feminist blogs in english

Essence magazine hires Ellianna Placas, a white woman, as their fashion director and the black internet (yes, there’s a black internet) goes nuts:

Placas, who used to work at O: The Oprah Magazine and US Weekly, will apparently make her debut in Essence’s 40th anniversary issue, on newsstands in September. Although Essence has been looking for a fashion director for quite some time, not everyone is happy with their newest acquisition.

Michaela Angela Davis, former fashion editor of Essence and former editor-in-chief of Honey Magazine, revealed on her Facebook Wall, “It’s with a heavy heart I’ve learned Essence Magazine has engaged a white Fashion Director. I love Essence and I love fashion. I hate this news and this feeling. It hurts, literally. The fashion industry has historically been so hostile to black people–especially women. The 1 seat reserved for black women once held by Susan Taylor, Ionia Dunn-Lee, Harriette Cole(+ me) is now-I can’t. It’s a dark day for me. How do you feel?”

I should say, right off the bat, I don’t read Essence. My mother never subscribed, and by the time I got to college, I was a ladymag hater for life. I’ve probably read enough of its content over the years to make up two or three issues. Enough content to know that while Essence is one of the few magazines directed at black women, it certainly doesn’t meet all of our needs. For example, it’s heternormative, and deeply invested in the black middle class. I say all of that to explain that I’m not invested in the product, even though I have friends who read it religiously, and I have friends who have worked there.

Having said that, I can understand where Davis and others are coming from. Fashion highlights the often-fraught relationship between black women and white women. Remember, it’s been one scant generation since a black woman first graced the cover of Vogue (and considering whole issues can go to press without a single black model in them, we haven’t seen much improvement). There’s also the deeply ingrained societal idealization of white femininity — something a black woman will never be able to achieve, no matter how straight her hair gets. Essence is also one of the few publications nurturing a significant number of black writers and editors — there is literally a handful of black editors at fashion mags in this country. So it’s no surprise to me that hiring a white woman to determine the course of fashion and beauty at a black publication evoked such a strong reaction.

But it’s a short-sighted and ahistorical reaction. Angela Burt-Murray, the editor-in-chief, wrote a response to the furor, saying that the magazine was “founded to empower, celebrate, and inspire black women to climb higher, go further and break down barriers. Our commitment to black women remains unchanged as we continue to stay laser-focused on those principles–no matter who works with us.” And ultimately, Essence is part of Time Inc. It has shareholders to answer to, and financial goals to meet. In order to continue working at its founding principles (whether or not it actually is, is debatable, in my opinion), the editor has to make decisions that should be easy, but aren’t, like hiring the best person for the job even if that person looks nothing like the target demographic. Besides, as Burt-Murray notes, Placas freelanced for the magazine for six months, with no readers being the wiser at the ‘infiltration.’

As an aside, I also think those who are outraged are missing something crucial about the history of what we call “black” publications, or TV shows, or even colleges. White people have always been involved, to some extent. This is unlike the other side of the coin, where whites have often historically had trouble including people of color (Vogue is one example, most network television shows are another). Girlfriends and The Game, two television shows that targeted the same demographic Essence does were produced by white Republican Kelsey Grammer. Both shows featured mostly black, heavily female casts. And speaking personally, when I was a child and my father worked at a black newspaper in Southern California, the paper’s production guy was white. While he didn’t have editorial input, his work still heavily influenced the paper. It didn’t make it less black. To go further back, whites helped found many historically black colleges–although not necessarily out of altruism–including my alma mater. And today, no one would say that Howard isn’t a black school, even if it has white professors.

I don’t think there’s anything to fear in the hiring of Placas. And, if by chance, some intangibles are lost, the readers of Essence will vote with their pocketbooks and the editorial staff will learn what is and isn’t acceptable to its readership. But I predict everyone will actually forget about this in six weeks. And I wish Placas the best at her new gig.

