#feminist since 1967

[itsawritblr]

Me after watching the "Barbie" movie only because I wanted to see why so many people say it's "feminist."

[forgthetheaterkid]

Hi I was wondering if you could suggest me some musicals

I have watched

heathers

Hamilton

Am currently watching newsies

listened to dear Evan hansen and the lightning theif and six and beetlejuice

*gasp* You’re asking me about my theories? I’VE WAITED YEARS FOR SOMEONE TO ASK ME ABOUT MY THEORIES!!! (She-ra reference)

But yes I’d love too! Here’s a list! (Warning: you can tell how much I enjoy Greek mythology)

Hadestown

Follows the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice and Hades & Persephone

Jazz, Blues and folk type music

My all time favorite ❤️ (it’s honestly such a good show)

Epic the musical

An adaption of Homer’s Odyssey

It incorporates anime and video games elements

Its currently being released in “sagas” and 7 out of 9 are out now!

Honestly If you want more information about it, send me more asks! I’d be happy to talk about it more

Legally Blonde

A movie to musical adaptation DONE RIGHT

Suchhh a feel good show

Follows Elle Woods, a presumably “dumb” blonde who goes to Harvard to get her boyfriend back

Feminist

Again such a banger musical

The Outsiders

Based on the book of the same name

A brand new musical that won Best Musical this year!

Follows Ponyboy in Tulsa 1967

WILL make you cry

It brings so many emotions and the cast is FANTASTIC

If you have more questions I HIGHLY recommend you talk to my bestest moot @sondheim-girly since The Outsiders is their jam

Be More Chill

Follow Jeremy, a Highschool loser, as he finds a pill called a SQUIP which makes him cool

Has one of my favorite songs of all time Micheal In the Bathroom

This musical isn’t my favorite favorite but based on what you’ve listened to, it’s worth checking out!

Mean Girls

NOT THE MOVIE MUSICAL

Cady, a new girl, and her run in with The Plastics

Big band music

Really enjoyable!

In the Heights

By Lin Manuel Miranda

Follows Usnavi in New York as his city changes (this is a really bad summary)

Has that LMM charm

Banger after Banger songs

SpongeBob The Musical

It’s spongebob

Lmk if you listen to any of these and enjoyed them!! I can also give you more if you want!

[haggishlyhagging]

Some of the most intense expressions of rage at males' limitations had been written in 1967 in Valerie Solanis' "SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto." (Solanis was not an activist in the organized feminist movement. She had worked for, and later shot, pop artist Andy Warhol.)

Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female...

In the 1970s, other writers followed in Solanis' lead. Particularly close in wording were the women of CLIT (Collection of Lesbian International Terrors), who published three groups of articles.

In CLIT Statement #2, published in 1974, they wrote, "males aren't human."

...It is impossible for women and men to become more and more alike because all men are terminally male which means jealous hole/woman killer.

The truth of the matter, which all patriarchies since their conception have tried to suppress, is that women are not only superiojr sexually to men, but also intellectually and emotionally and every other way except for physical strength.

Others, such as lesbian writer Rita Laporte, used gentler terms but saw men as limited.

Only by banding together and following a leader can men find strength, for they are emotionally and spiritually weaker, more dependent and sheep-like, than women. This animal-like urge to band into groups, while giving the individual members a feeling of potency, also necessitates fighting to defend the prowess of their leader against other, exactly similar groups...

Women, on the other hand, are determined by no such group pull.

Women who wish to cooperate with other women do so on the human, not the animal, level. Not being pushed by instinct to fall into gangs behind a more powerful woman, they are free to join together intelligently and they are free to leave the group by intelligent choice when they feel the group is up to no good...

This makes it impossible for vast hordes of women to be led into activities destructive to the human race. At the same time it makes agreement harder to come by.

LaPorte is speaking very generally. There is surely less group violence by women than by men, but one could not say that women never join or stay in fascist or violent groups.

-Carol Anne Douglas, Love and Politics: Radical Feminist and Lesbian Theories

[animefeminist]

A Life Drawing Boys: Takemiya Keiko, the shoujo trailblazer who started BL manga

Spoilers for Kaze to Ki no Uta

Amongst the manga authors who rose to fame in the last century, Takemiya Keiko is one that most people don’t know—or so they think. It is not for any of her faults, of course, but for her link to shoujo manga. Classic shoujo has a hard time being exported, especially in the Anglophone sphere, and in pop culture discussions it’s generally been reduced to a subpar category of comics when compared to the high-praise shounen manga are known to receive. However, her value as a multifaceted artist and storyteller should be valued as much as other prominent authors from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Born in 1950 in the city of Tokushima and raised on the southern island of Shikoku, detached from the glossy and busy heart of the country, Takemiya had dreamt of becoming a mangaka since her high school days. She grew up reading shounen manga and idolizing names such as Tezuka Osamu and Ishinomori Shotaro.

Such a dream was (partially) fulfilled (or at least, barely begun) in 1967, after winning first place in Mushi Production’s monthly magazine COM with her work “Kokonotsu no yūjo” (“The Ninth Friendship”). She debuted a year later in the shoujomanga magazine Margaret with “Ringo no tsumi” (“The Apple’s Sin”) at the age of eighteen.

Read it at Anime Feminist!

[fancoloredglasses]

Batgirl Returns (and feeling rather catty)

[All images owned by DC Comics and Warner Bros-Discovery. I swear I’m too small-fry to sue]

[Thanks to Batgirlspain for the inspiration]

(All videos are courtesy of Batman: The Animated Series)

Introduced in 1967, (one year before her first televised appearance) Batgirl is hailed as a feminist icon and a mainstay in the Bat Family (in fact, in New Adventures she was in the opening credits alongside the Dynamic Duo from the first episode)

But it was over 15 years after New Adventures that Batgirl would return to the small screen in the Dini-verse (I will NOT be discussing her time on the Big Screen), and though the Caped Crusaders don’t learn her identity and fully integrate her into the Bat Family until New Batman Adventures, she was able to hold her own against Two-Face and clear her father Commissioner Gordon’s name in her first ever case.

This is the tale of her second case. If you would like to watch it, it’s available on Max or behind your favorite paywall.

We open at Gotham State University where…

…a priceless jade cat statue is stolen from the University museum.

Meanwhile, Batman is in trouble (the deadly kind) from…

Oh, this can’t be good. Fortunately, Batgirl is on hand to send them running. Batman is grateful.

…wow!

But just before they kiss…

…Barbara Gordon is woken from her dream by Dick Grayson wanting to take her out for a pizza. She politely declines and is about to return to her nap studies when the evening paper is slid under get door.

Suddenly, her studies don’t seem so important.

Later at Gotham University Museum, there’s another break-in.

Catwoman examines the display where the statue was when Batgirl emerges from the shadows, accusing her of the crime. Catwoman points out that the method of the theft (using acid on the security) isn’t her style.

Batgirl decides to believe that she didn’t do it (but not that she wouldn’t) when…

Catwoman takes the opportunity to retreat, but Robin (with Batgirl in tow) chases after her. However, Catwoman snares Robin and escapes. Robin blames Batgirl.

Who knew robins were so territorial?

The next day, Barbara sees a cat-shaped message on the student bulletin board addressed to “The Winged Mouse” (Catwoman called Batgirl "a mouse with wings" the previous night)

That evening at Bayshore Pier, Batgirl arrives to find Catwoman waiting, complimenting Batgirl on her abilities.

