#Also re: the patriarchy I have some been having some Thoughts about that lately | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“Daughters’ skirmishes with mothers cut close to the bone, working the borders of identity often blurred by shared location within the home. With their responsibility for the reproduction of domestic roles, mothers lay centrally in the line of command over the lives of their daughters. Of course their authority was shared power—power that originated with wages earned by husbands and fathers.

Traditional patriarchy had been in decline for some time in the late nineteenth century. Without land to disperse, fathers had been losing their authority over their sons’ destinies, and as they moved to cities and took up work outside of the home, fathers were less and less involved in the delegation of work within the home. But in fundamental and important ways, they still ruled.

Those responsible for advising girls on their role in life reminded them of their continuing need to curry favor with fathers —and with reason. The Victorian patriarch could appear unexpectedly, thwarting plans, making pronouncements, breathing moral fire. Yet he was not always successful in these less and less common rulings. When opinion at home had congealed elsewhere—particularly when mothers and daughters agreed—the Victorian patriarch could find his authority hollow. Especially as daughters matured from childhood and found their lives inscribed with the expectations of gender, fathers receded from the line of command, expecting of their daughters, as they did of their wives, not obedience but domestic ministration.

Fathers’ familial responsibility for daughters translated into responsibility for guidance in two particular arenas beyond the walls of the home. Men were responsible for supervising their daughters’ academic education and for assisting them in their studies in religion. This responsibility is well communicated in the kinds of gifts bestowed by fathers on daughters on birthdays—prayer books, writing books, pens, dictionaries, atlases, library subscriptions. Fathers’ responsibilities for higher duties were reflected in their stern communications with daughters at midcentury. Agnes Lee received letters re- inforcing the importance of studies from her father, Robert E. Lee, in the 1850s when she was away at a female seminary.

He took issue with a bit of exuberant homesickness: ‘‘I must take you to task for some expressions in your letter. You say, ‘our only thought, our only talk, is entirely about our going home.’ How can you reconcile that with the object of your sojourn at Staunton! Unless your thoughts are sometimes devoted to your studies, I do not see the use of your being there.’’ It was often fathers to whom daughters recited lessons, and whose words of commendation were particularly meaningful. Fathers’ responsibilities for their daughters’ educations represented a vestigial authority for a family’s competency in the world—and continued when responsibility for other aspects of daughters’ lives had receded.

The same was true, though to a lesser degree, for fathers’ responsibilities for daughters’ souls. Kathryn Kish Sklar has written powerfully about the intertwining strands of patriarchy and evangelical culture which bedeviled Catharine Beecher’s quest for a conversion experience early in the nineteenth century. As mothers took up their newly won roles as moral exemplars, they supplemented but did not replace fathers as the guardians of familial faith. Robert E. Lee encouraged his daughter’s relationship with God as well as her studies, and his daughter wrote back a shy profession of faith, offered to her father as to one to whom it was owed: ‘‘I have something to tell you which I know will make you very happy. It is, I believe both of your daughters are Christians. I am sure Annie is, and O Papa I am resolved to doubt no longer that there has been a great and blessed change wrought in my wicked heart.’’

Though absent from the day-to-day dealings of the household, fathers’ interest in the state of their offsprings’ souls extended to the their moral training as well. Margaret Tileston’s diary, which included financial accounts, also included a moral accounting with her father. ‘‘I told Papa of a lie I told him about a week ago, last Tuesday or Wednesday.’’ It was in such a grave consciousness of his paternal responsibility for the character of his daughter that Albert Browne wrote a long letter to his daughter Nellie as she was preparing to leave school, ending with the admonishment that ‘‘a true christian woman, should make it a religious duty, to blend gentleness and dignity, as to win love, and command respect.’’ Albert Browne had no doubt of his authority over his daughters’ transition to womanhood, just as over other family matters.

…The conservative Ladies’ Home Journal in 1895 attempted to re- affirm masculine authority in what must be seen as a reactionary challenge to feminized domesticity. In reasserting ‘‘The Father’s Domestic Headship,’’ the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, D.D., acknowledged a ‘‘great deal of domestic reciprocity’’ but pronounced that ‘‘the husband and father is the point of final determination.’’ He sought an analogy for the moral authority of hus- band and wife in anatomy: ‘‘The bone and sinew of character will probably be a quotation from the father, and the delicate tissue with which it is over- laid will as likely be a bequest from the mother.’’ This late-century contrast between the strong force of paternal dictum with the more diffuse ‘‘tissue’’ of the maternal presence acknowledged a long-standing reality—that absent fathers would need to make their authority felt concisely in worded dictates, rather than through the steady example of a more present maternity.

By 1895, however, when Parkhurst was writing, he was in many ways too late. His assertion of masculine hegemony in the household was regressive— and claimed an authority for fathers in their daughters’ lives that they could not count on. Those girls in the postwar years most likely to reveal their dependency on paternal dictates—for instance, the reformer Jane Addams growing up in the late 1860s and Mary Thomas away at school in Georgia in the 1870s—used their fathers as live models of correct conduct with good reason, for both their mothers were dead. If daughters empowered by the increasing moral authority of their mothers were beginning to feel free to challenge paternal prerogative, fathers themselves showed, over the nineteenth century, a diminishing sense of identification with their daughters.

Fathers like Robert E. Lee and Albert Browne took seriously their paternal responsibility for providing guidance to their maturing daughters, but that guidance often required setting a new form of reference—the inscribing of gender on girls defined previously by their status as children. Albert Browne’s advice to Nellie intended to prepare her for that new station. He reminded her that leaving school would require that she end her time as a ‘‘mere’’ schoolgirl to take her part ‘‘in the drama of life’’ as ‘‘a true woman.’’

Doing so would mean surrendering part of her genetic inheritance, and becoming only part of who she had been. For Browne admonished his daughter to emulate her mother’s qualities of ‘‘mildness and amenity, love and kindness,’’ so ‘‘as to temper and subdue any unruly and unamiable tendencies which may have come to you from your Father.’’ This gendered lesson, of course, was a distancing one which signaled the attenuation of a relationship as well as a stage of life.

Girls who had been accorded the freedom of childhood by fond fathers found this withdrawal of paternal identification to be painful. Writing in the late century, Mary Virginia Terhune recounted such a moment: ‘‘I have now before me the picture of myself at ten years of age, looking up from the back of my pony into my father’s face, as in the course of the morning ride we daily enjoyed together.’’

They had been conversing about politics, and the child had offered an apt analysis. ‘‘My comments called up a smile and a sigh. ‘‘ ‘Ah, my daughter! If you had been born a boy you would be invaluable to me!’’’ Terhune recalled the sense of destiny. ‘‘I hung my head, mute and crushed by a calamity past human remedy or prevention. There is a pain at my heart in the telling that renews the real grief of the moment.’’

Terhune had been taking advantage of a latitude granted to Victorian children of both sexes; she observed that some of ‘‘the finest women, physically and mentally,’’ were ‘‘famous romps in their youth.’’ Such girls, she noted, ‘‘during the tomboy stage lamented secretly or loudly that they were not their own brothers; regrets which were heartily seconded by much-enduring mothers and disappointed fathers.’’

Literary historians have observed that the 1860s saw the emergence of a new literary type—tomboys—who, as Barbara Sicherman has observed, were ‘‘not only tolerated but even admired—up to a point, the point at which they were expected to become women.’’ The extension of the rights to romp and play to girls confirmed their identity as children, a state that often ended surprisingly and arbitrarily, with fathers’ rejections.

Terhune’s memory of paternal humiliation recalls from earlier in the century young Elizabeth Cady [Stanton]’s realization that she could not remain the confidante and paternal protégé she had been as a child. In her perhaps mythic retelling of the tale, that youthful epiphany produced a sense of injury and injustice which would help to fuel the woman’s rights movement itself. Both Stanton and Terhune gained their sense of betrayal from the contrast between their spirited childhoods and their sense of gendered destiny descending to restrict them in their teens.

Mary Virginia Terhune concluded with an admonition to fathers which gave them responsibility for this curtailment of aspiration in the world: ‘‘Your girl wants to help her father and to be of use in the world. Make her feel that a woman’s life is worth living, and that she has begun it. Do not brand her from the cradle, ‘Exempt from field duty on account of physical disability.’’’ For both Stanton and Terhune, it was a shock to discover that life ‘‘as a romp,’’ ‘‘as a half-boy,’’ in fact as a Victorian child, was only temporary, conditional. Their fathers, who often had invited their daughters along in their common round, withdrew that invitation as they approached maturity.

By later in the century, urban fathers were often absent from the beginning of their daughters’ lives, working in shops and offices away from home. When Louisa May Alcott commented on this new order, as she did most pointedly in An Old-Fashioned Girl, she depicted the father of her modern family as absent, ‘‘a busy man, so intent on getting rich that he had no time to enjoy what he already possessed.’’ In a later passage, he ‘‘had been so busy getting rich, that he had not found time to teach his children to love him,’’ neglecting both sons and daughters. His son he ordered ‘‘about as if he was a born rebel,’’ and was always ‘‘lecturing him.’’ His daughters, however, he let ‘‘do just as they liked.’’

By today’s accounting, the Victorian father was notable for the extent to which he assumed and discharged a role as paterfamilias. However, that brief moment (if there ever was one) when fathers presided supremely over a small, nurturant family was in decline as soon as it was constituted. The movement of men’s labor outside of the home also removed them from their role as the preeminent guide and adjudicator of their daughters’ conduct. As women challenged men’s domestic authority, so did men increasingly abdicate, letting go of prerogatives they were not in place to oversee.

Girls remained dependent on fathers, however, a condition that their increasing participation in the labor force would diminish but never erase. Conservative advice givers made it their business to remind girls of this status. Multiple authors in the Ladies’ Home Journal, starting with the Journal ’s editor, Edward Bok, urged on girls their responsibilities to practice as apprentice wives in their ministrations to their fathers. ‘‘Helping her father to remember his daily engagements, seeing that his accounts are properly balanced, following his personal matters—all these things enter into the life of a girl when she becomes a wife,’’ Bok wrote.

A girl should not imagine ‘‘that her father represented a money-making machine, bound to take care of her and give her a good time,’’ the Journal ’s columnist Rush Ashmore added. It was the daughter who owed her father a good time. She should remember that it is ‘‘her honor to be his daughter’’ and greet him with a smile. ‘‘He who is out in the busy world earning the bread and butter doesn’t want to be met with complaints and cross looks; he wants to be greeted with a kiss, to be entertained by the mind which he has really formed by earning the money to pay the teachers to broaden and round it, and to be able to look at the bright, cheery girl, neat in her dress, sweet in her manner and ever ready to make merry those who are sad.’’

Increasingly teenage daughters’ approaches to fathers, like those of their mothers, focused on the interaction of two separate worlds. Advisers’ exhortations that daughters should be affectionate and ‘‘pet’’ their fathers rather than ‘‘obey’’ them suggested the ways in which the family had become an arena of intimate exchange rather than hierarchical responsibility. Increasingly fathers did not induct their growing daughters into adulthood but instead looked to their daughters to offer them an escape from that world.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Houses, Families, Rooms of One’s Own.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#history #gender #american #victorian #jane h. hunter #how young ladies became girls

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chayanne-z · 4 years ago

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I know it’s wrong, but it’s so hard to stop it alone (I can reach out to someone not like me)

Quirks are a mysterious phenomenon. Sure you could study quirk genetics as you would with any other science, but do not forget that science is just magic that can be explained. Unfortunately for everyone living with quirks, there can be unforeseen consequences. Have you ever thought (and I mean really thought) about how the quirk gene affects the DNA, about how the body compensates for these supernatural abilities? One girl, Momo Yaoyorozu , thinks about this every day. Sure there are quirks that are not compatible with the person's body, such as Yuga Aoyama or Izuku Midoriya, but that is not Momo's problem. No, her problem is that her quirk is too compatible with her body And that is something that is constantly plaguing her mind.

momojiro, as well as Midoriya and Yaoyorozu friendship

read on AO3

Chapter 1:

Mirror mirror on the wall

Tunnel vision on the flaws

In the scale of things it's unimportant

So no talking but it's still an intrusive thought

I'm shivering and shaking, and I tell myself it's fine, but

You can't fool your body, you can only fool your mind

Quirks are a mysterious phenomenon. Sure you could study quirk genetics as you would with any other science, but do not forget that science is just magic that can be explained. Unfortunately for everyone living with quirks, there can be unforeseen consequences. Have you ever thought (and I mean really thought) about how the quirk gene affects the DNA, about how the body compensates for these supernatural abilities? One girl, Momo Yaoyorozu, thinks about this every day. Sure there are quirks that are not compatible with the person's body, such as Yuga Aoyama or Izuku Midoriya, but that is not Momo's problem. No, her problem is that her quirk is too compatible with her body And that is something that is constantly plaguing her mind.

I can reach out

To someone not like me

If you ask for help it doesn't make you´re weak

Being an underground hero meant that being observant was essential for survival, this was undoubtedly something Aizawa knew. As a UA teacher, he had to use his quirk on his students often, in an attempt to prepare them not to rely on their quirk so much. Every time he used his quirk on a certain student, Momo Yaoyorozo, he could see a brief flash of panic run across her eyes, before she regained her composure. He chalked it up to the fact that since her quirk was extremely strong, she was less confident in her abilities outside of it. He earnestly tried gently encouraging her in his own ¨Aizawa¨ way whenever they practice combat without quirks (the ¨encouragement¨ consisted mostly of telling her that she ¨did ok¨ but that was really the most praise you could get out of him.) Shockingly, despite Aizawa´s best efforts Yaoyorozu still always flinched when she felt her quirk depart from her body. This really made Aizawa sad, try as he might to conceal his feelings, he deeply genuinely cared about his students. He didn't have favorites but if he did, Yaoyorozu would be rightfully it (Shinsou doesn't count since he is his son.) Yaoyorozu by heart was a studious young girl; who had ambition, skills, and never goofed off. So why she was so deeply insecure, Aizawa didn't know.

He thinks he started to piece it together when he overheard ¨The 1A Gurlz¨ (as they have affectionately dubbed themselves) discussing the topic of motherhood after class.

¨I don't know if I'll want children, maybe someday, though it's unlikely, kero¨, Tsuyu said.