Cross-posted at Small Strokes Fell Big Oaks blog for the series on feminism and relationships.  If you’d like to submit a guest post for this series at Small Strokes, see the guidelines here and submit your post to samsanator(at)gmail(dot)com. I have issues with feminism. Wait, let me re-phrase that: I have issues with feminists telling me what feminism [...]

by Amanda Marcotte

Once again, I’m forced to question if conservatives are capable of remembering that they gave women the vote nearly a century ago.  The new faux scandal on the right is that President Obama is going on “The View”, and the reason that this is supposedly a disgrace is pretty blatantly argued as “bitches ain’t shit”.  For all the right wing romanticizing of housewives, it’s pretty fucking interesting that they object so strenuously to the President taking time out of his schedule to speak directly to housewives, who, last I checked, have the right to vote.  But to make the whole thing even more obviously about straight-up sexism, the way the “scandal” is being debated involves pitching a show aimed at a female audience against the Boy Scouts.  Glenn Beck, CNS, Fox News, Laura Inagraham, etc.---they’re all faux angry because the President is speaking to adult women about politics instead of to male children. 

I honestly can’t think of a better example of the conservative attitudes towards women than anger that the President appears to believe that adult women are more adult than minor children who happen to be male. 

It’s an interesting sign of modern conservatism that some of the people are themselves women that are pushing this idea that boys are a more important audience than grown women.  S.E. Cupp and Laura Inagraham are mentioned on Media Matters.  Broadsheet quotes Antoinette Kuritz using female names to emphasize how silly “The View” is:

“Being on ‘The View’ trivializes the President and the office. Does he go on before or after Brittany, Paris, or Lindsay? Or even Julia? Does he sit between Joy and Elizabeth and bait one while pandering to the other?”

Did I mention that there are people named Sally, Mary, and Ann in the audience?  Do you detect a theme of unseriousness here?  Do we need to spell it out for you? (V-A-G-I-N-A-S.)

This is why I can’t take conservative “feminism” seriously in the slightest.  The main theme of conservative “feminism” is, “Most women are too stupid to breathe, much less have rights.  And you can trust me when I say this, because I’m a woman.” As logic, it’s self-contradictory, but it’s emotionally satisfying.  It says that the truth of female inferiority is so obvious that even some women have to admit it.  And the women who argue this get to feel good about themselves because they’re at least smart....for women. 

“The View” can be a very silly show, but no more so than any other political talk show that encourages “fair-and-balanced” over smart and factual.  That they do celebrity coverage shouldn’t change this---so do all the supposed hard news networks.  Fox is particularly egregious in calling the kettle black on this one, since they openly reject real news for scandal-mongering and stories about how sexy ladies are bringing down society.  “The View” has different segments, some which don’t even pretend to be hard news.  So what?  The NY Times has a Style section.  At least “The View” doesn’t do what the NY Times does, and relegate important political stories about feminist issues to the Style section.  A lot of the ongoing outrage over “The View” is that it dare exist at all, since the premise of the show is that its intended audience---mostly female, mostly staying at home (at least during the day)---is interested in political talk and actual debate and even sometimes analysis.  Hell, I think if Obama decided to come on to a show purely about homemaking so that he could condescend about his wife’s decorating preferences while avoiding all political talk the squawkers wouldn’t be raising a peep. 

Sheila Rowbotham is one of the grande dames of British feminism. When I went to a talk by her on this book at Bookmarks, the packed crowd was hanging on her every word. And she was always impressive, even when depressing as she recalled the optimism of the Seventies in contrast to the feelings today: “It seemed things were going too slowly. We thought, ‘why don’t things change quickly?’ We didn’t bargain for the fact that capitalism would go into a completely different phase; we thought welfare-based capitalism would be democratised. We didn’t believe it would be so radically diminished. … We saw women in parliament as a detail, equal pay as a detail, but the details proved to be extremely difficult.”

She added: “We’ve learned now that you can go backwards. In the Seventies we assumed once you made a gain it would stay there. … It is much harder to argue for equality in a situation where equality is not respected.”

