Oct
19
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Posts tagged feminism
Jul
1
“For a year I cut myself off from men altogether. Perhaps I had to plunge so deeply into the negative side of my ambivalence in order to say good-bye to it, or try to. When I began to be with someone again it was a bit like moving to a strange country. In the intervening years aloneness had become my norm, my taken-for-granted context. And yet those same years had changed my sense of myself, of men, of the ground rules for relationships, making it impossible to simply pick up where I left off.”
“Escape from New York,” Ellen Willis in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (via birthdaygrl)
buy No More Nice Girls here
Jan
11
![Marco Roth shared his questions from last night’s event with us. If you weren’t able to attend but would like some reading group fodder, these are fascinating ways of looking at Emily Carter’s Glory Goes and Gets Some. People who were there: weren’t her answers incredible?
* One of the great things about the collection is how you structure your stories often by playing off a term, acronym or diagnosis. You do great things with the scarlet letter A, but I’m thinking mostly of the story called “The Bride,” a condensed memoir in its own right, where you introduce us to “pwv”—person with a vagina—pwa—person with AIDS—“glamour girl,” “bride of Frankenstein,” “addict,” and “the compliant personality,” just to name a few. These terms are all imposed on you from the outside, and yet you manage to make them your own and make them meaningful—simultaneously an act of resistance and acceptance. Can you talk a bit about this process of acronym appropriation, how conscious you were that this is what you were doing as you were writing, or at what point you realized that the labels that professionals and peers put on you didn’t oblige your complete surrender and submission to those labels?
*Genre Fiction and psychoanalysis, “Dawn of the Dread”—the first radio story, WLUV, the enchantment of inanimate objects. A mixed blessing to have a relative as your interviewer, since I know that you’re an aficionada of Japanese horror and monster movies—I’d like you to read this passage on p. 70 and then talk a little about what drew you to horror films and then also a more difficult question about memoir writing and recalling childhood: do you find that certain sensations of childhood can only be recaptured and brought out on the page via allusions to what’s usually called “genre fiction”? Maybe another way to ask this is to suggest that as children we’re subject to fearful emotions whose objective correlatives we meet only later in the pages of genre fiction or on the movie screen.
* Following off of this, although you express what’s almost become a de rigeur disgust for and rejection of psychoanalysts, you and I both know that it’s not so easy to bury the corpse of the Freudian father, and once in psychoanalysis, even as a background to family life, it’s very hard to get out of it…So, here’s your chance to discuss about what you learned from psychoanalysis, has it helped you as a writer?
*Another thing that will surprise readers of “Glory” is how many of the stories are really about and from the point of view of other people who are not Glory. Men, especially. [Bad Boy Walking story and Zemecki’s Cat…and then a cast of memorialized ex-boyfriends, men met in bars, etc…] What led you to draw these portraits of down-and-out male loners, recovering addicts and perverts?
*You lived on the LES when it was still dangerous; you lived in Williamsburg in 1989, I think, before it was gentrified; you were punk from the beginning, Goth before people knew to call it that, you got tattoos when it was still seen as transgressive or lower class, how do you feel now when you see how what was a visceral and original style for you has become part of “fashion,” inoculated against transgression?
* What, if anything, would you change about this book, looking back on it ten years after publication? Are there things you’d add to it?
Perhaps particularly about HIV as it becomes not just “no longer a death sentence,” but also something that’s faded as a cultural signifier. You convey a sense of what it’s like to live with a chronic condition, but it seems to me that you can sometimes be almost decorous about the details of various side effects and opportunistic infections. This might be a reflection of my own experience of living with a PWA who dealt with the disease at an obsessively micro-biological level, but I’m curious whether you felt that a certain degree of medical realism might be more than the average reader could be asked to bear.