Since she and Catwoman want to recover the jade cat, Batgirl agrees… on the condition that Catwoman surrender to the police if Batgirl finds out she’s lying (like she’d keep her end of the bargain)

Meanwhile at the Batcave, Bruce is in Paris on WayneCorp business, meaning Robin is on his own to deal with Catwoman (OK, Batgirl is also on the case, but he’s not thrilled about that either)

Elsewhere, Catwoman has taken Batgirl to a dive bar.

After getting the bar’s attention…

Catwoman and Batgirl corner a thug known as “The Chemist” and ask about the acid residue. He spooks and runs off, prompting every thug in the joint to get involved.

Fortunately, Robin is on hand to help Batgirl. After taking out the trash, Batgirl realizes Catwoman is missing.

 Naturally, she’s gone after Daggett. After convincing him to hand over the statue, he attacks her! Unfortunately, he goes over the railing and falls toward a vat of acid! (isn’t one Joker enough?) Fortunately…

…his leg is tangled in a hanging chain, breaking his fall. Unfortunately, Catwoman is interested in revenge and slowly lowers Daggett toward the vat. Fortunately, Batgirl is on hand and takes the chain from her. Unfortunately, that means Catwoman can run away with the statue. Fortunately, Robin is on hand.

He sends Batgirl after Catwoman while he finishes hauling up Daggett.

On the rooftops, Catwoman is about to make her escape when…

…she’s snared by Batgirl.

Catwoman offers to make their partnership official, but Batgirl declines, and reminds Catwoman about their agreement at the beginning of the episode.

Surprisingly, Catwoman agrees, though she regrets Batgirl turned down her offer.

However , the police car holding Catwoman stops not 100 feet away and the cops are kicked out.

Well played, Ms. Kyle!

With that, Catwoman drives off into the sunset.

I do enjoy the chemistry between Batgirl and Catwoman. I may have to review their interactions again!

[therecordchanger62279]

The 10 Most Influential Debut Records of the Rock Era

It's been, oh, at least three days since I posted a list, so I thought it was time for another one. (I have a list-making gene - which, unfortunately, takes up far too much of my time. But if I don't make the list and post it, I begin showing signs of emotional stress because my brain becomes overloaded with pointless minutiae, and I need to empty it - much like the trash on a computer. Otherwise, my brain begins to operate more slowly, and I'm unable to download my thoughts into words and deeds. The little wheel in my eyeball just goes round and round. My head begins to smoke, and my wife has to unplug me, and call tech support.)

In any case, this is a list I don't actually recall ever seeing anywhere else. I was thinking about how important it is for any musical act to make a great debut record, and if you manage to accomplish that, how incredible that record must be to actually influence or change the direction of popular music your first time out. It would be far more difficult than, say, hitting a grand slam walk-off home run in your first major league at-bat.

When I began compiling the list, I was thinking first about the most influential records ever made, but not many of them were debut records. There are countless lists of influential albums out there, and many more lists of best debut records. But both at once? So, I compiled a list that I think is pretty impressive dating back 60 years - although this list ends with 1980. By then, I think most, if not all popular music's worthwhile changes and growth had happened or had been set in motion, and from that point forward, regression set in. We've reached a point now where there's nothing new under the sun, and we are devolving our way to some landfill in New Jersey keeping company with six-pack plastic rings, and styrofoam cups.

The list is in roughly chronological order, and I'll add a few comments after each in an effort to defend my choices.

Meet The Beatles - The Beatles (1964) Not technically their debut, you scream? Well, I don't live in the UK. This was the US debut record, and I would argue that if The Beatles had never made it in America, they would've come and gone like last week's latest Rap sensation. This is ground zero, and I'll accept no substitutes.

Freak Out - The Mothers of Invention (1966) Even today, it's hard to wrap your head around the fact that a record like this existed in 1966. It opened up the whole world of record making to the avant-garde, and a whole new audience. No restrictions. No rules. From that day forward - bring it!

The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967) Do I really need to argue The Velvets influence at this point to anyone?

Music From Big Pink - The Band (1968) Eric Clapton left Cream because of a Rolling Stone review, and this album. Back to basics. You could argue it was the first "Americana" album long before they had a name for it.

Santana (1969) America and most of the world had not heard anything before like this marriage of Rock, Jazz, and Latin music, and it was there as if it was the most natural thing in the world - and maybe it was.

In The Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson (1969) The invention of Progressive Rock, and the influence of Folk, and Classical on the sound of Rock thereafter.

Black Sabbath (1970) The invention of Heavy Metal, and the importance of riffing, and a noise like laying down on a railroad track with a train bearing down on your exploding head.

Horses - Patti Smith (1975) Poetry fused with Rock 'N' Roll wrapped in a feminist sensibility, and an attitude that if you aren't saying something important, why speak at all?

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols (1977) Some would argue The Ramones debut mattered more, but their debut was largely ignored except by critics, and the NY club crowd. It was The Pistols that fired the Punk shot heard 'round the world. Rock's last gasp, and then there was.....

The Sugarhill Gang (1980) The single, Rapper's Delight was released in the late summer of '79. If they had not followed up with a full-length album, it might've been viewed as a novelty hit. Instead it was the birth of Rap which would eventually overwhelm Rock as the most popular music of the day.

[doitinanotherlanguage]

July 2023 Wrap-up: 1960s

(You can read more about the challenge on my post introducing the challenge. Basically, Reading Through the Decades is a year-long reading challenge where we read books - and explore other media - from the 1900s to the 2020s, decade-by-decade.)

Super late with the July wrap-up, but here it is at last!

What I Enjoyed This Month

📖 Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), Joan Lindsay -> In 1900, a group of female students at an Australian girls' boarding school vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic, causing varying effects on the school and local community. -> I watched the fantastic, queer 2018 mini-series (starring Natalie Dormer!) earlier this year and absolutely fell in love! So I knew I had to read the original novel as soon as possible. Since the book is written in the 60s, I decided to read it this month. I might prefer the mini-series (because in it, the themes of queerness are much more explicit and central) but the novel definitely holds its own, too.

🎬 Flickorna (1968; The Girls), dir. Mai Zetterling -> A feminist reinvention of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes: Three actresses prepare to go on the road in a theater production of the classic play about women and war. As the women re-assess and deal with the problems in their respective private lives, they recognize the parallels with the play and begin to realize that it is serious - even tragic - after all. -> Very 60s, very awesome. I love watching older movies that centre women and feminist themes. This is definitely a very inventive and experimental - even surrealist - film.

📖 SCUM Manifesto (1967), Valerie Solanas -> A radical feminist manifesto that argues that men have ruined the world, which women have to fix by forming SCUM, an organization dedicated to overthrowing society and eliminating the male sex. The manifesto was little-known until Solanas attempted to murder Andy Warhol in 1968. -> I don't really know what to say about this. Mostly, the manifesto is filled with absurd bullshit - I don't fuck with violence, I emphatically don't think killing is the solution to anything, and radical feminism is definitely not the brand of feminism for me. That said, the manifesto is also hilarious as fuck: the manifesto totally flips the age-old "women are inferior" dynamic from Western, patriarchal philosophy and theory around, so yielding the manifesto up to an interpretation as a delicious satire. (Unfortunately, it seems that Solanas did not write the manifesto for irony and satire's sake.)