I asked her about the current focus on porn/sexualisation among much feminist campaigning, and she responded that “selling things through sex was the route that capitalism took, and was using more and more. I don’t know how you can get that to change.” The “only alternative vision available” at present was the environmental movement she said, for Marxists had found that their assumption that the working class would resist capitalism was wrong. “The challenge is how to change society without extremely moralistic disapproval. Lots of small groups of people have been convinced but it is how to convince the mass of people now watching the World Cup and buying lots of gadgets.”

It’s an historical perspective from one who was there, and has seen a lot. It’s not, however, the subject of the book she was promoting, her new Dreamers of the New Day, which covers from the 1880s to the start of World War I, and is entirely successful in proving that there’s nothing really new under the son. The women she’s writing about lived in a very different world, but between them they thought up pretty well every revolutionary advance that we’re still dreaming about today.

What they wanted was nothing more than the abolition of gender stereotypes, something that today seems very dreamlike indeed. Who could argue with the hopes of Elsie Clews Parson, in 1914 in Journal of a Feminist:
“The day will come when the individual … [will not] have to pretend to be possessed of a given quoota of femaleness and maleness. This morning perhaps I fell like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a female; let me act like one. At midday or at midnight I may feel sexless; let me therefore act sexlessly… It is such a confounded bore to have to act one part endlessly.”

They also wanted access to birth control and abortion – rights that women are still fighting for today — (while also – generally – rejecting Malthusian and eugenics reasoning around them). Rowbotham recounts how Stella Browne put the case for the legalization of abortion in 1915 in a paper to the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, before going on to be a founder member of the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1936.

The wonderfully long-lived and long campaigning Charlotte Despard was a leader in setting up mother and baby clinics, beginning in Nine Elms in South London. In my local area, St Pancras, under pressure from mothers the Medical Officer for Health opened a school for mothers along with a clinic with health visitors – it was to be a model for many more. In East London, Sylvia Pankhurst and her Federation of Suffragettes bought a pub, The Gunmakers’ Amrs, renaming it the Mothers Arms, providing medicine, milk and nutritious food.

There’s also oh-so-familiar debates about childcare and how much the mother should provide. Rowbotham quotes the Greenwich Village feminist Henrietta Rodman on mothering: “The baby is the great problem of the woman who attempts to carry the responsibilities of wage-earning and citizenship. We must have babies for our own happiness, and we must give them the best of ourselves – not only for their own good, not only for the welfare of society, but for our own self expression … [but] the mother of the past has been so busy with her children that she hasn’t had time to enjoy them…The point is not how long but how intensely a mother does it.”

Housework, then as now, was another cause for fervent debate. It was in 1913 that the American socialist Jospehine Conger-Kaneteko, demanded, as women would again do in the Sixties and Seventies, wages for housework. She insisted that women’s household labour was ensuring their husbands could be efficient employees, and employers should be forced to recognise this. More radically still, in 1920, Crystal Eastman asked: “How can we change the nature of man so that he will honourably share the work and responsibility and thus make the home-making enterprise a song instead of a burden?” Rearing sons to do housework was her answer, Rowbotham reports.

And the problems of clothing were a cause for great debate. Rowbotham quotes Charlotte Perkins Wilman on the distinctive female dress was meant to ensure “we should never forget sex”. But, our author says, women in desexualised clothing were very deliberately trying to colonise new spaces, even in the face of ridicule: “Critics sneared at the plain shirtwaisters and ties worn by Russian-Jewish immigrant working class new women who sat in cafes debating marriage, the family and working conditions. One hostile observer in the 1890s derided the “atmosphere of tea-steam and cigarette smoke’, denouncing the ‘pallid, tired, thin-lipped, flat-chested and angular’ women for whom ‘The time of night means nothing until way into the small hours.’”

It wasn’t only women who were acting bravely and thinking originally. Rowbotham tells the tale of the Comstock laws in America, passed in 1873, which banned the distribution of “obscene” literature through the mail. Among those caught, and jailed, as a result was Moses Harman (father of campaigner Lillian), once for writing about women’s right to resist rape in marriage. He was jailed again for publishing articles by birth control advocate Dora Forster, who argued that the worst kind of prostitution was in conventional marriages, where women were taught to use their bodies for economic and social advantage.