¨HELL NO, I don't got time for kids when I'm a hero¨ said Mina.

¨Hell yeah, stick it to the patriarchy!¨ Jiro fist-bumped her pink friend's fist.

¨I kinda agree with Mina, I like the idea of children, but heroes are awfully busy. Plus what if it puts the child at risk since villains would target them¨. Uraraka said.

The rest of the girls nodded understandingly but Hagakure sighed, ¨Still I'd love to be a mother one day¨.

Jiro rolled her eyes, ¨you´re such a romantic, Hagakure, no wonder Ojiro is head-over-heels in love with you¨. She tried to give her invisible friend a playful shove, but missed and had to promptly catch herself. Hagakure´s quirk meant that her skin cells refract the light around her making her invisible. Unfortunately, this did not apply to her blood cells; she was blushing beet red. She stammered a lot until Tsuyu interjected with a question she had.

¨Would a Hagakure-Ojiro child be visible but with an invisible tail?¨

¨Or maybe they would be all invisible except for the tail!”, Ururaka exclaimed

¨so you would just see a floating tail?¨ Mina asked. The girls burst out with laughter (even Yaoyorozu, who throughout the conversation has remained stiff and quiet, started to giggle).

¨What about you Momo? You've been awfully quiet ¨ Uraraka turned to Momo. Now all the attention was on Yaoyorozu, and she did her best not to look visibly distressed.

” You ok ‘Mo?” Jiro quietly asked, always showing concern for her girlfriend.

¨I-I I'm fine! Um, I just...¨, Yaoyorozu stammered, ¨I´d sincerely like to be a mother one day...b-but I'd probably have to adopt since...you know...¨ Jiro and Yaoyorozu both blushed and looked elsewhere, ¨also I worry… about...some unintended ramifications of my DNA if their quirk is...Not...” Yaoyorozu trailed off. The lunch bell rang and “The 1A Gurlz” left, Yaoyorozu stayed behind for a second before taking a deep breath and walking out the door. Aizawa was extremely concerned, to say the least, he made a note to keep an eye on Yaoyorozu to make sure she was safe.

Kyoka Jiro was a very insecure girl, sure at first glance, she seemed confident and stand-offish that was not at all how she felt inside. She cringes at the memory of being sad that m*neta wasn’t harassing her but harassing all the other 1A Gurlz. Internalized misogyny was SO not punk rock. Sure she liked being her authentic self but there were times she wished her authentic self was seen as normal. It took her a long time to accept her feelings for Momo, and even longer to actually ask her out. But- it was ‘Mo; beautiful, smart, badass MOMO! How could she deny or hide her feelings for such a wonderful girl? Gradually with the help of her friends, Kyoka started increasing her confidence. Kyoka recognized that Momo was just as insecure as she was, though she could never understand why. Why would someone as competent, skilled, and amazing as Yaoyorozu Momo not be able to recognize how she lights up everybody’s life? Nevertheless, she recognized that ‘Mo was in pain, and she needed to support her. She just wasn’t sure how. At lunch Momo looked down at her food sadly, she still ate, thank goodness, Kyoka thought. Though Momo was always a stickler for portion control, what she ate, and when. Come to think of it , Kyoka pursed her lips, s he’s always been a little obsessive when it comes to food. Make no mistake Momo was not starving herself. She consistently made sure she had enough to eat- her quirk depended on it after all. Knowing ‘Mo it’s probably a system designed specifically for her quirk -that nerd, Kyoka thought to herself with a smile, still she does put an awful lot of planning into what she eats.

After lunch, the young couple headed toYaoyorozu's dorm to study. Jiro was a bit behind so she was grateful for the extra help. Kyoka sat comfortably on Momo's bed, her head resting peacefully on her lap as they head the hero studies textbook together. It was serene and peaceful. Momo cherished these small and intimate moments with her partner. We´ve been through so much lately... it was nice for the biggest problem to be an upcoming exam, she thought with a smile. T hick thighs save lives, Kyoka thought happily as she absentmindedly patted her GF's thigh. She then felt Momo tense up from underneath her when she did that.

¨...’Mo?¨

¨Hm? Yes?¨

¨What's wrong?¨

¨N-nothing! I'm fine!", Momo looked away and clutched her stomach.

¨Momo...¨ Kyoka rolled over and gently took her girlfriend's graceful hands in her own. ¨you're beautiful you know that right?¨

Momo blushed, ¨as are you, Kyoka¨. Kyoka´s placed her hand on Momo's face and slowly bridged the gap, as they shared a tender kiss.

#my fic #bnha #momojirou #erasermic #dadzawa #angst #quirk study #character study

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coffeeandcalligraphy · 6 years ago

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Dandelion | (the shortest) Short Story Update + publication!

Hey People of Earth!

***UPDATE: I wrote this update wayyyy back in September, and waited to post it in case I went down the publication route. I am so glad to announce that this story has been featured in Germ Magazine (a lit mag super close to my heart)! The link to read it will be at the end of this post!***

Guess who’s back to spill the tea on another writing project (its ya boy).

It’s been a while since I’ve updated you all on a writing project, so I thought it’d be fun to make a come back with an all new piece!

The piece I’ll be discussing in this post is a flash fiction piece I wrote called Dandelion. This story came to fruition because it was my first major writing assignment in my writing class. The guidelines went as follows:

Draft a 300 word story based on a writing prompt in order to better understand showing and telling

Try to Make It Work

The prompt:

A harried waiter or waitress serves a party of six rather unruly diners.

The only thing I was having some reservations about is that this story is supposed to have six characters (seven including the first person narrator) and it’s 300 words long. < the death of me??

I honestly don’t have very much experience in writing short fiction. I’ve written a lil somethin somethin for school, and for contests here and there, but it’s never been very good. I especially have 0% experience in flash fiction. Nonetheless, this seemed like perfect practice.

I dashed out the semblance of a beginning yesterday before I went to work which went:

There’s pizza stuck between his teeth, but he’s seven, so I shouldn’t blame him. His mother’s name is Matilda. She goes in for a handshake when I reach for my notepad, and her palms leave mine smelling of dollar store cucumber melon.

“Would you like a napkin for that, hon?” I mean to ask the boy, but the mother answers a curt, we’re okay, always grab extras at the drive-thru!

like ew no lol

I was literally only on the third sentence when I decided I wasn’t digging the POV. So after getting some advice from @sarahkelsiwrites, I decided to scrap that, and start over today!

OH BOY was that not as easy as I thought!

I’m just sort of disgustingly horrible at writing openings. I have a hard time coming up with ideas and most importantly getting past the first sentence. When the opening is rolling, I’m good to go, but until then, it’s just a gruelling process, ha. I thus, turned to the library, re-borrowed all of my faves (@ the girls @ demi-gods @ history of wolves), and did a two second pass over a few paragraphs from each.

@sarahkelsiwrites had previously given me an idea to make the six unruly guests members of a cult so I had an aha moment, however, I realized this cult angle was not working as I’d intended, and the characters were definitely taking me in a very different direction than I’d planned.

However, I definitely thought playing around with setting could be really cool! I chose 1969 because a lot of very different, but very important things happened in that singular year (which I do mention). I think the late 60s is a super interesting time period and it was super fun to explore in this story particularly.

I thought I’d do a quick tag yourself for you to get to know the characters:

NARRATOR (DAWN):

slightly roasty

is Not Having It but is lowkey too much of a pushover to say anything

silently judging u

THE TWINS

so coordinated ooh

‘want to see my rock collection’

that one weird friend who no one invited to the party

JOHNNY:

the EDGE is so SHARP

#i smoke cuz the aesthetic

patriarchy? fuck itttt

CHERRY:

talk to my lipsmackerssss

can I talk to ur manager

BERNADETTE:

will drag u

insta baddie

UNNAMED PACHINKO BOY:

pAChiNkO

will trade life for pachinko

(i’m johnny but also unnamed pachinko boy is a forever mood?)

Excerpts:

This is the part where I link you to the story! If you want to read this piece, you can check it out HERE. Thanks so much to Germ for featuring me! Hope you enjoy. :)

--Rachel

#writingupdates #writing #writerblr #amwriting #shortstories

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inumerable · 3 years ago

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Susan Stryker has some pretty sick interviews characterizing TERFS as gender nationalists. loved one she did on American Hysteria pod here: Gender Lies and Liberation with Susan Stryker. Re: Michfest, Rich, “womyn’s land” - I do find it a little simplistic to view late 20th century lesbian separatism as not motivated by disrupting and ending patriarchy - I have found it to just not be the same flavor of ideology as a modern TERF at all (something Stryker also sort of discusses in the linked interview as a trans lady historian who has been around a minute.) Many dykes co-created separatist spaces alongside their action and organizing in community and the discourses within them are divided still. Many of these spaces are inherently temporal and reactive to the conditions at the time - including that it was literally illegal to be a Lesbian in places. There also continues to be separatist projects amongst queer people [in the US but probably elsewhere] - they just don’t often fall along the same options for separatist delineation that the old school ones did. Another thought that comes to mind for me is that contemporary progressive/leftist (but still mainstreamed) gender discourse seems to have a stronger connection to queer theory than feminist theory, which in turn rises more strongly from the discipline of literary criticism than from political theory or political action. I think this divide of origin is meaningful in that the gender nationalism (as Stryker puts it) often divides along dissonances that occur between queer theorists and feminist theorists already. In particular around a generalized focus that lit-crit often has around Expression, and that leftist theory has on Oppression. Loved your outlining of folk + folkishness! So meaty and good to think about. Thanks for the thoughtful elaborations.

Weird question of the day: so what is terfs’ actual endgame?

Like I know the middle game is “everyone identifies with their assigned sex and no one modifies their body in ways that alter secondary sex characteristics.” But then what?

They say they’re feminists, so that would imply the actual endgame isn’t just “the destruction of the transcult” but the end of patriarchy.

But how is everyone identifying with their asab and not modifying their body supposed to do that?

It’s very Underpants Gnomes.

Recruit trans people who doubt.

Destroy the transcult!

…..

End patriarchy!

?????

#is this how i tumblr discourse?#its been a long time #queer teary

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armeniaitn · 4 years ago

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Artwork by Julia Couzens, Richard Hoblock, Farzad Kohan on Display at Tufenkian Fine Arts

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/culture/artwork-by-julia-couzens-richard-hoblock-farzad-kohan-on-display-at-tufenkian-fine-arts-73672-18-05-2021/

Artwork by Julia Couzens, Richard Hoblock, Farzad Kohan on Display at Tufenkian Fine Arts

“A New Day” Exhibition at Tufenkian Fine Arts

LOS ANGELES—Tufenkian Fine Arts is honored to present “A New Day,” an exhibition featuring bright uplifting works by Julia Couzens, Richard Hoblock, and Farzad Kohan. The exhibition opening reception will take place on May 15, from 2 to 6 p.m. and will be on view through June 26.

It’s A New Day, with Thanks to Nina Simone BY CAROLE ANN KLONARIDES

Reconsideration, repurposing, recalibration, call it what you like, for artists Julia Couzens, Richard Hoblock, and Farzad Kohan, it is an ongoing process. Layering, marking, moving the paint (the eye never rests), weaving, wrapping, scraping (the hand keeps active), a cyclical loop of rediscovery. An inspiration, perhaps, is to reconstruct a new consciousness from the salvage of our yesterdays. Sometimes the old is reinvented yet the roots remain, and new growth appears, and as cliched as it sounds, a new day begins.

Birds flying high, you know how I feel Sun in the sky, you know how I feel Breeze driftin’ on by, you know how I feel

For Richard Hoblock, it began with writing screenplays commissioned as portraits; each portrait was an imagined cinematic scene, the patron as the protagonist with underpinnings of personal details they provided. As a skilled writer, he could have several subplots at variance with each other all happening at once. After a series of screenplay portraits, he began to make abstract drawings while looking at Baroque paintings, focusing on a gesture or detail. Referring obtusely to the act of writing, his leftover pencil stubs would be ground down using a Cuisinart into a fine carbon powder which was used as a ground and drawn into. When finished, they were photographed using an 8 x 10 camera, a digital file is created, and the original drawing was then destroyed (unintentionally so was the Cuisinart!) Each photographic print was unique as part of his “Baroque Series.” This practice of layering materials and procedures, several times removed from the original, began a cycle of deconstruction and improvement, a reauthoring with each transitional stage. Yet, it was not quite an appropriation as the original source of inspiration is not apparent. It is more a process of cite and re-citing.

Farzad Kohan’s “Blue Blossom,” Mixed media, 60×48

According to the artist, he started painting seriously after seeing the Willem deKooning painting “Excavation” at the Art Institute of Chicago. An obsession with the work inspired many revisits to view it. The painting has an intensive build-up of surface that has been scraped to reveal underlying layers of paint and gesture, hence the title of the work. Starting with a color or off-white ground of paint, Hoblock also would build up layers and then scrape the surface with a palette knife or kitchen utensils, leaving the residue of previous layers along the edges as a visage of the process. Not quite a revival of gestural abstract painting, Hoblock puts it, “I went from concrete as a language to abstract as a gesture.” With such a calligraphic gesture, perhaps a screenplay is hidden within. However, it is up to the viewer to project their own, as his is not revealed with the exception of an occasional hint hidden within the title.

The most recent incarnations are vertically oriented abstract paintings that have dramatic virtuoso paint strokes of discordant colors. These seemingly would not go together but with his deft precision are found to abide on the same canvas. Fleshy pinks, cranberry reds with lipstick orange, and dull browns. Acid Green! White cutout shapes are held in front of the canvas to help the artist’s eye create the blank space needed to find the relationships within and around the gestures and forms—there can be no signature image as there is always contingency in the shifting relationships. The trajectory of this thought process finds a way for intuition to play; the outcome is not set. The work “Champion” was painted listening to the Miles Davis’ recording “Bitches Brew,” which similarly gives dead air and timing to punctuate each note creating a jarring, yet magnificent composition of discordant sounds. Replace sound with color and form and the same can be said about these gnomic paintings–what shouldn’t work comes together in a harmonious celebration of defiance.

Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel It’s a new dawn It’s a new day It’s a new life for me

Farzad Kohan prides himself as a self-taught artist always in-flux. His signature process of building up bits of ripped paper collaged on board or canvas, then distressed by sanding the surface, exposes layers of the passage of time and history of application like the age rings of a fallen tree. Ghostly bits immerge; gestures of automatic drawing, cursive lines of Farsi or Persian, the edges of torn magazine pages come forward and recede, much like distant memories. Having left his family and country of Iran at the age of eighteen, escaping first to Pakistan, then migrating to Sweden and later, settling in California, he weaves all of his past into the layers that make up his paintings and drawings with gradual transformations that sometimes hide the stories or hint at untold truths. As an émigré, a desire to be part of something bigger than himself drew him to art making; his work is imbued with a desired sense of belonging and new beginnings. The use of repellent materials, such as oil and water, perhaps metaphorically reflect the difficulties of assimilation, and his labor intensive procedures, the process of migration.

An art instillation from the “A New Day” exhibition

Inspired by a homeless man who creatively repurposed found objects, Farzad found his own economy of artistic material by using everything in his studio and surroundings. He taught art to children and learned from them, made his own paper, repurposed regional maps, created drawings and then ripped them to shreds along with discarded magazines (most commonly the local Iranian magazine Javanan), and then adhered them with water and glue in layers. For an additional pièce de résistance, in which an occasional fragment of fabric would be woven.

Lately, a series of works has turned more recognizably figurative. In each, he has firmly rooted a blossoming tree in a pot, with branches appearing to reach out of the confines of the perimeter of the rectangle. The arrangement of the carefully orientated strips of paper and the use of color is driven by form and texture. Slowly, he stopped sanding the surface, letting the paper bits layer like the bark of a tree. Underneath is evidence of the artist’s personal history, tangled lines that appear like the roots of many years of drawing automatically from the subconscious. As we walked out of his studio, he pointed to a cypress tree so tall it looked like it touched the sky. “See that, it was here the whole time and I never noticed it until recently.” I immediately thought of Van Gogh’s painting of cypress trees reaching to the sun and moon, with signature swirls and whorls in the heavy impasto. Van Gogh painted many trees, and in retrospect, the trees influenced by Japanese woodcuts are the ones that Farzad’s trees most resemble, with their minimal canopy and heavy outlines, a mastery mix of many historical and cultural influences. Not rooted in the ground but in a vessel, they are ready for transport to a new home.

Dragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, don’t you know? Butterflies all havin’ fun, you know what I mean Sleep in peace when day is done, that’s what I mean And this old world is a new world And a bold world, for me

As she approached the Little Flower Café in Pasadena, Julia Couzens eyed and then scooped up a doggie toggle pull toy left behind, a tight bundle of many colored strings that actually resembled some of her own sculptures. “Oh, this is so perfect for what I am working on!”, she exclaimed to me as she quickly stuffed it into her bag, a catchall for similar urban detritus she finds as she walks about. Her sculptures, which she calls “bundles,” are obsessively wrapped asymmetrical masses of rope, wire, string, yarn, bungee cord, fabric, and plastic, that have a textural physicality that gives the expression “tightly wound” a whole new meaning. Gathering, twisting, weaving, sewing, tying, all make up the form. The resulting structure, in its solidity with an occasional sharp angle, seems architectural, but is actually derived from a long history of drawing from the model or nature. Each sculpture begins like a drawing, starting with a line and continues until the intuited end with an aim to visually and physically build up layer after layer of contained energy. Like the Japanese tsutsumi (“wrapping”), used as protection for precious temple objects, one wonders if something worth protecting is contained within the sculpture’s inner core, but the contents (if there are any) are safely secured and hidden.

In making the bundles, process and materiality is something Couzens privileges over the conceptual. Whether conscious or not, her work counters the historical patriarchy of monumental sculpture. Sculptors Eva Hesse and Jackie Winsor, process and materials artists a generation before, offered a more organic approach in comparison to the minimal and conceptual work of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, whereas Couzens’ work is closer aligned to the work of Michelle Segre and Shinique Smith. Replacing the chisel with a needle, and casting with weaving, each work has a sculptural monumentality that comes out of craft traditions. They are light of weight, and if I were to wax poetic, I could see them strapped on the body as one’s total belongings carried on a nomadic sojourn. The use of color is as a force, one different from contemporary sculpture primarily made of wood, stone, and metal, with a simultaneity of color combinations that express the ineffable.

Given a rotation of 360 degrees, each side of the sculpture provides a new vantage point with a new face. There is no totality or instant read, they operate in the space like alien forms whose origins one can’t quite define and are so self-contained that they seem natural on the floor, hung from the ceiling, or protruding from a wall. It is the bringing together of these repurposed and disparate materials tightly bound in all their brilliant splendor that sends off a charge like a bundle of electrical circuitry ready to combust.

To paraphrase Couzens from a recent online response to our times, “Art’s nature is exploratory, peripheral to linear progress and predetermined order. I think its meaning sprouts from the cracks in life.” A bundle titled, “Sweet,” has a long shoot of bright green yarn that escaped and at its end is hanging a smaller bundle as if to say from the entanglements we make, there is always the possibility of something new thriving from the mess.

It’s a new dawn It’s a new day It’s a new life for me And I’m feeling good

Read original article here.

#Culture

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mullersquad · 4 years ago

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Tainá Müller: A Voice to be Heard

by Tudo | Oct 13rd, 2020 | Interview

Student of Philosophy, the actress believes that without debate there is no democracy

She is one of the eloquent voices of feminism. She is active to talk and reflect on this and other subjects such as: pandemic, philosophy, environment, artificial intelligence, social networks, and of course, on the new Netflix suspense series “Bom Dia, Verônica”, but the adventures of the actress do not end there, with release scheduled for the end of the year, Tainá is writing a book on motherhood. "It's a kind of philosophical chat, a little unpretentious, but with a lot of confessional moments of exchange," she explained.

In this exclusive interview with TUDO magazine, Tainá reveals herself to be a safe and mature woman to make her choices.

PHOTO BY CYNTHIA SALLES - Globo

Revista TUDO: Debuting the series “Good morning, Veronica” on the streaming platform, you play a clerk who decides to investigate a crime. During the creation process, did you ever visit a police station and learn a little about a clerk's routine? How was your laboratory and how long did it take you to prepare for this job?

Tainá Müller: Yes, I did a two-month preparation with Sergio Penna, which included a visit to the homicide police station in Rio. There, I had access to the routine of police officers from many areas, studied cases of femicide to understand the particularities of this crime and followed the work closely of a clerk. All of this was fundamental to Veronica's composition. But other than that I also had an emotional preparation, to dive into the psychology of the character from the script and a body preparation, which involved fights and shooting classes.

RT: As a matter of fact, the series addresses a little explored genre - thriller -, especially on broadcast television, do you believe that the streaming platforms give the opportunity for the actors to work on other, more interesting themes outside the box?

TM: For sure. The Brazilian audiovisual market is changing very fast, following the global trend of globalization of content. With that, it is natural that we have a greater diversity of themes, genres and how good we are having this opportunity here in Brazil. “Good Morning, Veronica” got my attention from the beginning, precisely because it was very different from everything I had ever seen.

RT: In March the whole world was caught off guard by a pandemic causing the population to be quarantined, isolated, and all of us were affected in some way, some more others less, emotionally, financially. How did those days go by for you and your family?

TM: It was full of emotional, ups and downs, on this roller coaster that became 2020. It is a period of fear and uncertainty and I don't think there was a person in the world who was not affected by this impact. And it is not just the pandemic, there is something very strange in the air in politics, in climate change, in our behavior. But honestly, despite feeling it all, I don't feel comfortable complaining about anything right now. I am aware of my privilege and how hard it is being for people in the most vulnerable positions. I am very sad to see all this around me, I try to help as I can and I take it one day at a time.

RT: We saw that you participate in a group that discusses feminism, an important action nowadays, but how do you see the feminist movement 20 years from now, for example? Because although we have achieved a lot, there is still much to do.

TM: About three years ago I started to study feminism more deeply. I owe a lot to teachers Djamila Ribeiro and Márcia Tiburi, who gave weekly classes to this group of mine on the subject, in a very philosophical and academic way. I honestly cannot imagine what the world will be like in twenty years, but in my utopias I create a much more feminine world, in every way. We have been living for centuries in an energetic imbalance between feminine and masculine. The two forces must be in harmony and equality in order to prosper without self-annihilation. Patriarchy has been stifling the feminine of the world for so long that today we need to fight for the most basic rights. I believe that the toxicity that we experienced at that time comes from this virility without measure, which is predatory, without care and without reflection. I hope that men can be free to rediscover their feminine side of protection, nutrition and delicacy with details, with the subtle. And that women rediscover all the creative power that the feminine has, without the fear of violence, oppression and silence. I gradually feel that this movement has already started. Men and women are becoming more aware and the backlash of this is an attempt to hold on to the unstoppable which is the path of evolution.

PHOTO BY CYNTHIA SALLES - Globo

RT: Back to the classroom you chose the philosophy course, and philosophy is the search for knowledge, reflection, questions and wisdom, but in the midst of everything that is happening (deforestation, homophobia, prejudice, intolerance, patriotism, hatred and etc.). Can you see a light at the end of the tunnel for future generations?

TM: I believe that the light at the end of the tunnel will not magically come out, it is the result of building thought, of resuming the ability to imagine. Yes, I think that today's social upheaval is an identity crisis caused by the excess of (dis) information that we receive every day through the screens. Our thinking is influenced by an algorithm that constantly reaffirms our tastes and values, creating thought bubbles with insurmountable walls. At the same time that we are all connected, we are watching the debate dies. And without debate, there is no democracy, you cannot reach a place of common interest. We have a lot to think about, what to invent and what to review in order to get out of this web of immobility that holds us. Perhaps the only thing that unites us, regardless of values and political position, is that we want a different world from the one we have now. We all have the feeling that “something didn't work out” and that we need to fix it. I believe that everyone today with food on the table has the duty to put their head on thinking about a new world, one that accommodates diversity, one that is more free and fair, more egalitarian and, above all, more ecological. How are we going to do it? I have no idea. But if we don't start debating and thinking now, it won't happen in the future. We need to stop falling into the trap of re-discussing ideas from 100 years ago and start looking ahead. We need to bury the 20th century in order to enter the 21st century definitively.

PHOTO BY CYNTHIA SALLES - Globo

RT: You are also scheduled for the original series “Evil Secret”, which is slowly return to filming. How has adaptation been at work in the midst of a pandemic? And taking advantage of the opportunity, how is your character [in the series], personality, behavior?

TM: My character is a criminal lawyer who gets involved with the forensic psychiatrist plays by Sergio Guizé. I can't give spoliers (laughs) but I hope to be able to start filming soon.

RT: Recently, the psychoanalyst Contardo Calligaris said that relations will be cleaner and more truthful among people in the post-pandemic period. What is your perception of the post-pandemic world? Do you already notice the change in the people around you?

TM: I believe that we still cannot measure the impact of all this change in our relationships, but I believe that the imminence of death always brings a lot of learning. At least I am on this path, of continuing to foster relationships of true exchange, of honesty and I have less and less patience for social masks. I hope that this is a trend and that we can increasingly live in authenticity.

RT: Taina, we would like to know a little more about the book you intend to write talking about motherhood. As it is a very specific topic, we would like to understand what the main approach you intend to take, and also how the idea came about? What is the name of the book and if it has a release date? Are you writing alone?

TM: This book emerged from the invitation of Companhia das Letras to write about the topic after a text I published in the newspaper “O Globo”. It is the result of a dialogue with Marcos Piangers about parenting in this changing world, about what it was like for us to be a son and now what it feels like to be a mother of a boy and a father of girls. It is a kind of philosophical, unassuming conversation but with very confessional moments of exchange. We plan to launch by the end of the year. It is late because of the demands of the pandemic, or rather, of our own parenting at that moment without school and without help.

RT: You recommended a documentary: “The Social Dilemma” that talks about artificial intelligence and the algorithm. But I wanted to understand how you do to keep mental health balanced and away from social networks, in a world where posting more and more has become essential in the lives of many people. How do you control these longings that come many times, without us noticing?

TM: I can say that today, despite being aware of the problem, I am totally immersed in it. And I wonder if I will ever have my brain and my time back. We have been captured, our professions and networks depend on it now, our entire generation is in the networks. The “I think, therefore I am”, became “I post, therefore I am”. Who has never experienced the strange sensation of living something very special and feels obliged to “leave” the moment to post, why not register there on the networks it seems that the moment did not even exist? Anyway, I hope that we will wake up and at least fight for the regulation of this trillion-dollar technology industry, so that we are not completely dominated by it. Otherwise, we will see democracy giving complete space to the supremacy of the industry and that is scary. I believe that it is possible to maneuver this transatlantic and change this route, strengthening and reaffirming the control institutions. There is a lot of shade, but there is also a lot of light in the technologies. Today I can attend a class by an indigenous leader directly from a village in Acre, something that would have been impossible years ago. So I root for ethics.

PHOTO BY CYNTHIA SALLES - Globo

RT: You said that when the vaccine comes out, the first thing you will do is take your son to visit the Nova Esperança village of the Yawanawas, it is sad to see everything that is happening with the forests, with the animals and with the indegenous. But do you believe that there will be time for salvation as government officials are not committed to resolving these issues?

TM: There has to be time. But we have to be more active, as civil society, to fight for what is right for us, which is a livable world. And protecting the indigenous is also self-protection, since they are the guardians of the forest that sustains the biochemical balance so that life on Earth is still possible. Not only that, they also have an ancestral knowledge of survival and harmony with the environment that we urgently need to recover. The decolonization of our thinking is fundamental to our own survival. The indigenous people teach us to "think outside the box" and I think that today they produce the most contemporary thinking of all, so whenever I can I hear what they have to say. I realize that they bring a different logic of existence, much more connected to the essence of life much more integrated with everything that exists and with the true “key to happiness” that capitalism wants so much to sell and cannot achieve, bringing only insatiability of desires. I am sad because we are privileged in Brazil for having all this wealth of cultural diversity in the country, which wants and has a lot to teach us, but we do not value it. We still do not see our true gold, which is the power of our original peoples and their way of life. We cannot let capitalism destroy our greatest wealth. We need to act and it is now.