🎬 Victim (1961), dir. Basil Dearden -> A British neo-noir suspense film about a closeted lawyer who risks his career to bring a blackmailer to justice. The film is credited as being the first British film to explicitly name homosexuality and deal with it sympathetically. -> I am not the biggest neo-noir fan, but I very much enjoyed this one. I love a good queer classic!

🎬 Midnight Cowboy (1969), dir. John Schlesinger -> A naive hustler travels from Texas to New York City to seek personal fortune, in the process befriending a scrounging, sleazy small-time con man with big dreams. -> Another queer(?) classic! Idk, I really like watching movies about drifters and down-on-their-luck people struggling onwards in life and maybe finding some modicum of companionship in each other.

🎬 Stonewall (1995), dir. Nigel Finch -> A historical comedy-drama film that gives a fictionalized account of the weeks leading up to the Stonewall riots, a seminal event in the modern American gay rights movement. The main story follows a cross-dressing sex worker who meets a young gay man, freshly arrived in NYC. -> There was a horribly disappointing Stonewall movie made more recently in 2015 - forget about that shit and watch this one instead! This film actually centres cross-dressers, trans women, and queer politics while also incorporating humour, a love story, and several lip-synch numbers!

[dillinger]

SØSTERSKAP

CONTEMPORARY NORDIC PHOTOGRAPHY

ÉGLISE SAINTE-ANNE

3 JULY - 24 SEPTEMBER 2023

10.00 AM - 07.30 PM

BILLETTERIE

Ikram Abdulkadir (1995), Jeannette Ehlers (1973), Fryd Frydendahl (1984), Bente Geving (1952), Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir (1984), Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff (1967), Heiða Helgadóttir (1975), Hilde Honerud (1977), Tuija Lindström (1950–2017), Monika Macdonald (1969), Hannah Modigh (1980), Eline Mugaas (1969), Maria Pasenau (1994), Raakel Kuukka (1955-2022) & Yeboyah (1996), Emma Sarpaniemi (1993), Lada Suomenrinne (1995) and Verena Winkelmann (1973).

Søsterskap highlights photographers’ strong role over several generations in the Nordic countries. The exhibition explores the welfare state from a perspective of intersectional feminism. Often referred to as ‘the Nordic model’, this system is characterized by a public sector that provides all citizens with social security and welfare services, including daycare and education, and has brought significant improvement to living and working conditions. Basic values underlying the model are openness, tolerance, and the conviction that all people are equal. “The welfare state is a woman’s best friend” is a feminist slogan.

The exhibition brings together photographers based in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Since the 1980s, we have witnessed many active photographers, whose works–based on different approaches from documentary to conceptual–reflect the socio-political context of the welfare state.

The interplay between photography and this social democratic model is here seen as a key factor in defining the panorama of camerawork from the region. The project makes this model visible while questioning certain aspects, harnessing photography to investigate the friction between the subjective, the collective and the political as it plays out within the welfare state. Family life, gender roles, labor, ethnicity, and colonialism are some of the topics discussed in Søsterskap, which also considers the darker sides of the welfare state based on exclusion and continuous economic growth that is accelerating the global ecological crisis.

CURATORS: ELINA HEIKKA, CHARLOTTE PRÆSTEGAARD SCHWARTZ, ANNA-KAISA RASTENBERGER, ÆSA SIGURJÓNSDÓTTIR, NINA STRAND, ANNA TELLGREN AND SUSANNE ØSTBY SÆTHER.

PUBLICATION: SØSTERSKAP, OBJEKTIV #27, 2023.

[thedemostop]

Famous Black Women Singers | Who Shaped Music History

Great songs that have shattered records have been composed by well-known, well-known famous black women singers who are well-known for their seductive vocals, enticing melodies, and socially conscious topics.

Ten legendary black female vocalists are honored, and their lives and careers—including their upbringing, hardships, triumphs, and legacies—are discussed. We talk about the singles and albums that catapulted them to stardom, the accolades and prizes they have won for their artistic endeavors.

Greatest famous black women singers

Popular black female singers have had a big impact on all genres of the music industry. Black female vocalists rose to fame in the 1920s as blues musicians Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey raised awareness of the genre, which reflected the joys and hardships of African-American life. The music has changed significantly since then. Between 2010 and 2020, musicians including Lizzo, Janelle Monáe, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Solange, and others wrote and released popular songs in a range of musical genres, including dancehall, rap, indie, pop, and others.

Top famous black female singers

Whitney Houston

Birth date and place: Whitney Houston, an iconic American singer and actress, was born on August 9, 1963, in Newark, New Jersey.

Famous albums and songs: Houston’s self-titled debut album, released in 1985, catapulted her to international fame with hits such as “Saving All My Love for You” and “How Will I Know.” The 1987 album “Whitney” solidified her status as a music powerhouse, featuring iconic tracks such as “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” The soundtrack of “The Bodyguard,” released in 1992, is one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time, featuring the timeless ballad “I Will Always Love You.”

Awards: Houston won six Grammy Awards, including the prestigious “Album of the Year” for “The Bodyguard” soundtrack. Houston also won numerous American Music Awards, MTV Movie + TV Awards, and Billboard Music Awards. Her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020 immortalized her impact on the music industry.

Life journey: Whitney was raised in a musical household. Whitney's mother was the gospel singer Cissy Houston. Whitney appeared to be headed for a career in music. From her days in the church choir to her current position as one of the best-selling musicians of all time, Houston's journey to stardom was swift. But ultimately, her own drug abuse and strained relationships took a toll on her output. Whitney Houston's ageless voice allowed her to emotionally connect with listeners in spite of these challenges. Her premature passing in 2012 marked the end of an era.

Aretha Franklin

Birth date and place: Aretha Franklin, often hailed as the “Queen of Soul,” was born on March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Famous albums and songs: Aretha Franklin’s breakthrough came in the 1960s with albums such as “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” (1967) and “Lady Soul” (1968). Iconic songs such as “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” and “Think” became anthems of the civil rights and feminist movements. The live album “Amazing Grace” (1972), recorded in a Los Angeles church, is regarded as one of the greatest gospel albums ever.

Awards: Aretha won 18 Grammy Awards, including the first-ever Best Female R&B Vocal Performance in 1968 for “Respect.” Franklin received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, cementing her status as a cultural icon.

Life journey: Growing up, Franklin was surrounded by gospel music, and her early participation in the church choir laid the groundwork for her incredible singing career. Her mother died when she was a small child. Franklin's deep, rich voice and skillful piano playing made her a formidable force in the music business. Franklin had personal setbacks, such as failed marriages and health issues, but his resilience and musical talent helped him get over them. Her contributions to gospel, soul, and R&B music, as well as her impact on the civil rights movement, earned her much respect and admiration. Aretha Franklin passed away on August 16, 2018, however she left behind a legacy that inspires and motivates a huge amount of music.

Mariah Carey

Birth date and place: Mariah Carey, one of the most celebrated and successful vocalists of her generation, was born on March 27, 1969, in Huntington, New York.

Famous albums and songs: Her self-titled debut album, released in 1990, introduced the world to her incredible five-octave vocal range. Iconic albums such as “Music Box” (1993), “Daydream” (1995), and “The Emancipation of Mimi” (2005) showcased her versatility and songwriting prowess. Hits such as “Vision of Love,” “Hero,” “Fantasy,” and “We Belong Together” have become anthems that define Mariah’s legacy.