Rowbotham has found some wonderful examples of debates and encounters on issues still being played out today, perhaps more notably on prostitution:

“When the future campaigner against lead contamination, Alive Hamilton, braved a brothel in Toledo to rescue a prostitute, she found, instead of the victim she had expected, ‘a woman of mature years, handsome, dignified, entirely mistress of herself’ in a house that was ‘luxurious but vulgarly ugly’. The meeting was an occasion for mutual incomprehension. The young idealistic reformer heard the calculating voice of a tradeswoman. ‘…I spend my time persuading men to spend money on what they don’t really want.’ For her part the prostitute was appalled by Hamilton’s altruistic settlement life in the Chicago slums: “That is not the sort of thing I could possibly do,” she observed with disgust…. From 1910 the upper-middle-class Bostonian Fanny Quincy Howe regularly corresponded with a Jewish prostitute and morphine addict, Maimie Pinzer, who told Howe she regarded divorce as ‘a lot of follishness and a marriage ceremony the worst lot of cant I ever heard.’”

I’d defy any reader not to learn surprising new things from Dreamers of the New Day: the most prominent snippet for me was the origins of the word “ecology” – it was “oekology” originally, coined by Ellen Swallow Richards, the first female graduate of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, where she was later a lecturer. In her 1882 The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning, she presented housework as a science, and she regarded work in the home as the basis for a much broader responsibility outside it. The world was everyone’s house, she declared, and it required good housekeeping, and that meant a science of the environment, for which she found the word.

All of this original, and often still radical, thinking was done despite its originators living in a world with the most ridiculous (to our eyes) restrictions. Rowbotham explains that women in the 1880s and 1890s were attending in Oxford and Cambridge University Extension lectures, and even being allowed to fully enrol in the newer provincial universities. But at Owens College Manchester, the female students were barred from the library: they had to send their maids to collect books. And the anarchists Rose Witcop and Guy Aldred were charged and convicted with distributing obscene literature for Family Limitation a straight practical text on birth control, with their lawyer explaining that this was probably because a diagram that showed a pessary being placed in a vagina. The obscenity was that the finger might not be the woman’s own, a thought that came as a total surprise to the female publisher.

Dreamers of the New Day could be criticised, perhaps, for not taking us forward, for simply reporting the past, but Rowbotham is, after all, primarily a historian, and this book is wonderfully original and delightful to read – and it recovers for new readers wonderful women of the past who deserve to be remembered. Perhaps your favourite will Mrs Grundy who in Shipley, Yorkshire, fought for women’s access to the Turkish baths at the same price as the men. She’s certainly one of mine.

Written by Ana Lilian Flores, co-publisher of SpanglishBaby, a site for parents raising bilingual and bicultural children and can always be found @laflowers.

I don’t think I’ve ever considered myself a feminist. I’m not a provoker, an activist, nor a social conscious spear-header at large. Not that I’m much for labels, as it is.

I grew up in the midst of El Salvador’s deadly and grueling Civil War in an era when you did not question the status quo. Much less if you belonged to the close-knit social class I was born into. The words ¿por qué? were hardly ever uttered and much less encouraged. Not that I even minded back then. I didn´t know better.

The seed of political activism or of traditional feminist tendencies of any kind were never planted in me. The woman that shaped my life and formed my first tribe were indeed strong and luchadoras, but always within the safe confines of their vast and plentiful homes. They treasured their luxuries, their leisure, their freedom and their image. Life existed within a thin and, oh-so-very-fragile veil that separated them from the imminent and loud reality that surrounded us. The label we could apply here would be more of “femenina” than “feminista.” (Funny tidbit that the popular Top 40 FM radio station I grew up listening to was called “La Femenina.”) Yes, the women I knew were adored because they knew their place. Even my mother.