#taina muller #tainamuller #bom dia veronica #bomdiaveronica #revistatudo

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sexypinkon · 7 years ago

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A Perspective on “The Art of Jamaican Sculpture” at National Gallery West

By Veerle Poupeye

Art museums have been under pressure recently. Not a week goes by without some high-profile protest action or controversy and it appears that no major art museum is exempt. This has involved protests against certain exhibitions and against certain artists and artworks, such as the contentions about Chuck Close, after allegations surfaced about a history of sexual harassment of his models, or the protests against a painting in last year’s Whitney Biennial, Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), which depicted the corpse of Emmett Till, a black 14-year old who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, and was deemed exploitative. There have also been contentions about how art museums are governed and funded, such as the recent protest at the Metropolitan Museum led by artist Nan Goldin against the role in the opioid painkiller addiction crisis of the Sackler family, who made their fortune in the pharmaceutical industry and who are major donors to the Met. On a more foundational level, these contentions have pertained to the ideological premises on which art museums operate, particularly their role in perpetuating dominant social, political and cultural interests and the manner in which this is reflected in the canons and narratives that such museums have produced and presented.

This is of course not, as such, new, since the canonical functions of art museums have been regularly questioned since the 1960s (and earlier, if we count in the advent of modernism and movements such as Dadaism). One such example is the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer, who dumped autumn leaves and other debris in the lobby of MoMA in the late 1960s, as a performative intervention that questioned the exclusion of artists like himself from the canons of modernism. Another example is the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of feminist artists that was established in 1985 and that has questioned, through various pointed and witty public interventions, the role of art museums in perpetuating (white) male patriarchy. The frequency and intensity of such controversies has however increased exponentially in recent years, as has the intensity and immediacy of the coverage of such actions in the conventional and social media.

While the increasingly contentious and demanding relationship with stakeholders has made the leadership positions in museums far more demanding than they used to be, the effects on how museums operate have been generally beneficial, as it has forced museums to become more self-reflexive and to re-examine their ideological foundations. This has, to varying degrees, resulted in more thoughtful and innovative approaches to exhibitions and programmes, which interrogate and challenge the very same canons and grand narratives such museums have historically produced and which invite conversation about them, rather than to impose them unilaterally and unquestioningly. The Victoria and Albert in London comes to mind as a museum that has made interesting strides in interrogating its colonial foundations through its recent exhibitions and projects.

For us here in Caribbean, the question arises where this leaves public cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Jamaica, Jamaica’s national art museum. I need to acknowledge at this point that I am the immediate past Executive Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica and have played a key role in its exhibitions and programmes up to three months ago. The debates and new expectations that surround museums elsewhere in the world also apply here, however, and there needs to be frank critical discussion about the current moment in the Caribbean art world, at a time where criticality seems to have all but disappeared in the region. I believe that I have a contribution to make to these conversations and so I am offering my perspective, while acknowledging my potential biases and personal interests, and my readers can decide whether I have risen to the occasion.

The National Gallery of Jamaica has been the fulcrum of the local culture wars since it was established in 1974 and it has always held an ambivalent position with regards to the production and promotion of art-historical canons. On one hand, it has made some interesting, if conflicted and at times controversial counter-canonical moves, such as the validation of aspects of self-taught, popular art under the Intuitive label (which has its own problems, but that is another story) and its more general role of claiming Jamaica’s place vis-à-vis the canons and grand narratives of the metropolitan West. On the other hand, it is Jamaica’s very own canonical institution, which has been centrally preoccupied with articulating a national canon from the mid-1970s, albeit always a heavily contested one, and which until quite recently did not question its canonical role or ideological premises. I am not knocking the National Gallery’s early efforts, as these were necessary in their time, but in the present context, these canons and underlying interests need to be unpacked and critiqued, and this ideally needs to be part of the scholarly and curatorial practice of the organization itself. And this takes me to The Art of Jamaican Sculpture, an exhibition which has been on view at National Gallery West, the Montego Bay branch of the National Gallery of Jamaica, since March 7.

The preceding National Gallery West exhibition—a smaller version of the Spiritual Yards exhibition which had previously been shown at the National Gallery in Kingston—was slated to close on February 25 and I was, of course, interested to see what would come next. The first inkling of what would be the next exhibition was an Instagram story which appeared on the National Gallery’s timeline on February 27, which stated that an exhibition titled The Art of Jamaican Sculpture was coming soon. The post showed a snippet of video footage of sculptures that had clearly just arrived at the gallery for installation and I glimpsed work by Ronald Moody, Christopher Gonzalez, Lawrence Edwards, Osmond Watson, and David Miller Senior. There was also a closure notice on Facebook on that day, which stated that the gallery would be closed until March 6 to facilitate the installation of The Art of Jamaican Sculpture, with a note that further information on this exhibition would be coming soon.

Piqued by the rather ambitious exhibition title, I contacted National Gallery West for more information and was told that the exhibition would have a soft opening on March 7, with a reception at a later date to be announced, but that information on the exhibition itself was forthcoming. On the evening of March 10, three days into the run of the exhibition, an e-flyer which announced that the exhibition reception would be on March 18 was posted to social media, but again without any accompanying information on the exhibition itself. Since I had to be in Montego Bay on March 13 for other reasons, I decided to have a look at the exhibition, which was indeed mounted and open, although there was not as yet any text panel or signage, other than the usual identifying labels besides each work of art. I was again told that the supporting information was forthcoming but that the exhibition was organized around the themes of nationalism, spirituality and abstraction. It is only in late afternoon on March 14, one week after the exhibition had opened to the public, that a press release was finally published and circulated and further queries on March 15 revealed that the curator’s essay was still being written and would be posted to the National Gallery West blog. The essay was eventually posted on the day of the reception, March 18.

I belabour this sequence of events here because it is unusual, to say the least, that a National Gallery of Jamaica exhibition would have been up and running for a week without any published information about it and with the curator’s essay still being written at that time. The standard practice is that there will be press and social media advisories at least a few days before the exhibition opens for viewing and that the public will be given a fair idea of what to expect in the exhibition, in terms of its scope and the artists featured. I do not wish to be too uncharitable about this unusual radio silence, which may well be caused by unavoidable practical challenges, but the delay in publishing this information also suggests that there are other problems with this exhibition.

Let me return to why I was piqued by the exhibition title. For a museum exhibition, a title is a promissory note and a statement of intent, which creates certain expectations in terms of what to expect in the exhibition and also signals how the exhibition is being framed. Titling this exhibition The Art of Jamaican Sculpture may seem innocuous but it implies a lot. It implies a certain position about what is meant with “art” and artistic merit, with “sculpture,” and with “Jamaican art” and “Jamaican sculpture.” Or to put it differently, the title suggests that the National Gallery of Jamaica is in full-throttle canonical mode, at a time when a more self-reflexive and questioning approach is expected. And the title also suggests that the exhibition will sample the full range of sculptural work that has been produced by artists who somehow qualify as “Jamaican” (which is another difficult issue).

Unfortunately, there is no evidence in the exhibition of any such breadth of range or any critical interrogation of its canonical underpinnings. The exhibition consists almost entirely of figurative sculpture—nineteen of the twenty-two sculptures on view are figurative, while three are abstract—and the majority of the sculptures are woodcarvings. One work is a stone carving (an alabaster carving by John “Doc” Williamson) and there are two bronzes, by Edna Manley (the 1982 version of her Negro Aroused, which was in its original, 1935 form a woodcarving) and by Kay Sullivan, as well as a plaster sculpture by Christopher Gonzalez. And only one work steps outside of the conventional formats of pedestal or relief sculpture, namely Laura Facey’s wall- and ground-based installation Goddess of Change (1993) from the National Gallery collection, although even this work involves, as its core element, a figurative woodcarving. Clearly, the operative definition of sculpture in this exhibition is a very narrow one and, on the technical front alone, it should be evident that there is a lot more to sculpture in Jamaica than carving and casting, especially in the contemporary practice, which is virtually absent from this exhibition. From a thematic, iconographic and stylistic point of view, the exhibition is equally conservative and reflects a very narrow, conventional and, frankly, dated conception of what is deemed legitimate as “Jamaican art.” The three themes of “nationalism, spirituality and abstraction” and the inclusion of self-taught, “Intuitive” artists are well within the range of how that has been conventionally conceived.

The point is that The Art of Jamaican Sculpture does not explore “the rich tradition of Jamaican sculpture in the 20th and 21st century,” as the press release claims, but only a specific and narrowly delineated part thereof, and there are only two works that date from the 21st century (Laura Facey’s Radiant Coomb of 2011 and a 2006 abstract by Ted Williams). Even the use of the word “tradition” is worrying in this context, since it suggests that sculpture necessarily belongs in a traditional framework. And it is also worth noting that of the seventeen artists in the exhibition, only three are women, so there appears to have been an unconscious gender bias in the selection process (a masculinist gender bias which was, by the way, also evident in the canonical hierarchies from which the exhibition draws.) And if there is still any doubt that old canons are being re-inscribed, the curator’s essay actually states that the exhibition takes at its point of departure the 1975 Ten Jamaican Sculptors exhibition which was guest-curated for the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery by the soon-to-be National Gallery Director/Curator David Boxer. This 1975 exhibition was in effect a key moment in the development of Jamaica’s art historical canons, particularly with regards to sculpture.

Let me be clear, I have no difficulty per se with any artist or works of art in The Art of Jamaican Sculpture which, other than the artists already mentioned, also features work by Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, Roy Lawrence, David Miller Junior, Fitz Harrack, Winston Patrick, and Namba Roy. Most of the works are well-known and frequently exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica (and a few have even been shown at National Gallery West before). The exhibition includes several personal favourites, such as Alvin Marriott’s Banana Man (1955), Ronald Moody’s Tacet (1938), Lawrence Edward’s Rapture (1992) and Osmond Watson’s Revival Kingdom (1969), all four from the National Gallery’s collection, which is the source of most of the works in the exhibition.

I was also delighted to see the work of two Montego Bay artists, Roy Lawrence and Ted Williams, since these are two artists who had thus far not received a lot of attention or recognition from the National Gallery of Jamaica, although Roy Lawrence was included in the Masculinities exhibition in 2015-16. But canons are not substantially challenged or questioned by simply adding a name or two, no matter how underrated these artists may be, and the work of Lawrence and Williams furthermore fits quite comfortably within the aesthetic, iconographical and technical premises that inform this exhibition. If anything, their inclusion reinforces the uncritical canonical aspirations of the exhibition.

Putting together a collection of strong works of art by artists of obvious merit and presenting it in an aesthetically pleasing manner (an issue to which I will return in a bit) does not necessarily make for a compelling and meaningful exhibition. The public deserves more than that from a museum exhibition and a well-curated exhibition needs to be more than the sum-total of the works of art therein: it needs to present new perspectives on the significance of what is exhibited, and facilitate new dialogues, between the works of art themselves and with its audiences. The Art of Jamaican Sculpture fails to deliver in terms of producing such surplus value. And this takes me back to the National Gallery’s odd, prolonged silence on this exhibition, as this suggests a reluctance or perhaps even an inability to articulate and justify its scope and intentions. This, in turn, may be an implied admission that its premises are indeed problematic and it may well be that the exhibition was titled, selected and mounted before its conceptual underpinnings were fully articulated. And that, of course, would amount to putting the cart before the curatorial horse.

I also need to say something about the exhibition installation. Installing any exhibition that consists purely of sculpture is a technically and conceptually challenging undertaking, especially in the sort of small and open exhibition space as is available at National Gallery West. The installation has its moments: Laura Facey’s Goddess of Change looks stunning in the entrance to the exhibition, and comfortably commands its space while interacting beautifully with the dome above and the other works in its vicinity. There are also some glimmers of the sort of dialogues and juxtapositions that would have added value to this exhibition, for instance between the muscular, assertive black masculinity of Alvin Marriott’s Banana Man and the supplicant, emaciated figure of the Kay Sullivan’s Star Boy (1972), who slyly talk to each other over the sulking, self-absorbed mass of David Miller Junior’s Head (1958). But overall, I found the installation to be rather dull and unimaginative and it was too crowded in most sections, with bulky sculptures competing for space and attention in ways that actually inhibit the hoped-for artistic dialogues. All sculptures positioned against the gallery walls, even though several would have benefited from being seen in the round. I was also puzzled by the cobalt-blue paint on the tops of the sculpture stands, as this does not seem to add anything to the exhibition, other than serving as décor and rather distractingly so.

There is much to be enjoyed in The Art of Jamaican Sculpture but it is an inadequately framed exhibition. Part of its problem is its grandiose but self-defeating title, which may have been decided on too hastily and over-determines the exhibition concept. The selection does not even gesture at the wide range of what could be defined as sculpture that has been produced in Jamaica in the twentieth and twenty-first century. But even with the narrow selection, the exhibition is a missed opportunity: it could have reflected very usefully on those sculptural canons the National Gallery helped to generate in the 1970s and 80s, without appearing to endorse or re-inscribe those uncritically. It could have engaged with the reasons why wood-carving and the stylistic and iconographic conventions that are privileged in the exhibition were given a central position in the Jamaican national canon, and why there appears to be a masculinist bias in that canon. It could also have asked how this sort of art is seen today and why woodcarving and conventional sculpture have, with a few notable exceptions, practically disappeared from the contemporary art practice in Jamaica. Or, along another line of inquiry, the exhibition could have explored how the supremely canonical “fine art” sculptures that were selected for this exhibition relate to the more obviously stereotypical Jamaican, “low-brow” woodcarvings that are produced for and sold in the tourism art market, which is one area where woodcarving continues to thrive (and Montego Bay is, after all, Jamaica’s tourism capital and the Montego Bay Craft Market is just around the corner).

This sort of questioning is unfortunately not evident in the exhibition. My fundamental concern with that is that it appears that the National Gallery of Jamaica is, consciously or unconsciously, engaging in a reactionary re-inscription of its old canons, definitions and curatorial approaches. And I am concerned that this may be part of a broader push-back against the perceived “take-over” by contemporary art and the advent of new curatorial and critical practices, which have deeply challenged the entrenched artistic hierarchies and narratives of the Caribbean in the last two to three decades. Such turf wars are really quite unnecessary, since for the art world to thrive, there needs to be room for artistic, curatorial and critical diversity and openness to change and new ideas. There is ample scope for potentially very productive dialogues between the older approaches and the newer developments.