Awards: Mariah won five Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist in 1991. Her single “We Belong Together” earned three Grammy Awards in 2006. Beyond Grammys, Carey has received Billboard Music Awards, American Music Awards, and a Hollywood Walk of Fame star.

Life journey: Mariah's story is one of triumph; she conquered early setbacks to reach the top of the global music sales charts. She may showcase her versatility and inventiveness by performing in pop, R&B, hip-hop, gospel, and other musical genres. Throughout her career, Mariah has consistently demonstrated her dedication to her work and her fans, despite the highs and lows in her personal life.

Etta James

Birth date and place: Etta James, the legendary blues and R&B singer, was born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, California.

Famous albums and songs: Etta’s debut album, “At Last!” (1961), remains an iconic record, featuring the timeless ballad “At Last.” Her other famous albums include “Tell Mama” (1968) and “Burnin’ Down the House” (2002). Etta’s repertoire includes hits such as “I’d Rather Go Blind,” “Tell Mama,” and “Sunday Kind of Love,” each showcasing her powerful and versatile vocal delivery.

Awards: Etta won six Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award 2003. Her signature song, “At Last,” got her into the Grammy Hall of Fame. James was also honored with various Blues Music Awards and received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star.

Life journey: Throughout her early years, Etta found solace and inspiration in gospel music since she was reared in a chaotic household. In the face of drug addiction and incarceration, Etta overcome challenges that affected her personal life. Nevertheless, her skill and strong voice never faltered. James demonstrated her versatility and importance as a singer by navigating among genres such as gospel, rock, R&B, blues, and others with ease. Despite experiencing health issues in her later years, Etta James continued to perform and create music until her passing on January 20, 2012.

Tina Turner

Birth date and place: Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll, was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in Nutbush, Tennessee.

Famous albums and songs: Tina’s breakthrough came with Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep – Mountain High” (1966). However, her solo career soared with the release of “Private Dancer” (1984), featuring the chart-topping “What’s Love Got to Do with It” and “Private Dancer.” The album marked a powerful comeback, solidifying Turner’s status as a solo superstar. Other hits such as “Simply the Best” and “Proud Mary” showcased her dynamic vocal range.

Awards: Tina won multiple Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “What’s Love Got to Do with It” in 1985. Tina received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2005 and was invited into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

Life journey: Early on in her marriage to Ike Turner, Tina had both career and personal success. Tina made a brave choice to leave her violent marriage and struggle financially to pursue her own career. Her reappearance in the 1980s proved that her extraordinary skill had not only not faded but had in fact flourished again. Through her autobiography, "I, Tina," she provided a glimpse into her life and offered hope to people who were struggling.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the development of popular music both domestically and internationally has been greatly influenced by black female vocalists. These performers' stunning vocals, moving stories, and steadfast perseverance have enthralled audiences. Aretha Franklin's deep tones and Beyoncé's captivating performances are two examples. In addition to dominating the charts, their contributions to a variety of genres, such as hip-hop, jazz, gospel, and R&B, have also spurred social movements and debunked stereotypes. Black female singers have celebrated joy, cried out for justice, and fought for equality via their music. They have therefore had a significant positive impact on society and a new generation.

[k00293410]

Artist Research

Elizabeth Peyton:

An American contemporary artist that works with painting, drawing and print best known for her small scale, intimate portraits. She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and since has had much success and many exhibitions; Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection (April 22th 2009- January 4th 2010), Since 2000s: Printmaking Now (May 3rd- Sep 8th 2006), Drawings from the Modern, 1975-2005 (September 14th 2005- January 9th 2006), Contemporary: Inaugural Installations (November 20th 2004- July 11th 2005), Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (October 17th 2002- January 6th 2003), New to the Modern: Recent Acquisitions from the Department of Drawings (October 25th 2001- January 8th 2002), About Face: Selections from the Department of Prints and Illustrated books (May 21st-June 5th 2001).

Kiss, 2019; Hanyu(Yuzuru Hanyu), 2018; Ariadne Auf Naxos, 2012-2018.

Marlene Dumas:

A south African artist currently based in the Netherlands. From 1972-75, she attended Cape Town University where she studied Visual Arts. She's lived and exhibited work in the Netherlands since 1976, and exhibited internationally since 1978. Dumas represented Holland in the Venice Biennale and in 1996 the Tate Gallery exhibited a selection of her works on paper.

She works with painting, collages, drawings, prints and installations. She's associated with portraits, despite her work redefining the definition of portrait as she captures the deeply emotional psych of a person rather than just being surface level. She uses varying themes in her work: race and sexuality, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness.

Stern, 2004; Genetic Longing; De gele vingers van de kunstenaar (The yellow fingers of the artist), 1985.

Judy Chicago:

Chicago born feminist artist, Judy Chicago's work has had a great impact on the women's rights movement. Her most notable piece of work being 'The Dinner Party', but she'd executed other exhibitions before the grand debut of the Dinner Party in 1979. In 1967, she worked with fireworks in an attempt to soften and feminize the California landscape. She helped establish the feminist art gallery, Womanhouse, in L.A. In the beginning of her professional work, she exhibited sculpture and abstract painting but her installation, The Dinner Party, is what gained her her reputation. It was a means of bringing attention to the success of overlooked women in a large, mixed-media art installation that worked with ceramics, embroidery, weaving and text. She worked collectively with dozen's of volunteers and assistants to make this happen, and focused on traditional, feminine associated hobbies such as pottery and needlework. When it debuted in 1979, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it caused controversy within the United States. In 2002, the Dinner Party was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum.

[tomafome]

Later On فروغ فرخزاد

My death will come someday to me One day in spring, bright and lovely One winter day, dusty, distant One empty autumn day, devoid of joy.

My death will come someday to me One bittersweet day, like all my days One hollow day like the one past Shadow of today or of tomorrow.

My eyes tune to half dark hallways My cheeks resemble cold, pale marble Suddenly sleep creeps over me I become empty of all painful cries.

Slowly my hands slide o’er my notes Delivered from poetry’s spell, I recall that once in my hands I held the flaming blood of poetry.

The earth invites me into its arms, Folks gather to entomb me there Perhaps at midnight my lovers Place above me wreaths of many roses.

❧

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a feminist trailblazer of Iranian literature and as an iconoclastic figure of contemporary world literature.

[haggishlyhagging]

…[I]n the spring of 1975, the reconstituted Redstockings went on the offensive in a desperate attempt to reassert radical feminist politics. On May 9, 1975, the group issued a press release accusing Ms. magazine editor Gloria Steinem of having once been involved with a CIA front. Following as it did on the heels of the Alpert controversy, the Redstockings' revelations raised anew the question of feminism's relationship to the state.