Divorced in her mid-twenties with two girls to fend for, she never failed to impress by her strength of character when faced with obstacles. I always attribute my independent, go-getter and strong-willed nature to her. Her years as a single mother of two, she worked hard and cunningly to sustain us by the highest standards--the best schools, the best clothes, the best surroundings, the best memberships. Then, she remarried to a man that would be able to take away all that burden from her and allow her to just be a women again--to run the house and the staff that kept it up; to play tennis and socialize; to travel; to care for her girls; to care for her man; and to run a fashion boutique of her own. Life became easy, manageable, fulfilled--or so it seemed behind that self-imposed veil.

As soon as I turned 18 I left the country that had cradled me in a sweet embrace of naiveness. I left behind my mask and started the true work of uncovering my realness. This is when I began to let out the authentic feminist voice in me. The one I didn’t even know I had. The voice of a woman who wants to have the chance to be unrestricted to express her soul. The diva who wants to shine wherever she chooses to. The Goddess who wants to explore her depths, her yearnings, her missteps and own up to them all. The dreamer who wants an equal share of the materialistic male-dominated world, without letting go of her feminine instincts and ethereal desires.

I still don’t consider myself a full blown-out feminist. It’s just a label, and labels are used to judge.

I am, however, a mother that lives with a constant mirror reflection of who I am and what I give. My daughter will always carry a part of her that reflects how I constantly continue to reconcile the feminine little girl in me with the more feminist and non-conformist luchadora that has claimed its place as well. I see in her the potential of full, unrestricted expression that is softly guided by the whispers of her ancestors to a place where its manifestation will belong only to her. That, I hope, is my gift to my daughter.




Summer of Feminista is a project where Latinas are sharing what feminism means to them. Positive. Negative. Academic statements. Personal stories. Learn more or how you can join the Summer of Feminista. This is a project of Viva la Feminista. Link and quote, but do not repost without written permission.

Trigger warning: Most of Eminem’s lyrics should probably come with a trigger warning attached. In this post, I’ll mark all particularly graphic lyrics with a “**” on either end. What happens when hip-hop’s most notorious woman-hater releases a frank and somewhat on point song about domestic violence from the point of view of a perpetrator…and [...]

Whether Oklahoma elects a Republican or Democrat as governor this November, one thing is clear– it will be a woman.

A woman has never before occupied the gubernatorial position in Oklahoma, a gender disparity that exists for 26 other states, as well. And as NPR reports, an all-female face-off for a state’s top elected position has only happened 3 times in United States history (once in Nebraska, and again in Hawaii).

For these two candidates, there are almost more similarities than differences. Both women bring to this race a history of breaking gender barriers in state politics. Mary Fallin, the Republican candidate, was the first woman elected to Congress from Oklahoma since 1921. She is currently Vice Chair of the Congressional Women’s Caucus. Her opponent is Jari Askins, the current Lieutenant Governor of OK. Askins was previously the first female to lead a caucus in Oklahoma’s legislature. Both Fallin and Askins are the first two– and only two– women to have occupied the position of Lieutenant Governor in the state’s history. (Fallin served from 1995–2007).

Both women faced difficult elections to become their party’s nominee. Askins only narrowly eclipsed the NRA-endorsed candidate who was favored to win. In the Republican primary, Fallin faced gendered criticism when her opponent, Randy Brogdon called on her to “stop hiding behind the skirt of Sarah Palin.”

The race should be an interesting one, particularly because it is predicted to be a close one.

As the NYT puts it: In Oklahoma, it’s not the year of the woman. It’s the year of the women.

Soooo I’m a little late to the game this week. But I’m here and very excited to guest-blog for Feministe.

My name is Nona Willis Aronowitz. I just turned 26. I’m the author of Girldrive, a book based on a road trip my friend Emma and I took across the country to find out what young women think about feminism. I just finished up my last day at the Chicago Tribune, but I’ve also blogged and freelanced for places like Feministe, The Nation, Slate, The Frisky, and Firedoglake. I also have a weekly radio show called Feminist Wednesday on Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo. Writing-wise, I have two feminist loves: sex and pop culture. But I get riled up about a variety of political and cultural issues.