The Art of Jamaican Sculpture is not the only reason why I have that concern: another is the Kapo Gallery at the National Gallery in Kingston which re-opened in late January 2018. This gallery had been temporarily closed in early 2017, to make room for the (unusually large) Jamaica Biennial 2017and a selection of the Kapo paintings and sculptures that are normally on view in that gallery was, later in 2017, shown at National Gallery West. It would have been one thing to simply reopen the Kapo gallery with some minor updates and changes, which is in essence what was done, but it is quite another to launch this as if it were a major re-installation, as this would have required a more fundamental rethinking of how Kapo’s work is presented and contextualized. Other than some cosmetic changes, there is nothing in that gallery, or in the educational programme that was staged on February 10 to accompany the reopening, that reflects any new scholarship or any new thinking on what Kapo represents today—artistically, culturally and, for that matter, politically—that goes beyond what was already known and established in the early 1980s, when the Kapo Gallery first opened. A revision of this narrative is now well overdue.

The Caribbean, given its historical position in the global dynamics of cultural representation, has a special responsibility to contribute actively to the new self-reflexivity and critical curatorship that is revolutionizing many art museums, globally. Institutions such as the National Gallery of Jamaica also have an obligation to contribute new scholarship and ideas about the art they are mandated to represent and to be on the cutting edge of Caribbean curatorial and art-historical practice, with thoughtful, relevant and innovative exhibitions, research, programmes and publications. The National Gallery cannot afford to rest on its laurels or to be defensive or even ignorant about the nature and implications of the canons and narratives it generated thirty- and forty-odd years ago. The current, hyper-critical cultural environment may be challenging for museums and curators but it presents many exciting new opportunities. The National Gallery’s early curatorial and art-historical labour will always provide a valuable foundation but applying a more self-reflexive, critical curatorial approach to that material is richly rewarding, in terms of the insights this can yield about the art itself, how it functions in Jamaica, how it is understood by various audiences, what this tells us about Jamaican society and culture, and how all of this is changing over time.

While I have also articulated concerns about how this exhibition and the related communications and publications appear to have been handled, I wrote this extended commentary mainly to contribute a much-needed critical perspective on the premises that appear to underpin the exhibition. I hope that this will help to trigger further conversation and reflection about where things are going, or need to be going, in terms of the curatorial and art-historical direction of the National Gallery of Jamaica. And I do hope that there will be educational programming to accompany the exhibition that adds further opportunity for public dialogue. There is no doubt in my mind that the curatorial and education staff of the National Gallery of Jamaica and National Gallery West is more than capable, technically and intellectually, of responding to these challenges.

#Perspectives #Writings of Veerle Poupeye #Jamaican Art #Jamaica Art galleries

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inhibited-irregularity · 4 years ago

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WARNING -Long rant

I remember a couple years ago when I needed to run to the cosmetics store quickly (I think I needed a raisor) when my date was gonna come over. I saw a bunch of guys in the street and felt ugly and unseemly with no makeup on, and just though "woah, men are naturally prettier than women". When I entered the store (that mainly sells makeup and "féminine" products) and saw myself in one of those mirrors, I felt a coldness sliding down my guts - my reflection was disgusting - my face looked wider, my features flat, and my tan was unhealthy, waxy, and every blemish stood out. I felt like I didn't shower or something and thought I shouldn't be out in public like that. When I returned to the apartment and looked in the mirror, I saw my regular reflection, and got angry - makeup stores use unflattering lighting and those mirrors on purpose; they want us to feel ugly and insecure and less than human without their products. I've been passively reading radfem stuff for several years, and begun doing so on purpose recently. I've known for a long time that makeup is harmful and why we use it - and I still have a complicated relationship with it. I will go without it for a while, and then I'll have an event, and I'll enjoy putting it on, creating different looks, and watching my face become more like the ones people find attractive, and even admire my reflection, which never happens without it, and the cycle will repeat. I no longer have panic attacks when I'm not wearing makeup in public, but I do feel unkempt and unattractive - no matter how much I tell myself that it's not my job to look pretty, the underlying itch is still there. Quarantine and obligatory masks helped me ditch makeup for the longest period of time so far, since my face can't take both, and I've noticed that my skin got way better. I've realised that men aren't naturally prettier, they just weren't made to smear chemicals over their faces since they were 13. Makeup apologists will say that you just need to find a good remover, cleanser and moisturiser, but in reality that's just another 50 euros off your bank account and into their pockets. It's so much easier to take care of your skin if you don't hinder it in the first place.

I still get confidence boosts from wearing makeup, and I understand women who'll defend it. I find the process calming and fun as well. But the thing is, you have to acknowledge that it can't be an isolated, individual choice when we see our natural bare faces and not using makeup as an option, not as default. It's fun when you put makeup for a special occasion or a casual hang-out, but does it feel as fun when you get up an hour to 30 minutes earlier to do your routine "everyday" face after barely sleeping?

Anyway, I'm never gonna shame a woman that loves makeup and can't break up the relationship - it's not her fault, and she has the right to do whatever she wants with her body. Maybe it's too late and she can't feel good without it. But at the end of the day, not speaking about this and pretending it's "fun" and "a choice" and not presenting her the option to see the truth makes us complicit with the industry that profits off of our insecurities and oppression, animal lives, and hard labour of women and children whose lives are so horrible that the issues we`re facing are abstract to them, and really are nothing compared to theirs.

I see how it's liberating for some gay men - embracing the "femininity" they were shamed for, and slapping the patriarchy and macho culture in the face by not conforming to gender. But as soon as thay becomes normalised, the beauty industry will chew them up and spit them out as well; it began preying on their insecurities too a long time ago. Also, a side note - not blaming gay men here, but just notice how Liberal society considers male makeup artists stunning, brave and professional, while being indifférent to female makeup artists and enthusiasts or considering them superficial.

Point being - don't feel guilty for enjoying makeup and don't be an asshole about it if you don't, but ask yourself why do you do it, and is it ok if you feel lesser without it, and why is that, and try to cut yourself some slack and gain some freedom. Also, try to set an example if you have a young girl around. Just check out the Desperate housewives episode when Gabby gets angry at her daughter for using her makeup, saying she doesn't need it, but then breaks her heart when she's unable not wear makeup for an event to prove her point. Think about how much more time and energy girls would have if they weren't forced to participate in such a culture. Normalise natural faces being the default, and work on it really becoming a choice.

women exist in this stockholm syndrome relationship with make up where they’ve been conditioned to believe things are just normal facial features on men are unspeakably ugly on women and that this is an ADVANTAGE. women are supposed to believe make up is a good thing because it gives them the opportunity to correct natures’ mistakes but rarely do we seem to ask ourselves what a mistake is on a man’s face.

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yennefers-geralt · 7 years ago

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Do you still of Sansa as a Stark?

I like Sansa in the novels. I strongly dislike that creature on the show that’s being referred to as Sansa Stark.

I’ll give a full explanation on my opinions on the character and standom below the cut, mostly bc this is something I’ve been thinking about lately.

When I first started watching the show, she was one of my first favorites with Dany and Cersei. I liked how different she was from the usual young period drama heroine. She was so much more realistic.

Usually, with period dramas, you have a teenage girl whose basically a modern girl with modern opinions who somehow time traveled a century or three into the past. You know the anachronistic characters I’m referring to. The ones who are shocked to find out that their marriage will be ... wait for it ... arranged. They can’t believe that they, a teenager, won’t have any say in such a huge political decision. It never crossed their minds that this cultural norm would ever apply to them. They usually have several other anachronistic opinions and behaviors as well.

This wasn’t so with Sansa. She seemed like a realistic young girl who was a product of her culture. She had flaws and opinions that modern readers wouldn’t agree with, but that made sense given the type of world she was raised in. When I finally got around to reading the novels after watching S2, I found an even better version of the character. I loved that she enamored with songs and stories and applied the ideals she found in them to her own life. I liked that she had even more views that made sense given her culture and upbringing that readers weren’t meant to agree with but that helped fully make Sansa a beautifully complicated and fully fleshed out character. Even now, when I read this character’s chapters, I really enjoy her and her POV.

The problem I have isn’t with the character of Sansa, it is with the standom.

Back in the day, since I liked Sansa a lot, I followed a lot of Sansa fans and read a lot of Sansa fic. If I could go back in time, I would advise myself not to go near any of those individuals. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have so much disdain for the character that I do.

What I’m about to say isn’t going to apply to all of them, but it does apply to a good number of them. Now, while I enjoyed the complicated and flawed character that George R. R. Martin created, a number of my fellow fans did not. The character they liked had no flaws, only virtues, she had no impact on the plot yet was the most important character in the series, she was the most beautiful, brilliant character to ever exist, and she had never, ever don anything even remotely wrong in her entire life. In short, these stans had taken an exceptionally well-developed character, stripped her of all complexity, and turned her into their own personal self-insert who would rule the world with her non-canonical political savvy and her non-canonial pure heart.

What was worse, was the sexism and vitriol that was flung at any fictional character or, worse, any real person who didn’t treat Sansa with complete deference. This is still true. Anyone who sees a flaw in Sansa is called a Sansa hater and is accused of sexism (which is laughable given the inherent sexism in that standom, but I’ll get to that later). Seriously, just a few days ago, I pointed out that canon doesn’t support the idea that Sansa currently loves Arya. I stand by that. Canon does not support that. If anything, it supports the idea that she does not love her sister, which is fine. Sansa stans interpreted this as: 1. You hate Sansa! 2. You think Sansa’s a bitch! (?) 3. You think Sansa deserved what she got! (????) 4. You’re sexist! (Coming from you guys, that’s compliment ;)).

Now, none of these conclusions that they drew have any connection to what I said or reality all together. But that’s just who they are. If someone doesn’t agree with them, they go bat-shit. And the ones who try to hide their crazy, they let their out and proud friends hurl personal attacks at people. I pointed this out during the last wank and the person backed completely off. She wanted her friend to personally attack me so she could keep her hands clean, but then freaked out when I called her out on supporting someone who attacks others. She thought that as long as she wasn’t the one doing the attacking, then she wouldn’t be implicated. She was wrong. That’s just how they roll, though. Sansa stans completely supported the crazed individual who stalked and harassed several people at once (and who’s probably reading this post right now ;)) because her behavior benefited them while allowing them to keep their hands clean of the worst of the horrific behavior. Quit like Littlefinger, if you think about it.

Now for the sexism. Oh, this standom is sexist as hell. They actively support the patriarchy and patriarchal ideals on what a woman should be. When they use the term “femininity” what they mean is “femininity as defined by men.” They treat this as the only right way to be a woman. If other characters don’t fit the patriarchal ideal, like Septa Mordane, they belittle them as stupid and manly. For some reason, they have also decided that these types of characters are misogynistic and being a fan of those characters will make a real person a misogynist. They completely ignore their own misogyny as well as Sansa’s internalized misogyny and her support of the patriarchy. What makes it even more amusing is that they will complain about sexism in the fandom. They aren’t always wrong about the sexism. But really, they should be cleaning up their own lawn before whining about the dude bros on youtube or making false accusations just because it’s easy to do so.

So, in conclusion, it’s the fandom that made me dislike Sansa because 1. They stripped her of her complexity so that she could be their self-insert, 2. They attack anyone who doesn’t agree with their one-dimensional version of Sansa, 3. Many of them are sexist as all hell.

When I re-read or relisten to the novels, I enjoy her again.

#got wank #asoiaf wank #wank for ts #Anonymous

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rilenerocks · 5 years ago

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I have a beloved friend named Julie. I’ve been lucky enough to have kept her in my life for about 50 years. We met in college. We were part of the revolutionary days of the late ‘60’s and early 70’s. We were anti-war, pro-women’s and civil rights and profoundly anti-establishment and anti-patriarchy. Julie was a warrior-poet. Erudite, well-read, sardonic and bitingly funny, she was my kind of person. She had the courage to head a slate of candidates who were running for office as an alternative student government, with Julie as the chair. Everyone won but her. A more moderate male was elected to the spot which should rightfully have been hers. Hard times for women back then, despite some progress. Still hard times. I knew Julie before she married her husband Rich as she knew me before I married Michael. Today that seems almost as if we were friends in prehistoric times.

She was a few years older than me. I can’t find a couple of excellent photos of her from back in those days but I include a few blurry ones. She was very spirited and beautiful, along with all her intellectual firepower. Julie was a “townie,” born in the community where we both attended college. When she got involved with Rich who was a graduate student, she got a job and stayed in town while he was finishing his degree. They had a daughter who is few years older than mine.

When many of our friends made the post-graduation exodus to Chicago, we still had each other and I felt lucky that our two daughters, a few years apart in age, played in the same houses together. Eventually, Rich got a job at a college in Kentucky and they packed up and moved away. We wrote, frequently at first, and then less so. But it didn’t really matter. When we got together, we had one of those easy relationships that picked up where it left off, without any difficult transitions.

Eventually, they moved to Ames, Iowa where they still reside. They came back her to Julie’s hometown for visits. Eventually her dad died which was a big deal because he was a department head at the University. I remember going to the memorial service for him which was crowded and blurry because of all the attendees. But I was there. As years went by, Julie’s mom ultimately needed living assistance and Julie mover her to Ames. Visits home decreased. Still we managed to stay in touch.

About 19 years ago, breast cancer showed up in Julie’s life at a pretty early age. It was one of the particularly nasty types, the Her-2 positive and she was blasted with treatment. She clawed her way through all of that and came out on the other side for which everyone was deeply grateful. But about three years ago, cancer reappeared in her liver, the same breast cancer as the earlier one with a slightly different mutation. How incredible that a cancer can lie dormant for almost seventeen years and then re-emerge in a new place and be so life-threatening. By that time, Michael had succumbed to his cancer and I was a free agent. Cancer can be such an isolating experience, I’d vowed to myself that I would make myself available to loved ones and friends who were going through treatments and hard times.

So I took off for Ames in fall of 2017 to spend some time with my old friends and give support and empathy in their difficult situation. We had a wonderful visit and although we were uncertain about how effective the treatments would be, I hoped that I’d see Julie again. And that’s exactly what happened. She outlived her prognosis and actually did well enough to make a visit back here last year.