This aspect of Steinem's past had already been made public in 1967 when Ramparts magazine revealed that the CIA had subsidized a number of domestic groups including the National Student Association (NSA) and the Independent Research Service (IRS), an organization which Steinem had helped found. The IRS had been established in 1959 to encourage American students to participate in the communist-dominated World Festivals of Youth and Students for Peace and Freedom. Steinem had been the director of the IRS from 1959 through 1960 and had continued to work for the organization through 1962. Redstockings alleged that the CIA established the IRS to organize an anti-communist delegation of Americans to disrupt the festival. They also claimed that Steinem and the IRS had been involved in gathering information on foreign nationals attending the festivals. However, Steinem's own account of the IRS's involvement in the festivals differed dramatically from the Redstockings' version. Shortly after the Ramparts article appeared, The New York Times published an interview with Steinem in which she admitted that she had known about the CIA funding, but claimed that she had never been asked to gather information on Americans or foreigners who participated in the festivals. According to Steinem, the IRS had encouraged Americans to attend the festivals in order to open up the lines of communication between the East and the West. In fact, Steinem maintained that the CIA's involvement was benign, if not enlightened:

“Far from being shocked by this involvement I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival.”

Steinem asserted that "the CIA's big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough."

But Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, and the other Redstockings members were not only concerned about Steinem's former relationship with a CIA front. They insinuated that Ms. magazine was part of a CIA strategy to replace radical feminism with liberal feminism. Ms. magazine had been a source of irritation to many feminists since its inception. A number of feminist writers were especially angry when Ms. first formed and went outside the movement for its writers and editors. (In fact, Susan Brownmiller, Nora Ephron, and Sally Kempton were struggling to establish a mass-circulation feminist magazine named Jane before Ms. was even conceived. When Brownmiller heard that Elisabeth Forsling Harris wanted to establish a feminist magazine, she suggested to her that the two groups work together. However, Harris reportedly insisted that Steinem was her editor and rejected Brownmiller's offer. Brownmiller's group was forced to scuttle its plans because they could not raise the necessary seed money.) Generally, radical feminists complained of the magazine's liberal orientation and attributed Ms.'s denatured feminism to the magazine's commercial orientation. But Redstockings looked at Ms.'s "curious financing"—Warner Communications put up virtually all the money for the magazine but relinquished corporate control by taking only twenty-five percent of the stock—and asked:

“We are wondering whether all this curious financing is connected to the lesson Gloria Steinem said she learned in 1967: ‘The CIA's big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough.’ The Ms. editors should come forward with more information about their unusual stockholders.”

Redstockings contended that the formation of Ms. magazine had given Steinem a strategic position from which "feminist politics can be influenced." And they alleged that “information can and is being gathered on the personal and political activities of women all over the world.”

Steinem, reportedly devastated by the Redstockings' accusations, decided against responding to the charges. However, this decision backfired as some feminists thought her silence suggested that she might, in fact, have something to hide. Betty Friedan, never a big fan of Steinem's, reportedly declared that the CIA had infiltrated the women's movement and called on Steinem to answer the Redstockings' charges. Steinem's vocal support for Alpert and her own refusal to repudiate her past involvement with the IRS made many feminists, like Ellen Willis, curious about her stance on cooperating with the state. In fact, Willis resigned her position as part-time contributing editor at Ms. on June 30, 1975. In her statement of resignation, Willis emphasized that the Redstockings' accusation solidified, but did not precipitate, her decision to resign. Willis explained that she was ending her two-year association with Ms. because of political differences with the magazine—including its promotion of "conservative, anti-left feminism."

-Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America: 1967-75

[kammartinez]

By Daniel Lewis

Milan Kundera, the Communist Party outcast who became a global literary star with mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in the workers’ paradise of his native Czechoslovakia, died on Tuesday in Paris. He was 94.

A spokeswoman for Gallimard, Mr. Kundera’s publisher in France, confirmed the death, saying it came “after a prolonged illness.”

Mr. Kundera’s run of popular books began with “The Joke,” which was published to acclaim in 1967, around the time of the Prague Spring, then banned with a vengeance after Soviet-led troops crushed that experiment in “socialism with a human face” a few months later. He completed his final novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” (2015), when he was in his mid-80s and living comfortably in Paris.

“Festival” was his first new fiction since 2000, but its reception, tepid at best, was a far cry from the reaction to his most enduringly popular novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

An instant success when it was published in 1984, “Unbearable Lightness” was reprinted over the years in at least two dozen languages. The novel drew even wider attention when it was adapted into a 1988 film starring Daniel Day Lewis as one of its central characters, Tomas, a Czech surgeon who criticizes the Communist leadership and consequently ends up washing windows for a living.

But washing windows is a pretty good deal for Tomas: A relentless philanderer, he’s always open to meeting new women, including bored housewives. But the sex as well as Tomas himself and the three other main characters — his wife, a seductive painter and the painter’s lover — are there for a larger purpose. In putting the novel on its list of best books of 1984, The New York Times Book Review observed that “this writer’s real business is to find images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime.”

“He uses the four pitilessly, setting each pair against the other as opposites in every way, to describe a world in which choice is exhausted and people simply cannot find a way to express their humanity.”

Mr. Kundera could be especially pitiless in his use of female characters — so much so that the British feminist Joan Smith, in her book “Misogynies” (1989), declared that “hostility is the common factor in all Kundera’s writing about women.”

Other critics reckoned that exposing men’s horrible behavior was at least part of his intent. Still, even the stronger women in Mr. Kundera’s books tended to be objectified, and the less fortunate were sometimes victimized in disturbing detail. The narrator of his first novel, “The Joke,” for example, vengefully seduces the wife of an old enemy, slaps her around during sex, then says he doesn’t want her. The woman’s husband doesn’t care; he’s in love with a very cool graduate student. In a final indignity, the distraught woman tries to kill herself with a fistful of pills, which turn out to be laxatives.

Mr. Kundera’s fear that Czech culture could be erased by Stalinism — much as disgraced leaders were airbrushed out of official photos — was at the heart of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” which became available in English in 1979.

It was not exactly what most Western readers would have expected of a “novel”: a sequence of seven stories, told as fiction, autobiography, philosophical speculation and much else. But Mr. Kundera called it a novel nonetheless, and likened it to a set of Beethoven variations.

Writing in The Times Book Review in 1980, John Updike said the book “is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out.”

‘The Truth of Uncertainty’

Mr. Kundera had a deep affinity for Central European thinkers and artists — Nietzsche, Kafka, the Viennese novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, the Czech composer Leos Janacek. Like Broch, Mr. Kundera said, he strove to discover “that which the novel alone can discover,” including what he called “the truth of uncertainty.”

His books were largely saved from the weight of this heritage by a playfulness that often meant using his own voice to comment on the work in progress. Here is how he begins to invent Tamina, a tragic figure in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” who starts out as a forlorn Czech widow in France and somehow ends up dying at the hands of cruel children in a fairy tale:

I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. That is why I am always hesitant about joining that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do? After all, my characters need to have names.

Mr. Kundera told The Paris Review in 1983: “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.”

He acknowledged that the names of his books could easily be swapped around. “Every one of my novels could be entitled ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ or ‘The Joke’ or ‘Laughable Loves,’” he said. “They reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me and, unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or to write.”

Though written in the Czech language, both “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” were composed in the clear light of France, where Mr. Kundera resettled in 1975 after giving up hope of political and creative freedom at home.

His decision to emigrate underlined the choices available to the Czech intelligentsia at the time. Thousands left. Among those who stayed and resisted was the playwright Vaclav Havel, who served several prison terms, including one of nearly three years. He survived to help lead the successful Velvet Revolution in 1989, and then served as president, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic after the Slovaks decided to go their own way.

With that great turnabout, Mr. Kundera’s books were legal in his homeland for the first time in 20 years. But there was scant demand for them or sympathy for him there. By one estimate only 10,000 copies of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” were sold.