I’m white, Jewish, middle class, straightish, and a New Yorker. I was raised atheist and kinda socialist—a baby of two semi-famous red diaper babies. I voted for Obama, in a hopeful moment, and even shed a tear or two in Grant Park. But my heart lies with radicals, and nothing gets me more pissed off than how much our country’s left keeps getting nudged to the center.

In other words, I’m the on-paper definition of a feminist stereotype, at least in the media’s imagination. But my interests lie in flouting these stereotypes, in creating and participating in a more inclusive convo where every type of person—young, historically marginalized, religious and/or conservative—has a say in what feminism should mean and what kind of power it has. Girldrive made me a “feminist populist”; in the moments after talking about gender issues with a 19-year-old bible college student or a Cheyenne-Arikara, Fargo activist, I’d realize how narrow my previous definition had been.* Also, I’d never use the phrase, “S/he’s a feminist but s/he doesn’t know it.” Maybe I’ll expand that more in a different post.

A personal note: y’all are getting me at quite an interesting time. I’m all of a sudden back in New York after a 3-year-long stint in Chicago, without a job or a plan. I’m at a crossroads personally, professionally, feministically—which often makes for some juicy blogging, which in turn works out for you!

Oh, and comment moderation: it’s simple…no personal attacks or derailments. Pretty much everything else is fair game. Thanks to Feministe for having me, and looking forward to the next two weeks!

*Although I don’t think that anyone can be a feminist, just because they decide to call themselves one. The Sarah-Palin-as-a-feminist debate has made that crystal clear.

ain’t i a mama…

you know how alice walker says that feminism is to womanism. like purple is to lavendar. ive always loved that quote. lavendar is my favorite color and one of my favorite scents.

well, last night as i was falling asleep after reading the comment thread of doom, i realized:

feminist is to mama like yellow is to:
waking up with the first rays of light hitting your face as the sun rises over the ocean and you stare into the sun’s reflection in the water and then jump in and swim celebrating this new day.
the colostrum nectar that i breastfed my daughter her first days after birth
the color of my mixed race daughter cheek as she sleep at night
the crushed wildflowers that aza picks in the park and then brings to me saying in her singsong voice: mama i have a present for you!

——-

a list:

people who have asked why i dont identify as a feminist

-random strangers on the internet
-random people who have just met me and like to push buttons

people who have never asked me why i dont identify as a feminist

-zapatista women when we lived in chiapas
-palestinian women when we lived in a small village in the southern west bank mountains
-women community organizers in the east congo
-young black american and african immigrant mothers whose birth assisted in north minneapolis
-the eight month pregnant kenyan-dutch woman who i shared a couple of days in israeli prison with
-my grandmother who grew up in the south, was college educated in the 40s, worked and earned her own money for years as a teacher, didnt have children until she was nearly thirty, was a community organizer, and taught all of her daughters and grand daughters to speak their truth and respect people

most of these women did call me ‘mama’ though. as i called them.

i wrote this last year on the word ‘mama’:

i love the word: mama. when i was doing research in east africa, mama was my name. mama maisha (which means life in swahili). mama works as an honorific there. it replaces ‘miss’ and ‘maam’ and whatever ways of respectfully addressing women. it is not dependent on whether or not the woman has children.

sitting in a room with dozens of community women leaders all of us addressing each other as mama… mama fayida, mama esperanze. as we talked about ways to address the violence in the communities. was powerful.

especially since i had miscarried a couple of months before. i was ‘mama’ before i ever gave birth.

it was also powerful because mama is how the boys back home address me. and once again it acts as an honorific a term of respect and kinship.

and being able to travel half way around the world and still be addressed by the same name that southern boys knocking on my grandmother’s door use…just another way that one can travel so far…rural south carolina to rural east congo…and still find home.

mama. is just such an evocative word. here, in cairo, the equivalent to mommy is umi. and umi is a beautiful word. but even here. everyone knows what ‘mama’ means. ma. ma. ma. there is something primoridial about it. something that speaks to millions of years of walking on this earth. i dont have any scientific data to back up my claims.