* How would you distinguish the feminism in your work from your mother’s or from Katie’s. Is it important to you that readers understand your work as feminist? If not, why not?](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxndpn8ANW1ql9sv8o1_250.jpg)
Marco Roth shared his questions from last night’s event with us. If you weren’t able to attend but would like some reading group fodder, these are fascinating ways of looking at Emily Carter’s Glory Goes and Gets Some. People who were there: weren’t her answers incredible?
* One of the great things about the collection is how you structure your stories often by playing off a term, acronym or diagnosis. You do great things with the scarlet letter A, but I’m thinking mostly of the story called “The Bride,” a condensed memoir in its own right, where you introduce us to “pwv”—person with a vagina—pwa—person with AIDS—“glamour girl,” “bride of Frankenstein,” “addict,” and “the compliant personality,” just to name a few. These terms are all imposed on you from the outside, and yet you manage to make them your own and make them meaningful—simultaneously an act of resistance and acceptance. Can you talk a bit about this process of acronym appropriation, how conscious you were that this is what you were doing as you were writing, or at what point you realized that the labels that professionals and peers put on you didn’t oblige your complete surrender and submission to those labels?
*Genre Fiction and psychoanalysis, “Dawn of the Dread”—the first radio story, WLUV, the enchantment of inanimate objects. A mixed blessing to have a relative as your interviewer, since I know that you’re an aficionada of Japanese horror and monster movies—I’d like you to read this passage on p. 70 and then talk a little about what drew you to horror films and then also a more difficult question about memoir writing and recalling childhood: do you find that certain sensations of childhood can only be recaptured and brought out on the page via allusions to what’s usually called “genre fiction”? Maybe another way to ask this is to suggest that as children we’re subject to fearful emotions whose objective correlatives we meet only later in the pages of genre fiction or on the movie screen.
* Following off of this, although you express what’s almost become a de rigeur disgust for and rejection of psychoanalysts, you and I both know that it’s not so easy to bury the corpse of the Freudian father, and once in psychoanalysis, even as a background to family life, it’s very hard to get out of it…So, here’s your chance to discuss about what you learned from psychoanalysis, has it helped you as a writer?
*Another thing that will surprise readers of “Glory” is how many of the stories are really about and from the point of view of other people who are not Glory. Men, especially. [Bad Boy Walking story and Zemecki’s Cat…and then a cast of memorialized ex-boyfriends, men met in bars, etc…] What led you to draw these portraits of down-and-out male loners, recovering addicts and perverts?
*You lived on the LES when it was still dangerous; you lived in Williamsburg in 1989, I think, before it was gentrified; you were punk from the beginning, Goth before people knew to call it that, you got tattoos when it was still seen as transgressive or lower class, how do you feel now when you see how what was a visceral and original style for you has become part of “fashion,” inoculated against transgression?
* What, if anything, would you change about this book, looking back on it ten years after publication? Are there things you’d add to it?
Perhaps particularly about HIV as it becomes not just “no longer a death sentence,” but also something that’s faded as a cultural signifier. You convey a sense of what it’s like to live with a chronic condition, but it seems to me that you can sometimes be almost decorous about the details of various side effects and opportunistic infections. This might be a reflection of my own experience of living with a PWA who dealt with the disease at an obsessively micro-biological level, but I’m curious whether you felt that a certain degree of medical realism might be more than the average reader could be asked to bear.
* How would you distinguish the feminism in your work from your mother’s or from Katie’s. Is it important to you that readers understand your work as feminist? If not, why not?
Nov
2
Are We Sisters Under the Skin Yet?
Recently I stumbled across a photo of Ryan Gosling. You know the one. “Hey girl. My perfect Saturday is a hot cup of tea, a trip to the Farmer’s market and curling up on the couch to figure out bell hooks’ theory that feminism is a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture with you.” Soon after, I read “Sisters Under the Skin?” by Ellen Willis. In this 1982 essay, Willis analyzes two then-recent books by feminist authors that address the question of why the contemporary feminist movement is so white. One of those authors is bell hooks. Feminist Ryan and I had our Saturday cut out for us.