Other dear friends from Chicago joined us and we all were thrilled and hopeful that she would be one of those who’d beat the odds. She had such a good time that she talked about the possibility of moving back here and reestablishing a life in the town of her childhood. We continued to communicate and all seemed well. But suddenly things took a dark turn – the liver cancer metastasized and spread to her colon. An exploratory surgery unearthed too many bad spots and the only alternative was a “light” chemo, as if anything that toxic could actually be termed light. Her response was dreadful with her immune system getting hammered and making her vulnerable to virtually any opportunistic germ. Slowly she recovered from that.

During the US Open, she and and Rich and I spoke before my personal favorite, Roger Federer’s match on a Tuesday evening. We were all pretty lighthearted. But the next day, Julie was having dreadful abdominal pain and was hospitalized. After scans and other tests, the doctors concluded that she had an intestinal obstruction which in the case of someone with her disease, was considered a death sentence. On September 7th, Rich sent out a note to family and friends saying that Julie had days to weeks to live and was being transferred to a hospice facility. He told people that if we wanted to plan a goodbye we were welcome to do that and transmitted a message from Julie expressing her gratitude for all the love she’d felt from all of us who’d been part of her life.

I sat stunned in my living room, not knowing what I should do. My knee replacement surgery was dull pretty recent and an hours long car ride with my leg bent seemed like a terrible idea. So I decided to send Rich a note with the request that he read it to Julie who was being treated for pain and being fed through nasogastric tubing. I wrote this on September 7th, the same day I got this dreadful news.

My dearest Julie

I have lain beside you in beds and on couches since we were so very young, when we were vulnerable and pained, and when we were angry and valiant, and so “in your face,” assholes of the world. So I lay beside you now, in some ethereal form which should be wordless in reality, but is not in the case of you and me. I remember.

Hours of talking and sorting and handholding. Speaking of love and sadness and mysteries of this difficult world. Gales of laughter through the worst of times. The gifts of our language which we acquired on the journey of this life ring in my head. Julie the poet. I could listen to you for hours and you listened to me, a master of graffiti, as we found the right word that would resonate for whatever was the urgency of the moment.

I have not left you and you will not leave me. Whatever are the crevices that our bodies hold for those who come along and somehow wriggle into the fabric of our person is the place I am in you and the place you are in me. Even when we are converted to ash or dust, that space for each other was settled long ago. I wish you release from every type of pain. You’ve suffered better life’s challenges because your will came from a place of love. For as long as I am a corporeal being I will lift your banner and try to ease the pain of your dearest family. I treasure what we’ve been able to share in recent years, an affirmation of what is unbreakable and forever. I love you, Julie, for now and always. Thank you for being a gift in my life.

Renee

I thought this would be the last communication between me and my old friend and I was terribly sad. But as days went by, there were changes happening with Julie. She decided she wanted her feeding tube removed as it was interfering with her ability to feel close to people. That happened, and eventually, she progressed from a tiny amount of liquids to more solid food with no significant adverse effects. After days in hospice went by, she was able to have her IV pain meds replaced with other forms of delivery and got strong enough to get around without her walker. By September 23rd, Rich informed us that Julie was going into hospice at home where she could look at her own trees through her windows and have the comforts of her own space as she walks down the narrower road to end of life.

People were invited to visit and on September 26th, I felt good enough to climb in the car for a seven hour drive to see my friend. That was a longer trip than I expected due to construction and traffic and I worried that Julie might be too tired to relate to me. And sure enough, within about 45 minutes of my arrival, her eyes were closing. So I thought I would give her what I could in silence and darkness. I must have a peculiar pheromone, one that my family calls my special sleep “juju” that acts like a sedative on most people. I climbed in Julie’s bed and she put her pillows in my lap, snuggled under a blanket and allowed me to gently massage her until she passed out. And I sat there for about three hours sending my quiet love and empathy to her as she rested.

The next day she felt pretty well and between appointments with hospice people and her daughter coming over, we chatted and talked about everyday life, old memories, death, cancer and everything in between. I slipped out for awhile to have lunch on my own and give Rich and Julie some downtime and quiet space. I also wanted to find some sweets and fruit that the nurses were recommending for extra calories to provide strength. A lovely cafe with a bakery helped me feed myself and bring in treats that I hoped Julie would enjoy. We stayed up later last night, squeezing as much time in as we could get but everyone feared that the full time company could prove too exhausting and that she might totally crash today. But she felt better than she’d anticipated and we talked some more about the big ideas of life with a few light notes tossed in for fun.

But then it was time to leave as I had a long drive ahead of me and Julie had the aspects of hospice that include visits. Time is a valuable commodity. So we had what might have been our final embrace. Julie is fragile but wept with strength while I held on to myself as I learned to do by all the practice I had in grieving Michael during his day by day decline. I have no idea how long Julie will stay alive or if I’ll have the chance to see her again. This time of my life, as is true for all of us who are aging, will be filled with losses. I feel as if chunks of my history are being carved out of the tapestry that winds out behind me. Of course I have the peculiar combined pain and gift of memory which I hope I retain as long as I’m alive. There’s doesn’t seem much point in being around if you know nothing of yourself. But for now, I hope that visiting Julie while she is still cognitive and aware was the gift I intended it to be. It was hard for me. I’m still too close to Michael’s death so I relive that time in moments like this. I’m not sorry I did it though. Love is love and love is pain and pain is love and all is a jumbled mess. At least that’s how I see it.

Julie and Farewells I have a beloved friend named Julie. I’ve been lucky enough to have kept her in my life for about 50 years.

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loneberry · 8 years ago

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Poetry, therefore, is not what we simply recognize as the formal “poem,” but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking.

[Currently re-reading one of my favorite books of all time--Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination--for an essay I am writing on the prison abolitionist imagination. Here is the first chapter.]

“WHEN HISTORY SLEEPS”: A BEGINNING

When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams: on the brow of the sleeping people, the poem is a constellation of blood…. --Octavio Paz, “Toward the Poem”

My mother has a tendency to dream out loud. I think it has something to do with her regular morning meditation. In the quiet darkness of her bedroom her third eye opens onto a new world, a beautiful light-filled place as peaceful as her state of mind. She never had to utter a word to describe her inner peace; like morning sunlight, it radiated out to everyone in her presence. My mother knows this, which is why for the past two decades she has taken the name Ananda (“bliss”). Her other two eyes never let her forget where we lived. The cops, drug dealers, social workers, the rusty tapwater, roaches and rodents, the urine-scented hallways, and the piles of garbage were constant reminders that our world began and ended in a battered Harlem/Washington Heights tenement apartment on 157th and Amsterdam.

Yet she would not allow us to live as victims. Instead, we were a family of caretakers who inherited this earth. We were expected to help any living creature in need, even if that meant giving up our last piece of bread. Strange, needy people always passed through our house, occasionally staying for long stretches of time. (My mom once helped me bring home a New York City pigeon with a broken leg in a failed effort to nurse her back to health!) We were expected to stand apart from the crowd and befriend the misfits, to embrace the kids who stuttered, smelled bad, or had holes in their clothes. My mother taught us that the Marvelous was free—in the patterns of a stray bird feather, in a Hudson River sunset, in the view from our fire escape, in the stories she told us, in the way she sang Gershwin’s “Summertime,” in a curbside rainbow created by the alchemy of motor oil and water from an open hydrant. She simply wanted us to live through our third eyes, to see life as possibility. She wanted us to imagine a world free of patriarchy, a world where gender and sexual relations could be reconstructed. She wanted us to see the poetic and prophetic in the richness of our daily lives. She wanted us to visualize a more expansive, fluid, “cosmos-politan” definition of blackness, to teach us that we are not merely inheritors of a culture but its makers.

So with her eyes wide open my mother dreamed and dreamed some more, describing what life could be for us. She wasn’t talking about a postmortem world, some kind of heaven or afterlife; and she was not speaking of reincarnation (which she believes in, by the way). She dreamed of land, a spacious house, fresh air, organic food, and endless meadows without boundaries, free of evil and violence, free of toxins and environmental hazards, free of poverty, racism, and sexism … just free. She never talked about how we might create such a world, nor had she connected her vision to any political ideology. But she convinced my siblings and me that change is possible and that we didn’t have to be stuck there forever.

The idea that we could possibly go somewhere that exists only in our imaginations—that is, “nowhere”—is the classic definition of utopia. Call me utopian, but I inherited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us. Now that I look back with hindsight, my writing and the kind of politics to which I’ve been drawn have more to do with imagining a different future than being pissed off about the present. Not that I haven’t been angry, frustrated, and critical of the misery created by race, gender, and class oppression—past and present. That goes without saying. My point is that the dream of a new world, my mother’s dream, was the catalyst for my own political engagement. I came to black nationalism filled with idealistic dreams of a communal society free of all oppressions, a world where we owned the land and shared the wealth and white folks were out of sight and out of mind. It was what I imagined precolonial Africa to be. Sure, I was naive, still in my teens, but my imaginary portrait, derived from the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Ture, and others, gave me a sense of hope and possibility of what a postcolonial Africa could look like.

Very quickly, I learned that the old past wasn’t as glorious, peaceful, or communal as I had thought—though I still believe that it was many times better than what we found when we got to the Americas. The stories from the former colonies—whether Mobutu’s Zaire, Amin’s Uganda, or Forbes Burnham’s Guyana—dashed most of my expectations about what it would take to achieve real freedom. In college, like all the other neophyte revolutionaries influenced by events in southern Africa, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Cuba and Grenada, I studied Third World liberation movements and postemancipation societies in the hope of discovering different visions of freedom born out of the circumstances of struggle. I looked in vain for glimmers of a new society, in the “liberated zones” of Portugal’s African colonies during the wars of independence, in Maurice Bishop’s “New Jewel” movement in Grenada, in Guyana’s tragically short-lived nineteenth-century communal villages, in the brief moment when striking workers of Congo-Brazzaville momentarily seized state power and were poised to establish Africa’s first workers’ state. Granted, all these movements crashed against the rocks, wrecked by various internal and external forces, but they left behind at least some kind of vision, however fragmented or incomplete, of what they wanted their world to look like.

Like most of my comrades active in the early days of the Reagan era, I turned to Marxism for the same reasons I looked to the Third World. The misery of the proletariat (lumpen and otherwise) proved less interesting and less urgent than the promise of revolution. I was attracted to “small c” communism because, in theory, it sought to harness technology to solve human needs, give us less work and more leisure, and free us all to create, invent, explore, love, relax, and enjoy life without want of the basic necessities of life. My big sister Makani and I used to preach to others about the end of money; the withering away of poverty, property, and the state; and the destruction of the material basis for racism and patriarchy. I fell in love with the young Marx of The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, the visionary Marx who predicted the abolition of all exploitative institutions. I followed young Marx, via the late English historian Edward P. Thompson, to those romantic renegade socialists like William Morris who wanted to break with all vestiges of capitalist production and rationalization. Morris was less concerned with socialist efficiency than with transforming social relations and constructing new, free, democratic communities built on, as Thompson put it, “the ethic of cooperation, the energies of love.”

There are very few contemporary political spaces where the energies of love and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces. The socialists, utopian and scientific, had little to say about this, so my search for an even more elaborate, complete dream of freedom forced me to take a more imaginative turn. Thanks to many wonderful chance encounters with Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, Ted Joans, Laura Corsiglia, and Jayne Cortez, I discovered surrealism, not so much in the writings and doings of André Breton or Louis Aragon or other leaders of the surrealist movement that emerged in Paris after World War I, but under my nose, so to speak, buried in the rich, black soil of Afrodiasporic culture. In it I found a most miraculous weapon with no birth date, no expiration date, no trademark. I traced the Marvelous from the ancient practices of Maroon societies and shamanism back to the future, to the metropoles of Europe, to the blues people of North America, to the colonized and semicolonized world that produced the likes of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and Wifredo Lam. The surrealists not only taught me that any serious motion toward freedom must begin in the mind, but they have also given us some of the most imaginative, expansive, and playful dreams of a new world I have ever known. Contrary to popular belief, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine but an international revolutionary movement concerned with the emancipation of thought. According to the Chicago Surrealist Group,

Surrealism is the exaltation of freedom, revolt, imagination and love. . . . Its basic aim is to lessen and eventually to completely resolve the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams. By definition subversive, surrealist thought and action are intended not only to discredit and destroy the forces of re- pression, but also to emancipate desire and supply it with new poetic weapons. . . . Beginning with the abolition of imaginative slavery, it advances to the creation of a free society in which everyone will be a poet—a society in which everyone will be able to develop his or her potentialities fully and freely.

Members of the Surrealist Group in Madrid, for example, see their work as an intervention in life rather than literature, a protracted battle against all forms of oppression that aims to replace “suspicion, fear and anger with curiosity, adventure and desire” and “a model space for collective living—a space from which separation and isolation are banished forever.”

The surrealists are talking about total transformation of society, not just granting aggrieved populations greater political and economic power. They are speaking of new social relationships, new ways of living and interacting, new attitudes toward work and leisure and community. In this respect, they share much with radical feminists whose revolutionary vision extended into every aspect of social life. Radical feminists taught us that there is nothing natural or inevitable about gender roles, male dominance, the overrepresentation of men in positions of power, or the tendency of men to use violence as a means to resolve conflict. Radical feminists of color, in particular, reveal how race, gender, and class work in tandem to subordinate most of society while complicating easy notions of universal sisterhood or biological arguments that establish men as the universal enemy. Like all the other movements that caught my attention, radical feminism, as well as the ideas emerging out of the lesbian and gay movements, proved attractive not simply for their critiques of patriarchy but for their freedom dreams. The work of these movements taken as a whole interrogates what is “normal”; shows us how the state and official culture polices our behavior with regard to sexuality, gender roles, and social relationships; and encourages us to construct a politics rooted in desire.