——-

bfp recently did one of my favorite posts:

I do not identify as a woman.
Or a feminist.
Or a womanist.

Mami.
Chicana.
Woman of color.

They mean what that mean for me.

and then she dropped one of my favorite comments yesterday:

Fuck feminism, fuck feminists and fuck their obnoxious entitled bullshit attitudes. And fuck all of you who think you did a goddamn thing for my daughter. MOTHERS did that, not you.
Mamis, mommies, mothers, M/others–NOT YOU.

i know that when i have been seen as being helpful to another’s liberation, that is when they start calling me mama.
——

srsly, if the common definition for feminism to be treated equal to a man. im not interested in feminism. that is not the goal of the women with whom ive worked. 1/3 of black men are in the prison industrial system. i am working for a different world for my daughter.

so, why did i agree to blog for feministe?
well, frankly, i have been and continue to be pretty critical of mainstream feminism. mainstream feminism is pretty irrelevant to my work, my family, my life, and to the communities with which i work in solidarity. and ive been critical of feminist media productions, including this blog, feministe. and the role they play in public discourse and understanding of the world that we live in. after a lot of consideration, i figured it was only fair of me to know the media productions better if i am going to critique them well. and considering how critical ive been, the bloggers of feministe still wanted me to guest blog, well, i have a bit of respect for people who engage their critics rather than just attack them.

——

i throw a side eye at folks who call themselves feminists, especially without an adjective in front of the word. and i have made it clear that if i had to be one, (and thank god i dont) i would be a crunk feminist. those girls keep it crunk.
Beat-driven and bass-laden, Crunk music blends Hip Hop culture and Southern Black culture in ways that are sometimes seamless, but more often dissonant. Its location as part of Southern Black culture references the South both as the location that brought many of us together and as the place where many of us still do vibrant and important intellectual and political work. The term “Crunk” was initially coined from a contraction of “crazy” or “chronic” (weed) and “drunk” and was used to describe a state of uber-intoxication, where a person is “crazy drunk,” out of their right mind, and under the influence. But where merely getting crunk signaled that you were out of your mind, a crunk feminist mode of resistance will help you get your mind right, as they say in the South.

and if your brand of feminism does not embrace and push to the forefront the critiques of itself, then i have no interest in your brand or your movement. actually i dont have an interest in brands at all. and if your movement isnt aligned with crunk feminists, and rasta feminists, with the zapatista women’s critique of feminsm, with palestinian women dressed in hijab with a fist in the air, with little girls who walk through war zones to get to school whether on the streets of washington, dc or the streets of goma, drc (democratic republic of congo) then i want nothing to do with your movement. cause those women dont bother to ask me why i am not a feminist. they just call me ‘mama’.

these movements center mamas, overflow with mamas, because mamas have been at the center of every major movement in the world for change. we give birth to and nurture, in various ways, revolutionaries everyday, whether or not that has been acknowledged in the ‘official’ records. being a mama is not a description of one’s biology or genitalia. it does not describe how many children we have nestled in wombs. it is not a description of age or even male/female gender.

it is who we are. it is what we do. it is love by any means necessary.

In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, much is said about his musical genius.  After all he played the lyre so well he eventually brought the devil to his knees.  He was a god walking among mortals. No man was happier when he wed Eurydice.  No man was more heartbroken when she died.  No man worked harder to bring her back to life.  We know that he played so beautifully that Hades changed his mind, said, "Yes, you can have her back again."  And we know that there was one condition:  That Orpheus never look back until they reached earth again. 

We know he looked, we know he lost her.  He was a musician, a lover, a god, a singer. But who was she?  Who was the woman who inspired such passion, such loyalty.  Was she beautiful, was she a seer, a priestess.  What were her gifts?  What is the story of her loss?  When her journey to the underworld begins, what is she thinking?  When Orpheus convinces Hades, is she happy?  Does she in fact even want to return to the land of the living?  Maybe she likes it better in hell.  Maybe its cooler, maybe she can think better.  Maybe her psyche feels more at home in the shadows.

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