with whom they are expected to conceive and bear children in creepy sex rituals that physically involve the creepy old husbands and vicariously involve the creepy old wives. Both scenarios were projections—forward or backward—from the real world of the early 1980s, from actual evidence: The Mists of Avalon is a theological-historical-anthropological back-formation, a brilliantly orchestrated reconciliation of 20th-century Wiccan rituals and speculations about the historical Arthur and pseudoarchaeology about actual ruins on the British isles and conflicting medieval French texts and folktales, while the horrors of The Handmaid’s Tale are rooted in contemporary struggles over reproductive justice and women’s rights and the rhetoric of the newly powerful religious right in the US, not to mention the swiftness with which women’s lives were changing in Iran under the Ayatollah, or rather the swiftness with which so many regimes (including our own!) associated nationalism or political stability with women’s subordination. Continue reading
Filed under Books + Literature
Our future husband wears his hoodie zipped just slightly above half-way up at all times.
This week’s episode kicked off with Kimberly, the woman who was rejected at last week’s Rose Ceremony but stuck around to talk with Chris just cause she’s sure she’s that special. We know that she isn’t, and that Chris doesn’t like when girls have brown hair. “Ick,” he says when he sees brunettes, and closes his eyes and grimaces. (Just kidding, Chris actually has said at several points, “brunette, blonde, I don’t care—it’s all about the connection.” Wow you guys, can you say FEMINIST?!) Chris worries about what kind of message it will send to the other women if he lets I’m Sure I’m Special Kimberly stay another rose ceremony cycle, but his BFF Chris Harrison assures him: “this is your life; there are no rules.” And so he lets Kim stay, to the horror of the other women.
We learn that Farmer Chris is staying in a house right down the driveway from where the ladiesssszzzz are lodging, and Host Chris basically encourages the womyn to break into Farmer Chris’s house by repeatedly saying “Chris lives right there” and “there are no rules.” Two gals do break in later in the episode; they like look at Farmer Chris’s motorcycle and it’s really boring. The only interesting part is that the girls are both wearing bikinis, and for some reason one of their lower halves keeps getting blocked out by one of those black censor bars because apparently her swimsuit does not cover her ass nor her vulva. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV
Illustration by Forsyth Harmon
Dear Anais,
I am in the middle of my first year in a graduate writing program. The program was my top choice, and I was also offered a nice fellowship as part of the admission package. Needless to say, I was on top of the world when accepted.
However, a semester later, I’m having a crisis. I came into the program feeling pretty good about my work, but my confidence has plummeted. The other writers in the program all have top-tier publications, get asked to read all the time, and two of them already have well-received books. They are obviously more talented than I am and I feel like I don’t quite know what I’m doing here: they seem to know all the right people and seem to have read EVERYTHING. I just feel like I can’t compete. The one thing I have going for me is that I’m socially astute, so everyone is nice to me. In fact, my peers are quite fun and friendly despite being apparent wunderkinds. Continue reading
Filed under Go Ask Anais
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.
Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
Let the journey to find love begin.
On Monday night, Bachelor Chris Soules began his season-long swim into a pool of conventionally pretty, ultra-traditional women competing for his hand in marriage. As a feminist, I’m horrified by The Bachelor. I’m also deeply excited to watch every single minute of it.
First of all, I want to address what I think it means to write a feminist take on The Bachelor—if I was doing a truly non-lazy and incisive feminist response to the show, I would talk about larger problems with how gender, race, class and more are portrayed in reality TV, and about media, and like, capitalism. The fact that the show’s politics are incredibly not-progressive to an almost unbelievable degree and that it promotes a totally archaic view of gender norms, and depicts a world that’s virtually absent of people who aren’t straight and white and cis. It is so dumb and bad, you guys. Truly. I’ll touch on all of these ideas here, but I also can’t deny that I’m basically deeply committed to watching every episode of this terrible show, for pretty un-feminist reasons. These are:
Reason 1: In 2008, Erica DiSimone, a Girl Who Went to My High School, was on The Bachelor. And so I watched. And because each season’s Bachelor or Bachelorette is a well-loved rejected suitor from the previous season, I became hooked for SEVEN YEARS. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV
We asked our regular contributors to write about the feminist books that they love—books that struck a chord, for one reason or another, books they couldn’t put down, that they’ll never donate, that are underlined and dog-eared and bookmarked eternally, that you can maybe borrow, but you most definitely have to give back. Here’s Cathy on A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World:
A feminist book that really affected me is A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World edited by Karen Green and Tristan Taormino, which came out in 1997, when I was 16. I lucked out by stumbling upon the book—an almost encyclopedia of riot grrrl zines—in my local Half Price Books in San Antonio, Texas. (The same bookstore also had a surplus of Kathy Acker books I would later find and then have my feminist literary world forever altered in the best possible way.) In 1997, riot grrrl zines were not new to me, but this book made zines and their authors the most accessible they had ever been, and made them seem legitimized in this funny way—here they were in a book I could buy at the store and check out from the library: “See mom and dad, the stuff that my pen-pals write IS getting taken seriously.” At the time, I was defending zine culture to my parents, who were worried I was getting brainwashed by queer punk feminist liberals (little did they know I was basically born a queer punk feminist liberal). I did not flaunt the book to my parents, who actually would have been scandalized by some of its confessionally honest contents, but I knew if they confiscated it like they did some of my zines, I could just go check it out from the library and start reading all over again.