Many Czechs saw Mr. Kundera as someone who had abandoned his compatriots and taken the easy way out. And they tended to believe a Czech magazine’s allegation in 2008 that he had been an informer in his student days and had betrayed a Western spy. The agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, served 14 years in prison. Mr. Kundera denied turning him in.

Cast Out of the Party

The rocky history of Mr. Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke,” is a good illustration of the trouble he faced while still trying to promote reform from within.

When the Prague Spring ended, the book was condemned as cynical, erotic and anti-Socialist; and if the reader could somehow adopt the censors’ mind-set, the reader would see their point.

Ludvik, the main narrator of “The Joke,” is a Prague university student in the 1950s who is under suspicion by party members for his perceived individualism. “You smile as though you were thinking to yourself,” he is told. Then he gets a letter from a credulous female friend praising the “healthy atmosphere” at the summer training camp she’s been sent to. Resentful that she should be happy when he is missing her, young Ludvik makes a horrible mistake:

“So I bought a postcard,” he says, “and (to hurt, shock and confuse her) wrote: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’”

There is a trial. For his little joke, Ludvik is thrown out of the party and sentenced to work as a coal miner in a military penal unit.

Mr. Kundera didn’t suffer quite that fate, but he was twice expelled from the party he had supported from age 18, when the Communists seized power in 1948.

His first expulsion, for what he called a trivial remark, was imposed in 1950 and inspired the central plot of “The Joke.” He was nevertheless allowed to continue his studies; he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1952 and was then appointed to the faculty there as an instructor in world literature, counting among his students the film director Milos Forman.

Mr. Kundera was reinstated to the Communist Party in 1956 but kicked out again, in 1970, for advocating reform. This time the ejection was forever, effectively erasing him as a person. He was driven from his job and, as he said, “No one had the right to offer me another.”

Over the next several years he picked up money as a jazz musician (he played the piano) and day laborer. Friends sometimes arranged for him to write things under their names or pseudonyms. Which was how he became an astrology columnist.

Mr. Kundera had actually had experience casting horoscopes. So when a magazine editor, whom he identified as R., proposed a weekly astrology feature, he agreed, advising her to “tell the editorial board that the writer would be a brilliant nuclear physicist who did not want his name revealed for fear of being made fun of by his colleagues.”

He even cast a horoscope for R.’s editor in chief, a party hack who would have been disgraced if anyone had known of his superstitious beliefs. R. later reported, he said, that the boss “had begun to guard against the harshness the horoscope warned him about,” that “he was setting great store by the bit of kindness he was capable of” and that “in his often vacant gaze you could recognize the sadness of a man who realizes that the stars merely promise him suffering.”

The two of them had a good laugh. Inevitably, though, the authorities would learn the true identity of the brilliant nuclear physicist-astrologer, and Mr. Kundera realized with certainty that there was no way to protect friends who wanted to help him.

In London, the first English translation of “The Joke” had been so botched that it was hard to know what to make of it. Chapters were rearranged or simply omitted. Irony became satire. Isolated in Prague, there was little he could do about it. (Not until 1992 was there an edition that satisfied him. He wrote an author’s note for it that began, “If it didn’t concern me, it would certainly make me laugh: this is the fifth English-language version of ‘The Joke.’”)

In his 1980 Times review, Mr. Updike commented that Mr. Kundera’s struggle “makes the life histories of most American writers look as stolid as the progress of a tomato plant, and it is small wonder that Kundera is able to merge personal and political significances with the ease of a Camus.”

Bred on Music and Books

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, the son of Milada Janosikova and Ludvik Kundera. His father, a noted concert pianist and musicologist, taught him piano, and he considered a career in music before his interests shifted to literature, particularly French.

“From an early age,” he told an interviewer for the literary journal Salmagundi in 1987, “I read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cocteau, Bataille, Ionesco and admired French surrealism.”

Having grown up in a country occupied by German forces from 1939 to 1945, the young Mr. Kundera was one of many millions who embraced Communism after the war. It was a heady time, with new lists of winners and losers.

“Old injustices were redressed, new injustices were perpetrated,” he wrote in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” “Factories were nationalized, thousands of people went to prison, medical care was free, tobacconists saw their shops confiscated, aged workers vacationed for the first time in expropriated villas, and on our faces we had the smile of happiness.”

Too late, he said, he realized that the evil done in the name of Socialism was not a betrayal of the revolution but rather a poison inherent in it from the beginning.

When Communism ended in 1989, Mr. Kundera, who spoke little about his personal life, had been living in France for 14 years with his wife, Vera Hrabankova, first as a university teacher in Rennes and then in Paris. Czechoslovakia revoked his citizenship in 1979, and he became a French citizen two years later. The Czech Republic restored his citizenship of his homeland in 2019. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

The last book Mr. Kundera wrote in Czech before switching to French was “Immortality,” in 1990. Beginning there, his later novels were notably less political and more overtly philosophical: “Slowness” (1995), “Identity” (1998) and “Ignorance” (2000).

Of that group, “Immortality,” with bright inventions like the friendship of Hemingway and Goethe when they meet in heaven, was the most favorably received. It enjoyed a few weeks on the Times best-seller list.

With “Slowness,” Mr. Kundera dismayed more than a few readers by supplying no ending and by exceeding the safe limit of first-person discourse: “And I ask myself: Who was dreaming? Who dreamed this story? Who imagined it? She? He? Both of them?” and so on.

Besides the long works of fiction, he had written short stories and a play, “Jacques and His Master.” He was also the author of essays, including several that illuminated his work and that of other writers, collected under the title “The Art of the Novel.”

He was often nominated but not selected for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Enigmatic and private, and more than a little grumpy about the clatter and clutter of modern Western society, Mr. Kundera was largely out of the public eye from 2000 until the announcement in 2014 that he had created yet another novel, “The Festival of Insignificance,” originally written in French.

Set in Paris and barely exceeding 100 pages — the critic Michiko Kakutani dismissed it in The Times as “flimsy” — it follows the perambulations of five friends through whom Mr. Kundera considers familiar themes of laughter, practical jokes, despair, sex and death.

The novelist Diane Johnson, writing in The Times Book Review, speculated on the central importance of laughter to Mr. Kundera.

“It may be that when Kundera writes about laughter,” she wrote, “he conceives of it not as a subjective expression of appreciation or surprise, the way we usually understand it, but as a material form of aggression, an actual act of self-defense, even a duty.”

As Mr. Kundera himself wrote in “Insignificance”: “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”

He had struck a similar note in 1985, on accepting the Jerusalem Prize, one of several honors he received.

“There is a fine Jewish proverb,” he said in his acceptance speech: “Man thinks, God laughs.” And then a fine Kunderian flourish:

“But why does God laugh? Because man thinks, and the truth escapes him. Because the more men think, the more one man’s thought diverges from another’s. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is.”

[kamreadsandrecs]

By Daniel Lewis

Milan Kundera, the Communist Party outcast who became a global literary star with mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in the workers’ paradise of his native Czechoslovakia, died on Tuesday in Paris. He was 94.

A spokeswoman for Gallimard, Mr. Kundera’s publisher in France, confirmed the death, saying it came “after a prolonged illness.”

