Though the hashtag #NotYourAsianSidekick ‘erupted’ at the end of last year, it has been on my mind lately as I think through how various social media platforms are used for or facilitate certain kinds of interactions, and how those interactions are often coded through dichotomies of virtual/real and talk/action. For those who missed it, #NotYourAsianSidekick was a hashtag started by 23-year-old Suey Park to refocus attention on issues such as racism towards Asian-Americans in ‘feminist’ spaces, exotification, the ‘model minority’ myth and other microaggressons and forms of structural opppression faced by Asian-Americans. (See some Tweets at BlogHer.)

How many times have I had to say that #NotYourAsianSidekick is about women of color feminism? Well y'all are about to find out. Step aside.—
Angry Asian Woman (@suey_park) March 29, 2014

“I think for a lot of women who don’t feel like they can really come out as feminist, #NotYourAsianSidekick is a way to come into that conversation,” Park told the Washington Post. Calling it a ‘conversation’ highlights not only its text-based but also its dialectic and interactive nature; it necessitates multiple speakers. On a note which I will return to later, the Post referred to Park as an ‘organizer,’ a term often used for those involved in coordinating more ‘traditional’ protests in physical spaces. If we are increasingly using digital platforms as the location of resisting or negotiating power, are ‘conversations’ replacing ‘protests?’

It would be too easy to create this additional dichotomy. As the coverage of #NotYourAsianSidekick shows, there are resonances between what we think of as ‘traditional’ protests (in our romanticization and fetishization of 60s-era activism) and these online political moments. Screenshots of hashtags easily function like photographs, used to illustrate how the drama unfolds of escalates, as #NotYourAsianSidekick was presented on Buzzfeed, and interjected with narration: “The hashtag immediately caught on. First, to recognize the patriarchy that exists in Asian-American cultures.” Thus while a hashtag may seem static, through dialogue it actually facilitates exploration of an issue—that is, movement.

While Occupy Wall Street was criticized and dismissed for not having a singular, coherent message, a key distinction between the kind of organizing that happens on Twitter and the kind that happens in physical spaces (marches, sit-ins, etc.) is that Twitter allows, embraces and encourages a plurality of messages. Hashtags allow messages to be both individual and collective; there is no need for a ‘unifying’ message because the hashtag is designed to provide it. The hashtag allowed Park and other to talk about a range of intersecting issues: “queerness, disability, immigration, multiracial/biracial issues, compulsory coalitions, challenging anti-blackness, mental health, body image, and all things feminism. It was all of the things we were told to never talk about,” Park told Buzzfeed.

In the introduction to her book ‘Tactical Media,’ Rita Raley writes that “Rather than interfering with the operations of infrastructure, Web activism aims to transform the social conditions in which that infrastructure is situated.” Though she is focusing on electronic civil disobedience (e.g. ‘hactivism’), this is a key point for understanding #NotYourAsianSidekick as well. As Park and others expressed during #NotYourAsianSidekick, not only are there taboo subjects within activist communities, but for Asian-American women specifically, stereotypes of submissiveness, obedience and docility are used as silencing tools. Therefore while a post on Asian-American activism, feminist and pop culture blog Reappropriate claimed that “#NotYourAsianSidekick also proves that Twitter is the wrong place to have this conversation. 140 characters isn’t enough to express a lifetime of experiences — both oppressive and uplifting — and to be able to do it in a place where it can be heard and taken seriously,” Park and the other participants demonstrated that they in fact could operate within the infrastructure to contest the conditions outside of it—in this case, the way in which society perpetuates a model of female Asian passivity and silence.

#NotYourAsianSidekick dug up this old circular w/ me, Yuri, Helen, Grace. Fierce.@gregorycendana RT @isabelspeaking http://t.co/wy9U6G1StF”—
Mari Matsuda (@mari_matsuda) December 16, 2013

Predictably, #NotYourAsianSidekick was problematized for not being material enough. On Time.com, a piece by Kai Ma entitled “#NotYourAsianSidekick is Great. Now Can We Get Some Real Social Change?” made a strict distinction between ‘digital activism’ and ‘social change,’ argued that “an ephemeral platform like the Internet—though it may feel cathartic—is not always terrible productive,” and celebrated that “according to it’s website, #NotYourAsianSidekick has plans to take this beyond Twitter.” According to Ma, “it has to.”

But as John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt write in their analysis of the Zapatista movement in Networks and Netwards, “The overall aim is sustainable pulsing—swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse.” What Ma dismisses as ‘ephemeral’ is actually a crucial component of #NotYourAsianSidekick. The ability to ‘swarm’ around a target—in this case, intersections of racism and sexism—and disperse just as quickly is what allows so many issues to occupy space in different temporal moments.