Riot grrrl zines changed my life, and I am still so glad this book collects many of the zines I was already reading and many that I had never heard of. A Girl’s Guide is organized by themes (e.g., Chapter 1: “friends secrets sex,” and Chapter 2: “body image health”) and features excerpts from zines such as Tammy Rae Carland’s I <3 Amy Carter, Witknee’s Alien, Lisa Crystal Carver‘s Rollerderby and many more. It begins with an introduction by Ann Magnuson and ends with addresses and prices for all the zines featured inside. If only all of those zines were still being made and I could send $1 and a few stamps to those addresses. If only.
To this day, my own writing and performance are greatly influenced by the raw and confessional voices that epitomized so many of the zines I used to read. I have always been fairly shy, and they encouraged me to just finally say what I needed to say. I appreciate both the urgency and permanence of so many zines in A Girl’s Guide. They were not Facebook statuses you could go back and delete, but at the same time they were often limited edition. Riot grrrl zines didn’t just teach me about feminism; they taught me about friendship and keeping in touch. I am forever grateful that being a feminist and being a good friend are rooted in the same place.
Filed under Books + Literature, Everything Else
“African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees…Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture — and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future — might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism.” – Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0”
Still from Frances Bodomo’s “Afronauts”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future. What will I do, who will I be, how will I love, will everything be okay. I’ve been thinking about the planet and how it is not doing very well. I am thinking about marches and earthquakes and The Book of Revelation. I am thinking a lot about death. I am starting to understand I’m not welcome. In my ear I hear Sun Ra whisper “space is the place.” In my other ear I hear Kanye say “we wasn’t supposed to make it past twenty-five.” This is what Black American women are wondering: What’s up to us?
Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV
We asked our regular contributors to write about the feminist books that they love—books that struck a chord, for one reason or another, books they couldn’t put down, that they’ll never donate, that are underlined and dog-eared and bookmarked eternally, that you can maybe borrow, but you most definitely have to give back. Here’s Emily on Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night:
In 1934, Christiane Ritter left the comforts of her home and children to live for a year in desolate Svalbard, in northern Norway, with her husband and another hunter. Her memoir, A Woman in the Polar Night, the only book she ever wrote, chronicles this year. If I know you, there’s a good chance I’ve lent it to you or bought you a copy. Ritter walked away from everything she knew about being a human in society and confronted life in the harshest of elements, without sunlight, without guarantee of food or warmth, and with only few provisions. She walked right up to and past her own physical, psychological and emotional edges, and recounted it all in absolutely gorgeous and meditative prose. I can reread each sentence a dozen times. I randomly open to a page, point and land here: “We are wet from the sea, and the mist is oppressively heavy.” A second try and I land here: “With beads of sweat on their brows and swearing horribly, holding the thin needles in their heavy hands, the men try with a kind of lunatic fervour to invent new knitting patterns for socks.”
A Woman in the Polar Night balances the worn man-in-nature narratives more familiar to readers living in our patriarchy. It’s true that some social constructs did travel along with Ritter, but most were left behind, allowing Ritter to experience and share with her readers a totally different consciousness. In that way, it’s an amazing tale of possibility. Ritter wrote, “The immense silence of the land surrounds me and invades me, submerging and annihilating my human smallness.” While that can be read as a reminder of human insignificance, I see it in context as the opposite—as an expression of our vastness as living beings. Feminism in action requires ideological movement. To learn what that can look like, we can turn to reading about the movement of one mind from social confines into vast independence and freedom.
Filed under Books + Literature