Mr. Kundera’s run of popular books began with “The Joke,” which was published to acclaim in 1967, around the time of the Prague Spring, then banned with a vengeance after Soviet-led troops crushed that experiment in “socialism with a human face” a few months later. He completed his final novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” (2015), when he was in his mid-80s and living comfortably in Paris.

“Festival” was his first new fiction since 2000, but its reception, tepid at best, was a far cry from the reaction to his most enduringly popular novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

An instant success when it was published in 1984, “Unbearable Lightness” was reprinted over the years in at least two dozen languages. The novel drew even wider attention when it was adapted into a 1988 film starring Daniel Day Lewis as one of its central characters, Tomas, a Czech surgeon who criticizes the Communist leadership and consequently ends up washing windows for a living.

But washing windows is a pretty good deal for Tomas: A relentless philanderer, he’s always open to meeting new women, including bored housewives. But the sex as well as Tomas himself and the three other main characters — his wife, a seductive painter and the painter’s lover — are there for a larger purpose. In putting the novel on its list of best books of 1984, The New York Times Book Review observed that “this writer’s real business is to find images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime.”

“He uses the four pitilessly, setting each pair against the other as opposites in every way, to describe a world in which choice is exhausted and people simply cannot find a way to express their humanity.”

Mr. Kundera could be especially pitiless in his use of female characters — so much so that the British feminist Joan Smith, in her book “Misogynies” (1989), declared that “hostility is the common factor in all Kundera’s writing about women.”

Other critics reckoned that exposing men’s horrible behavior was at least part of his intent. Still, even the stronger women in Mr. Kundera’s books tended to be objectified, and the less fortunate were sometimes victimized in disturbing detail. The narrator of his first novel, “The Joke,” for example, vengefully seduces the wife of an old enemy, slaps her around during sex, then says he doesn’t want her. The woman’s husband doesn’t care; he’s in love with a very cool graduate student. In a final indignity, the distraught woman tries to kill herself with a fistful of pills, which turn out to be laxatives.

Mr. Kundera’s fear that Czech culture could be erased by Stalinism — much as disgraced leaders were airbrushed out of official photos — was at the heart of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” which became available in English in 1979.

It was not exactly what most Western readers would have expected of a “novel”: a sequence of seven stories, told as fiction, autobiography, philosophical speculation and much else. But Mr. Kundera called it a novel nonetheless, and likened it to a set of Beethoven variations.

Writing in The Times Book Review in 1980, John Updike said the book “is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out.”

‘The Truth of Uncertainty’

Mr. Kundera had a deep affinity for Central European thinkers and artists — Nietzsche, Kafka, the Viennese novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, the Czech composer Leos Janacek. Like Broch, Mr. Kundera said, he strove to discover “that which the novel alone can discover,” including what he called “the truth of uncertainty.”

His books were largely saved from the weight of this heritage by a playfulness that often meant using his own voice to comment on the work in progress. Here is how he begins to invent Tamina, a tragic figure in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” who starts out as a forlorn Czech widow in France and somehow ends up dying at the hands of cruel children in a fairy tale:

I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. That is why I am always hesitant about joining that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do? After all, my characters need to have names.

Mr. Kundera told The Paris Review in 1983: “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.”

He acknowledged that the names of his books could easily be swapped around. “Every one of my novels could be entitled ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ or ‘The Joke’ or ‘Laughable Loves,’” he said. “They reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me and, unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or to write.”

Though written in the Czech language, both “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” were composed in the clear light of France, where Mr. Kundera resettled in 1975 after giving up hope of political and creative freedom at home.

His decision to emigrate underlined the choices available to the Czech intelligentsia at the time. Thousands left. Among those who stayed and resisted was the playwright Vaclav Havel, who served several prison terms, including one of nearly three years. He survived to help lead the successful Velvet Revolution in 1989, and then served as president, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic after the Slovaks decided to go their own way.

With that great turnabout, Mr. Kundera’s books were legal in his homeland for the first time in 20 years. But there was scant demand for them or sympathy for him there. By one estimate only 10,000 copies of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” were sold.

Many Czechs saw Mr. Kundera as someone who had abandoned his compatriots and taken the easy way out. And they tended to believe a Czech magazine’s allegation in 2008 that he had been an informer in his student days and had betrayed a Western spy. The agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, served 14 years in prison. Mr. Kundera denied turning him in.

Cast Out of the Party

The rocky history of Mr. Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke,” is a good illustration of the trouble he faced while still trying to promote reform from within.

When the Prague Spring ended, the book was condemned as cynical, erotic and anti-Socialist; and if the reader could somehow adopt the censors’ mind-set, the reader would see their point.

Ludvik, the main narrator of “The Joke,” is a Prague university student in the 1950s who is under suspicion by party members for his perceived individualism. “You smile as though you were thinking to yourself,” he is told. Then he gets a letter from a credulous female friend praising the “healthy atmosphere” at the summer training camp she’s been sent to. Resentful that she should be happy when he is missing her, young Ludvik makes a horrible mistake:

“So I bought a postcard,” he says, “and (to hurt, shock and confuse her) wrote: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’”

There is a trial. For his little joke, Ludvik is thrown out of the party and sentenced to work as a coal miner in a military penal unit.

Mr. Kundera didn’t suffer quite that fate, but he was twice expelled from the party he had supported from age 18, when the Communists seized power in 1948.

His first expulsion, for what he called a trivial remark, was imposed in 1950 and inspired the central plot of “The Joke.” He was nevertheless allowed to continue his studies; he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1952 and was then appointed to the faculty there as an instructor in world literature, counting among his students the film director Milos Forman.

Mr. Kundera was reinstated to the Communist Party in 1956 but kicked out again, in 1970, for advocating reform. This time the ejection was forever, effectively erasing him as a person. He was driven from his job and, as he said, “No one had the right to offer me another.”

Over the next several years he picked up money as a jazz musician (he played the piano) and day laborer. Friends sometimes arranged for him to write things under their names or pseudonyms. Which was how he became an astrology columnist.

Mr. Kundera had actually had experience casting horoscopes. So when a magazine editor, whom he identified as R., proposed a weekly astrology feature, he agreed, advising her to “tell the editorial board that the writer would be a brilliant nuclear physicist who did not want his name revealed for fear of being made fun of by his colleagues.”

He even cast a horoscope for R.’s editor in chief, a party hack who would have been disgraced if anyone had known of his superstitious beliefs. R. later reported, he said, that the boss “had begun to guard against the harshness the horoscope warned him about,” that “he was setting great store by the bit of kindness he was capable of” and that “in his often vacant gaze you could recognize the sadness of a man who realizes that the stars merely promise him suffering.”

The two of them had a good laugh. Inevitably, though, the authorities would learn the true identity of the brilliant nuclear physicist-astrologer, and Mr. Kundera realized with certainty that there was no way to protect friends who wanted to help him.

In London, the first English translation of “The Joke” had been so botched that it was hard to know what to make of it. Chapters were rearranged or simply omitted. Irony became satire. Isolated in Prague, there was little he could do about it. (Not until 1992 was there an edition that satisfied him. He wrote an author’s note for it that began, “If it didn’t concern me, it would certainly make me laugh: this is the fifth English-language version of ‘The Joke.’”)

In his 1980 Times review, Mr. Updike commented that Mr. Kundera’s struggle “makes the life histories of most American writers look as stolid as the progress of a tomato plant, and it is small wonder that Kundera is able to merge personal and political significances with the ease of a Camus.”