Similarly to the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s statement that “this is a Protest. FloodNet is not a game,” Park said: “This is not a trend, this is a movement.” As forms of power and oppression become increasingly decentralized, we need to think beyond protests occurring at symbol sites of power (like the lunch counter) and beyond social movements as needing a specific endpoint or goal—the point is to keep moving, and to create ripples in the process.

This is not a trend, this is a movement. Everybody calm down and buckle down for the long haul, please.—
Angry Asian Woman (@suey_park) December 16, 2013

By Sophia Seawell, Co-Editor-in-Chief

The first image: a young boy, around 6 years old, grinning on a an outdoor track. He wears a white shirt with a paper on the front reading “43 / Endeavor Games,” and blue shorts. He wears prosthetic legs designed for athletics and appears to be walking or jogging toward the camera. Lime green text is superimposed on top of the image in the center, reading, “your excuse is invalid.”

The second image: a woman with her back to the camera overlooking a beach with her arms outstretched to her sides. She has long brown hair, wears a short-sleeve white shirt, and is in a wheelchair. White text is superimposed on the top of the image, reading: “Never Ignore Somebody With a Disability, You Don’t Realize How Much They Can Inspire You !!” Text on the right side of the screen, below the previous text, reads: “Share If You Agree.”

You might be familiar with these pictures. For many people, seeing people with disabilities accomplish feats that we assume can only be done by an able-bodied person is inspirational; it reminds us that if people with disabilities can overcome their challenges, then why can’t we?

Images like these and the quotes accompanying them are known as inspiration porn. Think about it: why do you find that person inspirational? This sympathetic reaction, based on the perception that people with disabilities have to struggle more than able-bodied people to get through life, places that person in a lower status and instantly “others” them while able-bodied people or people whose disabilities do not hinder them in their everyday lives sit comfortably in easier life.

While these and similar images have become ubiquitous on platforms like Facebook, where the dissemination of ordinary photos does not often extend beyond your friends, Tumblr has created a space for both propagation of and dissent from this ideology.

“If Facebook is the social network for online identification and authentication, and Twitter is for communication, Tumblr fulfills a different role: self-expression,” writes Leonard Bell. This platform makes the creation and sharing of new content, particularly visual content, possible in only a few clicks. The easy-to-understand site also gives users the opportunity to share content in text, quote, audio, video, chat, link, and more.

There has recently been a heightened awareness of the relation of our physical bodies to those in the online world. On Tumblr, where users have the opportunity to create an identity through their own blog, dashboard, and interactions with other bloggers, this relation to the body is more complex.

Let’s brush up on disability theory

1. There are two models of disability: the medical model and the social model. The medical model views disability as inherently impairing. A woman born with one arm is worse off because of the lack of a limb, seen as a defect. The social model of disability views disability as the result of a built environment and ideology that exclude anyone who does not fit into the category of an “able body,” on other words, a systemic form of ableism. Imagine a world where all humans were born without legs. How would the world look different? Would there be “handicap” parking spots? Stairs? In this post, I accept the the social model of disability, which is becoming more widely accepted over the outdated medical model.

In the image above, a cartoon depicts a woman using a wheelchair at the bottom of stairs next to a sign that reads “WAY IN [arrow pointing up the stairs], Everyone Welcome!” Speech bubble on left reads: “Her impairment is the problem! They should cure her or give her prosthetics,” coming from “The medical model of disability.” Speech bubble on the right reads: “The stairs are the problem! They should build a ramp,” coming from “the social model of disability.”

2. Terminology: Word choice is a delicate issue. Let’s break it down:

The word handicap(ed) has become derogatory. Plain and simple. The only time it is appropriate is when referring to non-human things like a “handicapped parking spot” or a “handicapped bathroom.”

As a general rule, I will use people-first language. Calling someone a “disabled” person literally and metaphorically puts the disability in front of the person, assuming that a disability is the most important part of one’s identity. It is not all that different from the recent discussion about gay marriage, that asks, ‘why can’t it just be called “marriage?”’ There are fantastic, strong counter-arguments to people-first language available here and here.

When talking about people with disabilities, what it ultimately comes down to is simple: “Nothing about us without us.” Ask someone what they prefer. While it may seem awkward at first, it’s much less awkward than being tongue-tied or insensitive, and they might even appreciate it.

Now that the basics are out of the way, we can return to Tumblr and why it is such a timely and intriguing way to look at disability. The question of digital embodiment, or the identity attached your physical body IRL vs. the online identity, has become a commonly used starting point in other areas of the digital humanities. Tumblr has been at the crux of this discussion based on the user’s abilities built into the platform and the people who engage with its content. For those of you unfamiliar with Tumblr, there are a handful of ways that users can create identities on the platform. The first is through the “about” section in the header or sidebar of their blog (example here), or on an optional “about” page (example here). Descriptions in the header or sidebar must be succinct and deliberate; the limited space (and taboo quality of having too much text on an otherwise visual blog) combined with the visibility of the section gives it significance in how the user identifies. Users will sometimes use this space for a single meaningful line or quote (example here). An “about” page offers a similar space, but without the strict confines of space. The second is through the actual aesthetic of the blog, including content and theme. Themes exist to minimize or exaggerate, creating a critical atmosphere. In adding and reblogging posts, users create a unique identity that tells you about that person’s interests, style, and even pieces of their daily lives. Scrolling through a blog allows you to make sense of their identity and how it has been established and changed over time. Finally, when users follow blogs, they curate a dashboard visible only to them. In scrolling through one’s dashboard, users interact with a reflection of their own interests, and perhaps even a reflection of themselves. The more time one spends on Tumblr, whether on a computer, tablet, or phone, the more Tumblr influences our understanding of identities online.