Black intellectuals associated with each of these movements not only imagined a different future, but in many instances their emancipatory vision proved more radical and inclusive than what their compatriots proposed.* Indeed, throughout the book I argue that these renegade black intellectuals/activists/artists challenged and reshaped communism, surrealism, and radical feminism, and in so doing produced brilliant theoretical insights that might have pushed these movements in new directions. In most cases, however, the critical visions of black radicals were held at bay, if not completely marginalized. Of course, there are many people still struggling to realize these dreams—extending, elaborating, and refining their vision as the battle wears on. This book is about those dreams of freedom; it is merely a brief, idiosyncratic outline of a history of black radical imagination in the twentieth century. I don’t pretend to have written anything approaching a movement history or an intellectual history, and I am not interested in explaining why these dreams of revolution have not succeeded (yet!). Rather, I simply want to explore the different ways self-proclaimed renegades imagined life after the revolution and where their ideas came from. Although Freedom Dreams is no memoir, it is a very personal book. It is loosely organized around my own political journey, around the dreams I once shared or still share—from the dreams of an African utopia to the surreal world of our imagination, from the communist and feminist dreams of abolishing all forms of exploitation to the four-hundred-year-old dream of payback for slavery and Jim Crow.

My purpose in writing this book is simply to reopen a very old conversation about what kind of world we want to struggle for. I’m not the only one interested in the work of dreaming—obviously there are many activists and thinkers having this conversation right now, ranging from my sister Makani Themba-Nixon, Cornel West, and Lian and Eric Mann to Cleveland’s Norma Jean Freeman and Don Freeman, Newark’s Amina and Amiri Baraka, and Detroit’s Grace Lee Boggs, to name but a few. For decades, these and other folks have dared to talk openly of revolution and dream of a new society, sometimes creating cultural works that enable communities to envision what’s possible with collective action, personal self-transformation, and will.

I did not write this book for those traditional leftists who have traded in their dreams for orthodoxy and sectarianism. Most of those folks are hopeless, I’m sad to say. And they will be the first to dismiss this book as utopian, idealistic, and romantic. Instead, I wrote it for anyone bold enough still to dream, especially young people who are growing up in what critic Henry Giroux perceptively calls “the culture of cynicism”—young people whose dreams have been utterly coopted by the marketplace. In a world where so many youth believe that “getting paid” and living ostentatiously was the goal of the black freedom movement, there is little space to even discuss building a radical democratic public culture. Too many young people really believe that this is the best we can do. Young faces, however, have been popping up en masse at the antiglobalization demonstrations beginning in Seattle in 1999, and the success of the college antisweatshop campaign No Sweat owes much of its success to a growing number of radicalized students. The Black Radical Congress, launched in 1997, has attracted hundreds of activists under age twenty-five, and so has the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. So there is hope.

The question remains: What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for? These are crucial questions, for one of the basic premises of this book is that the most powerful, visionary dreams of a new society don’t come from little think tanks of smart people or out of the atomized, individualistic world of consumer capitalism where raging against the status quo is simply the hip thing to do. Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge. While this may seem obvious, I am increasingly surrounded by well-meaning students who want to be activists but exhibit anxiety about doing intellectual work. They often differentiate the two, positioning activism and intellectual work as inherently incompatible. They speak of the “real” world as some concrete wilderness overrun with violence and despair, and the university as if it were some sanitized sanctuary distant from actual people’s lives and struggles. At the other extreme, I have had students argue that the problems facing “real people” today can be solved by merely bridging the gap between our superior knowledge and people outside the ivy walls who simply do not have access to that knowledge. Unwitting advocates of a kind of “talented tenth” ideology of racial uplift, their stated goal is to “reach the people” with more “accessible” knowledge, to carry back to the ‘hood the information folks need to liberate themselves. While it is heartening to see young people excited about learning and cognizant of the political implications of knowledge, it worries me when they believe that simply “droppin’ science” on the people will generate new, liberatory social movements.

I am convinced that the opposite is true: Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression. For example, the academic study of race has always been inextricably intertwined with political struggles. Just as imperialism, colonialism, and post-Reconstruction redemption politics created the intellectual ground for Social Darwinism and other manifestations of scientific racism, the struggle against racism generated cultural relativist and social constructionist scholarship on race. The great works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Franz Boas, Oliver Cox, and many others were invariably shaped by social movements as well as social crises such as the proliferation of lynching and the rise of fascism. Similarly, gender analysis was brought to us by the feminist movement, not simply by the individual genius of the Grimke sisters or Anna Julia Cooper, Simone de Beauvoir, or Audre Lorde. Thinking on gender and the possibility of transformation evolved largely in relationship to social struggle.

Progressive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way. It is that imagination, that effort to see the future in the present, that I shall call “poetry” or “poetic knowledge.” I take my lead from Aimé Césaire’s great essay “Poetry and Knowledge,” first published in 1945. Opening with the simple but provocative proposition that “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge,” he then demonstrates why poetry is the only way to achieve the kind of knowledge we need to move beyond the world’s crises. “What presides over the poem,” he writes, “is not the most lucid intelligence, the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole.” This means everything, every history, every future, every dream, every life form from plant to animal, every creative impulse—plumbed from the depths of the unconscious. Poetry, therefore, is not what we simply recognize as the formal “poem,” but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking. Consider Césaire’s third proposition regarding poetic knowledge: “Poetic knowledge is that in which man spatters the object with all of his mobilized riches.”

In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born. Recovering the poetry of social movements, however, particularly the poetry that dreams of a new world, is not such an easy task. For obvious reasons, what we are against tends to take precedence over what we are for, which is always a more complicated and ambiguous matter. It is a testament to the legacies of oppression that opposition is so frequently contained, or that efforts to find “free spaces” for articulating or even realizing our dreams are so rare or marginalized. George Lipsitz helps explain the problem when he writes in Dangerous Crossroads, “The desire to work through existing contradictions rather than stand outside them represents not so much a preference for melioristic reform over revolutionary change, but rather a recognition of the impossibility of standing outside totalitarian systems of domination.” Besides, even if we could gather together our dreams of a new world, how do we figure them out in a culture dominated by the marketplace? How can social movements actually reshape the desires and dreams of the participants?

Another problem, of course, is that such dreaming is often suppressed and policed not only by our enemies but by leaders of social movements themselves. The utopian visions of male nationalists or so-called socialists often depend on the suppression of women, of youth, of gays and lesbians, of people of color. Desire can be crushed by so-called revolutionary ideology. I don’t know how many times self-proclaimed leftists talk of universalizing “working-class culture,” focusing only on what they think is uplifting and politically correct but never paying attention to, say, the ecstatic. I remember attending a conference in Vermont about the future of socialism, where a bunch of us got into a fight with an older generation of white leftists who proposed replacing retrograde “pop” music with the revolutionary “working-class” music of Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie, preelectric Bob Dylan, and songs from the Spanish Civil War. And there I was, comically screaming at the top of my lungs, “No way! After the revolution, we STILL want Bootsy! That’s right, we want Bootsy! We need the funk!”

Sometimes I think the conditions of daily life, of everyday oppressions, of survival, not to mention the temporary pleasures accessible to most of us, render much of our imagination inert. We are constantly putting out fires, responding to emergencies, finding temporary refuge, all of which make it difficult to see anything other than the present. As the great poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, “When the clouds clear / We shall know the colour of the sky.” When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets—no matter the medium—who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling. This is what poet Askia Muhammad Toure meant when, in a 1964 article in Liberator magazine, he called black rhythm-and-blues artists “poet philosophers” and described their music as a “potent weapon in the black freedom struggle.” For Toure, the “movement” was more than sit-ins at lunch counters, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; it was about self-transformation, changing the way we think, live, love, and handle pain. While the music frequently negatively mirrored the larger culture, it nonetheless helped generate community pride, challenged racial self-hatred, and built self-respect. It created a world of pleasure, not just to escape the everyday brutalities of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but to build community, establish fellowship, play and laugh, and plant seeds for a different way of living, a different way of hearing. As Amiri Baraka put it in his famous essay, “The Changing Same,” black music has the potential to usher in a new future based on love: “The change to Love. The freedom to (of) Love.”

Freedom and love may be the most revolutionary ideas available to us, and yet as intellectuals we have failed miserably to grapple with their political and analytical importance. Despite having spent a decade and a half writing about radical social movements, I am only just beginning to see what animated, motivated, and knitted together these gatherings of aggrieved folk. I have come to realize that once we strip radical social movements down to their bare essence and understand the collective desires of people in motion, freedom and love lay at the very heart of the matter. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that freedom and love constitute the foundation for spirituality, another elusive and intangible force with which few scholars of social movements have come to terms. These insights were always there in the movements I’ve studied, but I was unable to see it, acknowledge it, or bring it to the surface. I hope this little book might be a beginning.

#robin kelley #freedom dreams #race #poetry #literature #marxism #theory #black marxism #surrealism #jazz #blues #history #love #revolution #struggle

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whattoputonyourface · 8 years ago

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A Note on Why This Stuff Is Important To Me Even Though I Know It’s Pretty Dumb

I make a lot of self effacing comments when I write here about my wealth of knowledge regarding skincare and beauty, and most of that is sincere. I do feel like it's sort of a frivolous interest or hobby, though no more frivolous than many other interests and hobbies. I think I'm equally if not more knowledgable about a number of more "serious" things, so I'm not too worried about it. I don't think any of the advice I give here is stuff that anyone NEEDS to follow, and in some ways, it's a pretty silly thing to have spent so much money and time on. But it also means a lot to me to express myself in a certain way - for my own reasons, and for societal ones.

I identify as an anticapitalist and a feminist, or at least someone who hopes to act in accordance with those beliefs. Over the years of feminist theory, the thinking on whether caring about how you look, and spending money to make yourself look better, as a woman, is "feminist", or whether it's capitulating to the patriarchy - old fashioned capitalism rebranded as empowerment.

Theoretically I tend to spend more time in the latter camp. I worry a lot about the way feminism has been coopted by capitalist interests - and a lot of the Self-Care-As-Feminism-Industrial-Complex reads that way to me. Something isn't feminist just because it makes me feel good. This becomes especially complicated when I think about a big part of WHY makeup and skincare makes me feel good - it's because I'm treated better when I look nice.

I think policing how women look - which includes condemning them as shallow or unserious for caring about this stuff, for finding it interesting or beautiful or for spending money on it - is regressive, whether it's coming from the left or the right. It's especially regressive to assume from the way a woman looks what her priorities are, even if you object to the amount of "work" she's put into her appearance (too much and too little both seem to piss people off). At best, she's expressing herself, and at worst, she's doing what she needs to to get through the day in a world where her appearance is considered a reflection of her character.

People smarter than me have written better stuff re: Marxist-feminist analyses of beauty and the beauty industry, and re: the labor of self presentation, so I won't spend more time there. I'll just talk about it in terms of how it applies to my life: In many ways I fit into the acceptable parameters of attractiveness dictated to function in society without facing too many obstacles - I'm a cisgender woman, young, white, ablebodied, I have pretty good skin most of the time, I don't have any hugely disproportionate or asymmetrical features, etc. But I AM fat. And there's a certain amount of carelessness people ascribe to your self-presentation when you're fat. In order to be taken seriously, you have to go above and beyond what a thin or average sized woman would do in order to look "polished". What reads as a bold, subversive anti fashion stance on a thin body (messy hair, no makeup, "athleisure" or ripped up clothing, comfortable shoes, body hair) usually reads as slovenly on a fat one. Frankly, I know a lot more about makeup and skincare than a lot of my thinner friends do because I feel like I have to, in order to be taken as seriously as they are. Similarly, it's more important to me to look "put together" than it is for a lot of my thinner friends. I think every woman gets taken more seriously when they make an effort to fit into these Parameters of Acceptable Female Presentation, but the further you deviate from these paramaters naturally, the more important it is to try and fit within them, and the more effort, or appearance of effort, you need to put forth to pass muster. For people who fit into these parameters even less than I do, adopting all the "frivolity" of femininity can literally be an act of survival. Unfortunately, white supremacist patriarchy ascribes meaning to all bodies, and some of us have to do a little more work to be read as even Unremarkably Acceptable. There's also a huge class element here - how the way you look is assumed to telegraph your economic class, both in terms of what you've chosen about your self presentation and what's there naturally, and what that means for your attractiveness, acceptability, and even sexual availability - but if I go into it I'll be writing forever.

I guess long story short, I have genuinely come to enjoy this stuff because I do find it intellectually stimulating and fun - I enjoy learning about the science of skincare, and expressing my creativity (and, yes, my vanity) with makeup. I find the rituals of personal grooming to relieve my chronic anxiety. And some of that mainstream feminist self care rhetoric IS true - it feels good to value yourself. But part of why I like it is absolutely because I live in a society that expects me to look A Certain Way, and I don't feel like the way I look affords me the luxury of rebelling against that as much as I might like to, theoretically speaking.

When I started this blog, a friend of mine asked me if I was going to be giving feminist skincare and makeup advice. I don't remember what I said, but I've thought about it a lot since, and I guess I've come to the conclusion that "feminist skincare and makeup advice" isn't really possible. I don't think we can ever separate ourselves enough from patriarchy to really say whether we're doing this for ourselves or not. But I find it fun enough that I don't mind too much, and of all the ways to be hurt by capitalism and the Patriarchy, there are certainly worse ones than Sephora (of course, the system of labor that produces beauty products is as fraught and unjust as any late capitalist labor system, although probably not moreso than buying anything else). I think everyone has to find their own personal give-and-take w/r/t how they participate and refuse to participate in the systems of oppression that govern our lives. And I think participating in this way makes it easier to resist in other ways, at least for me.

#this doesnt even TOUCH on wanting to be fuckable but that is a whole other can of worms

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djatoon · 4 years ago

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A question of tolerance

Our public figures must rediscover the true spirit of liberty

DOUGLAS MURRAY

It has become fashionable in recent years to talk of the death of liberalism. But as crowds high on the octane of generational self-righteousness rampage through major cities, the evidence mounts. The growing intolerance of freedom of thought, the inability to talk across divides, the way that most of the British establishment, police included, feels the need to pledge fealty to the cause — as though all terrified of ending up on the wrong side — points to a crisis of more than confidence. It is evidence of an underlying morbidity.

Each day the cultural revolution is picking up a pace, with the iconoclasts who attacked the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill looking for new focuses for their rage. The University of Liverpool has announced that its Gladstone halls of residence will be renamed after protestors pointed out that the former prime minister’s father had owned slaves. So there goes the ‘sins of the father’ ethic too. Nervous broadcasters have started removing programmes ahead of any stampede, with the BBC withdrawing Little Britain and HBO taking out Gone with the Wind from their streaming services in case the woke eye of Sauron flashes on them.

What we are seeing is nothing more or less than the death of the liberal ideal.

