I am sure I’m a sometimes white supremacist. In the States, growing up a “person of color” (what does that even mean?!?) means growing up suffocating in whiteness—a whiteness so beautiful and total its edges are implacable. For many of us, this translates into wanting “to be someone else,” as Morgan Parker suggests in her article for VIDA. Morgan wants to be Nancy Meyers or Diane Keaton (I’m not sure—does it matter?) and I want to be, have wanted to be, a slew of white things. At times consciously and intellectually—a sick fun—and at others not-so-consciously nor intellectually. Just painfully. A hate comes along with the wanting but it’s all there in a sometimes ecstasy-inducing rigmarole that I’ve labored to turn into writing or art. Why I’m writing this down now feels like its own kind of art; an interruption by the way of naming. Continue reading →
This month. 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 Naomi on The Healing:
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I have always had a sweet spot for stories centered on women with magical powers. I loved watching the show Charmed throughout my high school years and to this day the film Matilda reigns among my favorites. When I read the novel The Healing by Gayl Jones in grad school, finally I understood why I was attracted to female magic on television. It was even more than the power of transformation, agency, and spirit of playfulness that drew my attention. It was the actual healing—these women could fix things including themselves. Continue reading →
This month. 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. First up is Hanna on The Cutmouth Lady:
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Urban legends, awkward crushes, high school, sneaking out to the wrong side of town…. Sounds like the makings of a typical coming-of-age story. But add a basically-orphaned Seattle girl sent to Japan to attend a strict Catholic school while living with a distant family friend above a bar, and you’ve got The Cutmouth Lady. A friend gifted this book to me when I was 24, and upon reading it, I immediately felt so much longing and a deep regret that my teenage self hadn’t had this to read on train ride escapes into NYC on the weekends.
Have you ever read/watched/listened to a book/movie/song that really annoyed you because it challenged what you felt to be aesthetically pleasurable? And then you kept on reading/watching/listening and you realized there was a beauty in the formerly perceived grotesquerie? Which caused you to not only find said book/movie/song actually awe-inspiring but also caused you to recalibrate your whole sense of aesthetics in general?
It used to be a kind of utopia. A weekly meeting of all my favorite Blackgirls, indulging and over-indulging on wine and takeout, listening to records, talking about life and love, and hollering at the TV as Kerry Washington stunted in a flawless white coat and stomped delicately on the heads of every white man in the White House.
Of course, she didn’t look like us, with her airbrushed skin and bone-straight perm. Of course, she was in love with one white man, or two, depending on the season. Of course she wasn’t an artist, or an activist, or a progressive. But she was a Black woman on prime time television, she was sexy as hell, and she was smarter than you. We were so damn hungry we forgave her. We forgave the overdone love scenes and the corny banter. We forgave the patriotism, the predictability, the strange treatment of Black men. We are so damn hungry. Continue reading →
Elsewhere, we’ve been following Delirious Hem‘s December features, including this one on feminism and fitness curated by Amanda Montei and Elizabeth Hall, and the annual Advent calendar, this year edited by Susan Gardner and Jessica Smith and featuring poetry about rape culture.
Best of 2014 music lists havebeenrollingout, and many feature our fave women musicians like Jenny Lewis, Lykke Li, FKA twigs, St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, and Hurray for the Riff Raff, whose music video for their song “The Body Electric” features the Marissa Alexander story:
In other music news, we can’t wait for the Lana del Rey / Courtney Love tour planned for 2015 and the new Sleater-Kinney album, No Cities to Love, out January 20 (S-K also appeared on the Chris Gethard show this week).
–we thought we’d point you toward some feminist gift guides. Bitch is running a series of them, and Feministing introduces us to The Guardian Princess Alliance, a series of books about culturally and racially diverse princesses fighting for social justice, for the princess-loving little feminist in your life. You might want to give Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please or Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist to the not-so-little feminists in your life, or the think-they’re-not-feminists in your life who will soon see the light. xoJane has a #FeministShelfie article that will spark more gift ideas. We wish these novels by Toni Morrison and Miranda July and this book of poems by PJ Harvey were out already, but then again, we need something to look forward to about now. Also, look out for WEIRD SISTER’s own series on feminist books we love, coming soon!
Feel free to post links in support of the abolition of imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy in the comments!
Join us later this month for a series of live and virtual readings, performances and talks exploring selfies and feminism!
Featuring:
Veronica Arreola
Marisa Crawford
Kate Durbin
Morgan Parker
Jennifer L. Pozner
“The selfie suggests something in picture form—I think I look [beautiful] [happy] [funny] [sexy]. Do you?—that a girl could never get away with saying. It puts the gaze of the camera squarely in a girl’s hands, and along with it, the power to influence the photo’s interpretation.” – Rachel Simmons, Slate
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Veronica I. Arreola is a professional feminist, writer, and mom. She took her degree in biological sciences with a minor in women’s studies and turned it into a career working on diversity issues in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Veronica is the assistant director of the UIC Center for Research on Women and Gender and directs their Women in Science and Engineering program. Her blog, Viva la Feminista, has been named a top political blog by Blogher, Women’s Media Center and LATISM. Veronica’s work on behalf of women and girls has been recognized by her coworkers with a UIC Woman of the Year award, the community with a Chicago Foundation for Women Impact Award and the White House with an organizational Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. Her current project, #365FeministSelfie, aims to have people take a close look at themselves every day and see the beauty everyone else sees.Continue reading →
This fall, I spent two months trying to cram the entire white male literary canon into my militant women’s studies-trained brain. I was studying for the GRE Subject Test in English Literature, a deeply dreaded admission requirement for most English Literature PhD programs which is I guess supposed to measure your knowledge of what is widely accepted as the English literary canon. To have to learn the entire canon in a matter of months to prepare for a multiple-choice test felt like utter madness, and was made far worse by the fact that so few women writers and writers of color are included on the test. It felt like a cruel joke—having to find time between my full-time job and trying to launch this cool feminist website to make flash cards of basically all the writers that feel least relevant to my actual scholarly interests and life. Continue reading →
I didn’t do a good job teaching my poetry students about Ferguson.
I know a lot of people are doing a good job. You should listen to them and follow their example. But I’m going to tell you about how I did a mediocre job, because I think (I’m not sure) that it’s better to do a mediocre job than not to address it at all; because I think we should be talking about what we tried to do, even if we didn’t do it right.
Last Monday night, the night the grand jury’s verdict was announced, I realized I was teaching the next afternoon: an introductory undergrad course on reading and writing about poetry. I posted on Facebook that I was looking for poems and/or lesson plans that might help me and my students talk about what was happening in Ferguson, and my friends had great ideas. They posted links to the Atlantic’s version of the Ferguson Syllabus; Jennée Desmond-Harris’s list of Do’s and Don’ts for teaching about Ferguson; the NAACP petition urging the Department of Justice to complete its investigation of Michael Brown’s shooting; qz.com’s advice for white antiracist allies. They posted poems by Claude McKay, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Danez Smith (see a full list of poems at the bottom of this post.) Continue reading →
WEIRD SISTER explores the intersections of feminism, literature and pop culture. We feature essays, interviews, comics, reviews, playlists, secret diaries, and love letters written in invisible ink.