Bred on Music and Books

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, the son of Milada Janosikova and Ludvik Kundera. His father, a noted concert pianist and musicologist, taught him piano, and he considered a career in music before his interests shifted to literature, particularly French.

“From an early age,” he told an interviewer for the literary journal Salmagundi in 1987, “I read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cocteau, Bataille, Ionesco and admired French surrealism.”

Having grown up in a country occupied by German forces from 1939 to 1945, the young Mr. Kundera was one of many millions who embraced Communism after the war. It was a heady time, with new lists of winners and losers.

“Old injustices were redressed, new injustices were perpetrated,” he wrote in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” “Factories were nationalized, thousands of people went to prison, medical care was free, tobacconists saw their shops confiscated, aged workers vacationed for the first time in expropriated villas, and on our faces we had the smile of happiness.”

Too late, he said, he realized that the evil done in the name of Socialism was not a betrayal of the revolution but rather a poison inherent in it from the beginning.

When Communism ended in 1989, Mr. Kundera, who spoke little about his personal life, had been living in France for 14 years with his wife, Vera Hrabankova, first as a university teacher in Rennes and then in Paris. Czechoslovakia revoked his citizenship in 1979, and he became a French citizen two years later. The Czech Republic restored his citizenship of his homeland in 2019. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

The last book Mr. Kundera wrote in Czech before switching to French was “Immortality,” in 1990. Beginning there, his later novels were notably less political and more overtly philosophical: “Slowness” (1995), “Identity” (1998) and “Ignorance” (2000).

Of that group, “Immortality,” with bright inventions like the friendship of Hemingway and Goethe when they meet in heaven, was the most favorably received. It enjoyed a few weeks on the Times best-seller list.

With “Slowness,” Mr. Kundera dismayed more than a few readers by supplying no ending and by exceeding the safe limit of first-person discourse: “And I ask myself: Who was dreaming? Who dreamed this story? Who imagined it? She? He? Both of them?” and so on.

Besides the long works of fiction, he had written short stories and a play, “Jacques and His Master.” He was also the author of essays, including several that illuminated his work and that of other writers, collected under the title “The Art of the Novel.”

He was often nominated but not selected for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Enigmatic and private, and more than a little grumpy about the clatter and clutter of modern Western society, Mr. Kundera was largely out of the public eye from 2000 until the announcement in 2014 that he had created yet another novel, “The Festival of Insignificance,” originally written in French.

Set in Paris and barely exceeding 100 pages — the critic Michiko Kakutani dismissed it in The Times as “flimsy” — it follows the perambulations of five friends through whom Mr. Kundera considers familiar themes of laughter, practical jokes, despair, sex and death.

The novelist Diane Johnson, writing in The Times Book Review, speculated on the central importance of laughter to Mr. Kundera.

“It may be that when Kundera writes about laughter,” she wrote, “he conceives of it not as a subjective expression of appreciation or surprise, the way we usually understand it, but as a material form of aggression, an actual act of self-defense, even a duty.”

As Mr. Kundera himself wrote in “Insignificance”: “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”

He had struck a similar note in 1985, on accepting the Jerusalem Prize, one of several honors he received.

“There is a fine Jewish proverb,” he said in his acceptance speech: “Man thinks, God laughs.” And then a fine Kunderian flourish:

“But why does God laugh? Because man thinks, and the truth escapes him. Because the more men think, the more one man’s thought diverges from another’s. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is.”

[the-defiant-fluffball]

Let me tell you a tale of International Women's Day and how it's celebrated in different places. I'm not a big expert or anything, I'm just privileged enough to have lived abroad and to have many close friends from other countries.

What I'm used to is the way of former socialism. March 8th is a relatively big thing - women get acknowledged, we get flowers (not just from the men in our lives but like, you might get one if you walk down the city centre, courtesy of the local government), we get little gifts at work. The women of my family, which is all of my family minus like 3 people, get together for a dessert and a chat about feminism, but we're considered pretty radical. It's generally a tame holiday. Men get their own day shortly after - the martyrs' day - but we never had that growing up, and it's not a day that's taken very seriously. To me, it's kinda rural and churchy, and it very much feels like 'but why don't i get anything and you do??'. Minor celebrities will go on TV and talk about how they're not feminists, but.

Women's rights were written into the Yugislavian constitution in 1946, and abortion was constitutionalised in the 1970s. The current constitution of my country gives me the right to freely decide whether I want to bear children or not. It's been this way my whole life.

*

In the UK, I didn't notice IWD being a thing at all. No gifts in the workplace, no flowers on the street, not even sales (which are a thing where I live because everything is an excuse to have a sale).

UK had one of the most well-known women's suffrage movements that started in the 19th century. Women have had voting rights since the early 20th century, and abortion has been lawful (but is not constitutionalized from what I can tell) since 1967.

*

When I was in Mexico, I was impressed by the feminist movement. They seem to be ever-present, loud, and not afraid of a proper protest. IWD is a day of protest, too, and of wearing purple in support of the movement. I've also seen info about March 9th being a strike day, with women removing themselves from society (incl. work, school etc.). I've had a friend reach out with a very different message than what I'm used to here. It was a careful but supportive one, acknowledging the struggle and offering support. When we talked about it, he told me: 'all of my girl friends back home are feminists. borderline radical ones.' and I told him, that's how it should be. But the difference between our complacency and their activism is notable, and as much as I love that spirit, I wish it wasn't born out of necessity. I wish they could afford to be a bit complacent as well.

Mexico is apparently one of the 20 worst countries for women. The rape and femicide statiatics are atrocious. Women got the right to vote in 1953, and abortion was only decriminalized in 2021. From what I can tell, women still get prosecuted for miscarrying (and, as usual, the more indigenous you are, the more likely they are to go after you).

So. This IWD, and all following ones, I wish all of us complacent feminists a bit of an edge and rebelious spirit to keep on fighting the good fight. There's so much left to do. And to all of our sisters globally who can't afford to not be radical, I wish good luck and safety, and that you also get the opportunity to be a little complacent soon.

[dutch-and-flemish-painters]

Michaelina Wautier, also Woutiers (1604–1689), was a painter from the Southern Netherlands. Only since the turn of the 21st century has her work been recognized as that of an outstanding female Baroque artist, her works having been previously attributed to male artists, especially her brother Charles.

After Wautier's death in 1689, her legacy was quickly lost due to the various reasons: mis-attribution, confusion with other noted female artists of the period, and inability to differentiate her work from that of her brother Charles. Two centuries later, starting in the 1850s, recognition of her work began to pick up again. However, any mention of her was usually limited to a characterization of her as a "skilled portraitist" with few attributed works. Her reputation enjoyed an uptick starting in the 1960s with the sudden appearance of her floral still life Garland with a Butterfly in an exhibition, which later disappeared in 1985, along with her official recognition as the rightful creator of The Triumph of Bacchus in 1967. Writer, intellectual, and feminist Germaine Greer gave Wautier greater notability in The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1979). Commenting on her work Portrait of a Commander in the Spanish Army, Greer said that Wautier displayed "swiftness and accuracy" indicating extensive professional practice. More re-attributions and recognitions of her works and exhibitions that included her paintings made her legacy to more of the art-going public. The greater interest in her work culminated in her first retrospective in 2018.

Michaelina Wautier, Study of a Young Woman, c.1649-59