Of course ‘liberalism’ was always a broadly defined term; a definition made only vaguer by Americans making it synonymous with ‘left-wing’. But in the truest political sense it encapsulates most of the foundations of our political order, including (though not limited to) equality, the rule of law and freedom — including the freedom of speech that allows good ideas to win out. In the past few years, left-wing critics have been keen to identify what they see as the erasure of liberal democracy by popularly elected leaders on the political right. But in our own country, the much more serious assault on political liberalism comes not from the conservative right, but from the radical left.

Over the past couple of weeks, well–meaning people have poured almost a million pounds into the coffers of Black Lives Matter UK in the belief that they are helping a movement that will help black people. In fact they have funded a deeply radical movement. On its own fundraising page, BLM UK describes its aims as: ‘to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures.’ So as well as dismantling a nonexistent menace (‘imperialism’) it intends to bring down the economy and completely alter relations between the sexes (negatively characterised as ‘patriarchy’). This is not liberalism, but far-left radicalism of a kind that has become very familiar of late.

Some people watching events of recent days will have been surprised by how far and fast such sentiments have run. By the sight of a mob in Bristol tearing down a statue and then jumping on it. By a Labour MP saying: ‘I celebrate these acts of resistance. We need a movement that will tear down systemic racism.’ By the ranks of British police who could find no way to respond to this behaviour other than (in a newly invented act of faith) to ‘take the knee’ before it. And then there is the media, which has chosen to provide cover for such violence and purge from their ranks not just people who dissent from it but, in the case of the New York Times a few days ago, anyone who helps publish someone who dissents.

As one of the last liberals left at that newspaper, Bari Weiss, explained it last week, the over-forties in the news business (like so many others) imagined that the people coming up under them shared their liberal worldview. Then they discovered that these young people believed in ‘safetyism’ over liberalism, and ‘the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe’ over ‘what were considered core liberal values, like free speech’. Actually the divide is even bigger than that, and now encompasses nearly everything. Where the liberal mind is inquiring, the woke mind is dogmatic. Where the liberal mind is capable of humility, the woke mind is capable of none. Where the liberal mind is able to forgive, the woke mind believes that to have erred just once is cause enough to be ‘cancelled’. And while the liberal mind inherited the idea of loving your neighbour, the woke mind positively itches to cast the first stone.

Readers of The Spectator have known this was coming. When this magazine first wrote about the Stepford Students, it was asked why we take this so seriously — surely the students would grow up? And they did: but they didn’t change. The virtue–signalling of large corporations — the growing legions of diversity officers and ‘implicit bias training’ — was also written off as the silliness of the corporate world. When we described the mandatory requirement in government to prove a ‘commitment to diversity’ in order to be eligible for any public appointment, it was greeted with the same dismissal. As the American journalist Andrew Sullivan (himself now seemingly muzzled, if not cancelled) put it two years ago: ‘We all live on campus now.’

Step by step, the UK came to have a public and private sector dedicated to the implementation of views which are barely distinguishable from those of the protestors who took to the streets in the past week or two. It’s an ethic which demands that our society play a set of impossible, unwinnable games of identity and ‘privilege’ that not only subvert but end any idea of tolerance.

All of this emanates from those who come out of university educated to loathe our society, believing it to be characterised by the oppression of certain groups by other groups: a shameful history and a shameful present. Today these people head into professions where their language of aggressive superiority (‘Educate yourself’) is used to intimidate their elders, force every-one to agree with their point of view and otherwise make themselves unsackable.

As with all movements that catch, they aren’t on to nothing. Inequalities and inequities do exist, here as in all societies. Reasonable people disagree about how to address this. But the new illiberal radicals do not share that worry. For them, every inequity that exists (financial, familial, social, neurological) is the result of the same thing: discrimination. A thing we must ‘tackle’, ‘eradicate’ and otherwise cleanse from existence. There’s an awful lot of work to do.

Even the woke analysis of history that now sees them scouring the land for more statues to assault is radically different from that of the liberal mind. Liberals understand that people in history acted with the knowledge they had at the time, and that the task of those looking back is to look on it with understanding, not least in the hope of being understood in turn. The woke mind abhors this. It knows that it is right, and that everybody before this year zero was a bigot. After the weekend’s vandalism against London monuments, the capital’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, announced that his ‘Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm’ would sit in judgment on all racist statues in the capital. Within hours, the Museum of London had already brought in the cranes to remove an errant statue on West India Quay.

In such ways has the free exchange of ideas about our past and present been replaced by a series of demands and assertions that demand everyone else’s compliance. ‘Silence is violence’ is one favoured line, meaning that if you do not agree with the radicals, you are perpetrating an act of violence. Naturally this assertion comes from the same people who have spent a lot of time asserting that words (such as ‘mis-gendering’ someone) are violence. While the violence of the past few days is not violence.

It is on the lip of this trap that our representatives and public figures have teetered over the past week or two, unable to work out how they can avoid a step they intuit to be deadly. What they need to do is pause and fundamentally change the terms, basing their appeal not just on reason but on a truly liberal spirit. It should be one which emphasises that the claims being made are unjust. It is unjust to portray the whole of American society, in all of its complexity, as typified by a policeman who is awaiting trial for murder. And it is even more unjust to think that his actions reveal some deep truth about the British police, or the British state, let alone everybody who is white. Equally, it is not just unjust but vindictive to pretend that any contradiction of your world view is merely a display of ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ or ‘white tears’.

Unwittingly or otherwise, those who use these terms subvert one of the last great additions to liberal thought: that aspiration expressed by Dr Martin Luther King half a century ago. For when Dr King talked about the need to judge a person by the content of their character and not by the colour of their skin, he gave us something that was not just a great moral insight but — in an increasingly diverse society — the only solution. A year before his death, Dr King gave a speech titled ‘Where do we go from here?’ in which he said: ‘Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!”, when nobody will shout, “Black Power!”, but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.’

The people who have come after Dr King have spent years busily inverting that dream. In the name of black agency they try to deny white people agency. In the name of assailing white supremacy they end up by asserting black supremacy. And in order to make up for the sufferings of people who are no longer alive they demand vast wealth transfers today based on racial grouping. It is hard to imagine a more divisive programme, all carried out in the name of anti–racism. What they are actually doing is busily re-racialising our societies. Which is how you come to the situation where a cabinet minister is quizzed on Sky News about the precise ethno-racial composition of the British cabinet and certain ‘anti-racists’ can be found on social media noting with disapproval the number of people of Asian descent in the cabinet.

Any movement that says ‘Things are so bad that this whole thing needs to be pulled down’ should be encouraged to realise, before they have to experience it, the cost of what they are abandoning. And to remember the central truth about how much easier it is to pull down than it is to build. They must be responded to by people of every skin colour and background with a polite but firm ‘No’. Not just because the things that they are attempting to pull down include the only things that are capable of holding us all up. But because if everything that got us here was so bad, then what we are living in wouldn’t be so unusually good.

spectator.co.uk/podcast - Douglas Murray and Kate Andrews on the future of liberalism.

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fuckyeahslightlyamusing-blog · 6 years ago

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Authors shared a lot of book recommendations with us in 2018-so add these to your reading list

As HelloGiggles' Contributing Books Editor, one of the many joys of my job is interviewing authors. They're incredibly giving of their time and always share sharp, thoughtful perspectives about how their stories fit into the bigger picture, whether it's working in President Obama's White House or navigating a post-#MeToo world.

Earlier this year, I asked authors to share the book that changed their life, and their responses were incredibly moving. Since then, when time permits, I began ending our chats with the same question: What's your favorite book that you've read lately?

The key word in that question is “lately.” It's extremely difficult for some people to choose one ultimate favorite book of all time, especially when they're put on the spot. But everybody has a book (or two, or three) that they can't get off their mind right now. And, just as I suspected, those are the books authors loved talking about. Most of them had a difficult time choosing just one, which I relate to on a spiritual level.

If you're looking for a new read, pick up one of these author-approved books:

Jessica Knoll, author of The Favorite Sister

Recommendation: I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

Harper

available at Amazon | $18.21

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“Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark. I just loved that. It was the first time in a while that I had read something about a horrific crime, but there was still so much compassion in how she wrote. I found that to be such a refreshing combination. It really made me think, as a writer, about the kind of writer that I want to be. I love books that simultaneously entertain me and inspire me to be better.”

Ellie Kemper, author of My Squirrel Days

Recommendations: You Think It, I'll Say It: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld; Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Random House

available at Amazon | $15.35

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“A collection of stories by Curtis Sittenfeld, You Think It, I'll Say It. She's crazy. The book is so good. I love everything by her. I went back and read Prep recently, and she's an incredible writer. Her characters are so…I don't know how to describe them other than alive. They're just people I know, and I'm sure you know. That's probably my favorite book that I've read lately.”

Knopf

available at Amazon | $10.20

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“I'm also just going to throw out, a few weeks ago, it's a very sad, tough read, but I reread Blue Nights by Joan Didion. That's a hard one, right? That's a hard one.”

Eva Chen, author of Juno Valentine and the Magical Shoes

Recommendation: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Del Rey

available at Amazon | $18.78

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“Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. It's a re-telling of the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, and it's really good. Any time something's a re-telling, I'm here for it. It's really, really good, and it's really well-written. She created nice complex characters. There's a Hunger Games-esque quality to the writing. It feels austere, almost. It has that tone of writing that's sparse and raw. Support women authors!”

Dessa, author of My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love

Recommendations: Gulp by Mary Roach; Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter; Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

W. W. Norton & Company

available at Amazon | $3.98

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“Gulp by Mary Roach.”

Graywolf Press

available at Amazon | $10.91

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“I'm still sort of deciding what my final review of it is, but I really liked reading the short novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, because it's such a different way of using language than I know how to use language, and it made me want to figure out how to work in that lane a little bit.”

Ecco / Harper Perennial

available at Amazon | $10.39

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“Oh, and one more: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. Aw, man.”

Erin Gibson, author of Feminasty: The Complicated Woman's Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death

Recommendations: America's Women by Gail Collins; everything by Roxane Gay; Eleanor Roosevelt: In Her Words edited by Nancy Woloch; Backlash by Susan Faludi; White Trash by Nancy Isenberg; Brazen by Pénélope Bagieu; Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro; The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood; everything by Samantha Irby; The Spy Who Loved by Clare Mulley

William Morrow Paperbacks

available at Amazon | $15.99

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“I love Gail Collins. She's a New York Times journalist. She wrote a book called America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. It's the feminist history book you never had. It's a book you cannot put down. It's so jam packed with information, and you just can't believe you don't know this stuff. She has a whole thing about how pioneer women basically built San Francisco. Because when the gold rush happened, there was no one to cook for the men. So women would come out, set up shop, and make tons of money. They were business owners and had autonomy and control of their finances for the first time. Stuff like that. I mean, Bear Grylls would look like Tom Brokaw compared to these pioneer women. That's not even a good analogy. But these women would like, crawl up mountains while giving birth. Their skirts would catch on fire all the time. The shit that they went through was insane. So you're reading this, and [Collins is] just giving you all of it. It's the most fascinating book I've ever read.”

HarperCollins

available at Amazon | $12.73

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“Of course, all of Roxane Gay's books. She's necessary reading.”

Black Dog & Leventhal

available at Amazon | $13.59

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“I just read In Her Words, the Eleanor Roosevelt book. That was uplifting, and also so sad to see this woman with this knowledge and access to power whom, if she had been given the chance…god, the things she could have done.”

Broadway Books

available at Amazon | $13.68

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“You should read Susan Faludi's Backlash. That's super necessary feminist reading.”

Viking

available at Amazon | $11.35

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“I also like this book called White Trash. It's about America's history of poverty and how it explains a lot of what's happening today. But because it's written by a woman - it's written by Nancy Isenberg - it has a feminist slant to it. It's fantastic.”

First Second

available at Amazon | $12.23

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“Oh, and Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu. It's a graphic novel of incredible women. It's gorgeous and informative and great. And it's a great book for a teen, or an adult who likes graphic novels like me.”

Image Comics

available at Amazon | $9.99

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“Also Bitch Planet. It's a graphic novel that's The Handmaid's Tale of space. That's great.”

Anchor

available at Amazon | $12.48

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“And of course, The Handmaid's Tale. Read Margaret Atwood. And not just The Handmaid's Tale. She's written tons of other books that are thematically similar and just as depressing.”

Vintage

available at Amazon | $10.84

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“Also, Samantha Irby. Her books…I don't know what to say about her books. I have a really loud laugh, and when something tickles me and gets me really hard, I laugh really loudly. And I do it like, every other page with her.”

St. Martin's Press

available at Amazon | $17.24

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“Can I tell you one more book? It's called The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville. She was Britain's first special agent in World War II. And because they couldn't acknowledge that she was a special agent, they couldn't rescue her. The shit that you learn about female spies during World War II is insane. And that's another thing. Women participated in war, and their stories are absolutely eradicated. There are very few books about how women participated in so many ways.”

Maggy van Eijk, author of How Not to Fall Apart: Lessons Learned on the Road from Self-Harm to Self-Care

Recommendation: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Harper Perennial

available at Amazon | $15.29

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“I did finally get around to reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and I'm so glad I did. It's so beautiful and, whilst so far off from my own world, there were passages that made me gasp in terms of how real they felt to me-the feeling of dissociation, love, passion, and jealousy. Would 100% recommend.”

Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature

Recommendations: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh; The Group by Mary McCarthy; The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley

Penguin Press

available at Amazon | $17.68

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“I just read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. I loved it so much.”

Mariner Books

available at Amazon | $14.48

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“I also just read Mary McCarthy's The Group, which I think is massively underrated.”

MCD

available at Amazon | $18.36

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“And Maria Dahvana Headley's The Mere Wife, which is a modern feminist retelling of Beowulf. It's just so beautifully written.”

Keiko Agena, author of No Mistakes: A Perfect Workbook for Imperfect Artists

Recommendation: The Little Book of Life Hacks by Yumi Sakugawa

St. Martin's Griffin

available at Amazon | $13.59

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“Yumi Sakugawa came out with a book called The Little Book of Life Hacks, and it's just so adorable. She's such a gem. That kind of artwork and that kind of lightness and that kind of spiritually is helpful, especially during stressful times.”

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