Oct
21
Getting It
“All this stuff about the Ellen Willis book is so vague,” a friend of mine wrote to me last night. “Because I’m not a chick I’ve only read her rock criticism, which I love. Could you have someone post a summary of some kind of the book and perhaps a piece going negative on it. Right now all I’m getting is rah rah rah.”
I found this obnoxious but fair, to some extent, so I decided to address it here.
Oct
17
Not The Border But The Space
by Zan Romanoff
For many years I did not consider myself a feminist. If you had asked me I would have denied that I was one; I would have equivocated about “not being sure what that meant,” about equal rights vs. exceptionalism, about the various particular feminists I’d met or read and disagreed with. The quibbles themselves were more and less legitimate, but it would be a long time before I learned that picking holes in the argument and finding a nuanced little isle of opinion for myself wasn’t the point: if I couldn’t admit to being part of that messy, difficult, and yes, sometimes humorless tribe in the first place, all of my equivocating added up to very little: I was refining myself right out of the conversation by pretending that my voice didn’t belong there in the first place. I still wouldn’t want a place in Feminism as I imagined it (somehow both monolithic and incoherent), but that was an edifice I constructed out of whole cloth because I found feminism compelling but embarrassing and I wanted a smart way out of it, thanks.
Oct
10
“This company spent thousands of dollars flying Shannon and I to LA, to meet with their team and they can’t even remember what we discussed. Nor do they care to. They want me to write something happy go-lucky about how positive our meeting was for women everywhere, and then they want to sign off on it, you know, in case I forget anything.
Well, news fucking flash: that’s not what I’m doing. I said that I would write about what I saw no matter what it was, and the three sentences of that email tell more truth about what went on in this bizarro adventure than anything I saw in that factory or those offices.
I had a couple of websites offer to run this blog, or run the email, but I figured I’d do it here, on my own. I wanted to be able to write what I felt and exactly how I felt it, and let the repercussions of that fall squarely on my shoulders, just in case there are any.
If there’s anything else I could possibly have to say (for I’ve certainly said a lot), it’s that I started this journey on what was a big (ha) joke about perception. The way we see other people defines them for us, more than any other form you can know or interact with a person.
My perception about this company was basically “they know not what they do.” Then I met a lot of them, and it changed to, “they know not what they do, but boy are they trying to fix that.” Now, it’s somewhere along the lines of “how can you possibly not understand what you do?” I hope they figure it out.”
Well, news fucking flash: that’s not what I’m doing. I said that I would write about what I saw no matter what it was, and the three sentences of that email tell more truth about what went on in this bizarro adventure than anything I saw in that factory or those offices.
I had a couple of websites offer to run this blog, or run the email, but I figured I’d do it here, on my own. I wanted to be able to write what I felt and exactly how I felt it, and let the repercussions of that fall squarely on my shoulders, just in case there are any.
If there’s anything else I could possibly have to say (for I’ve certainly said a lot), it’s that I started this journey on what was a big (ha) joke about perception. The way we see other people defines them for us, more than any other form you can know or interact with a person.
My perception about this company was basically “they know not what they do.” Then I met a lot of them, and it changed to, “they know not what they do, but boy are they trying to fix that.” Now, it’s somewhere along the lines of “how can you possibly not understand what you do?” I hope they figure it out.”
“That’s not our demographic.”: If A Tree Falls in the Forest…
Please read this whole thing if you haven’t already. And then get your next pair of leggings somewhere other than American Apparel.
“… it seemed like everything that gave me pleasure, kept me sane, soothed (or distracted from) the world of female otherness was a function of my privileges — education, leisure, certain kinds of self-esteem, work I enjoyed that let me live like a bohemian, and most crucially the luxury of distance, therefore insulation, from certain kinds of human misery.”
— Ellen Willis, “Coming Down Again,” 1992