Now, let’s return to the main subject: Inspiration Porn

A widely circulated definition of inspiration porn, via Tumblr, is as follows:

Via the Lame Dame

We can apply this definition of inspiration porn to the following post by Cracked.com on their Tumblr account:

As you can see, the post has had 429 notes (likes and reblogs). When you scroll through the notes, you can see what users added when reblogging the post. Examples include:

“Getting there on two legs was hard enough. Mad respect.”

“Shit”

“Ugh these disabled people going out and doing things and I’m just sitting here trying to pass my tests”

“my excuse is that climbing a mountain is a stupid way to use your time”

“My legs hurt”

“If you can do things without legs, that 99% of people with all four limbs can’t, I don’t think you’re “disabled”.”

“What am I doing with my life?”

“NOW make excuses…”

A handful were seemingly neutral in terms of his disability (“What an awesome feat. Done Mt. Kenya, Tanzania is next on the list”). Only one user expressed dissatisfaction (“Cracked, you utter wanks, stop making disabled people into your fucking motivational pinups you smarmy bastards”).

Posts like these, which have been floating around Tumblr for years, and the growth of the idea of inspiration porn motivated users to push back in greater numbers.

(Even more responses to inspiration porn can be found here, here, and here)

Some users decided to take a different approach.

 In December of 2012, The Lame Dame posted the following image of herself in response to yet another display of inspiration po

rn:

Other users reblogged her post, adding their own photos:   

[Each of the four images show young women doing ordinary things. Text is superimposed over each of the images, reflecting what each of the women is doing. The post showing all of the response photographs was reblogged hundreds of times. Since the community of people who self-identify with a disability is relatively small and somewhat scattered, we know that these images reached people who may not have any other interest in the representation of people with disabilities.

How inspiration porn fits into the spectrum of digital dualism and the rhetoric of ableism is something I can only assess after delving more in depth into the world of disability on Tumblr in the coming weeks. For now, I will let these last images be food for thought.

By Meagan Miller, Contributor

Images via tumblr.com and Google Images

Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American zine-maker, writer, illustrator, Green Day fan, Gemini and all-round bad-ass. She has published several illustrated books—Indestructible (2006), Bad Habits: A Love Story (2008), Spit and Passion (2012)—and is currently working on a tarot card deck and making music with her band, The Homewreckers. Road was part of the Sister Spit: The Next Generation Tour in 2007 and the POC Zine Project Race Riot! Tour in 2012.

Recently Bluestockings Magazine’s Co-Editor-in-Chief, Sophia Seawell, had the chance to talk to Road in a three-part interview series. In the first segment, Road spoke about zine-making, publishing, and the pernicious omnipresence of capitalism. In the second installment, Road talked about her relationship with the punk scene as a queer woman of color. In this segment, she’ll discuss themes of gender and sexuality as they overlap in her life and work.

To see some of her work visit her website.

***

Sophia Seawell: What you said earlier about the ‘kind of gay’ that is marketable makes me think about the ending of ‘Spit and Passion.’ It seems to me like you’re talking about the closet not necessarily as this awful, constricting place that you can’t wait to escape, but a place where you can figure out your own subjecthood. How do you feel are about the way in which the closet metaphor and the coming out narrative are talked about, and the former celebrated, in our culture right now?

Cristy Road: I think it’s awesome to talk about coming out, and I would love to write something about coming out to my family. I haven’t done that yet, and I probably will, but at the same time I don’t have that desire to. It was a happy and positive thing, but what led to it is what is more important to me, which was being in the closet for a million years and trying to survive it.

I do think it’s important to talk about these things from whatever angle, but when I started working on ‘Spit and Passion’ I didn’t have that much of a vision—it actually started as a sci-fi graphic novel about this world in the future that is exposed to radiation and there’s a lot of mutant happenings with animals and people. That world is socialist, and there’s a capitalist world in this dome. So I’m writing this story but I’m focusing on this character who happens to love Green Day and happens to be 12 and she’s in the closet. She was gonna have this internet romance with someone in the capitalist world, but then I keep writing about this character who loves this punk band and she’s gay and she’s this new world’s version of Latino so I was like, ‘I might as well just write about myself!’ So I started doing that kind of organically just because that’s what I felt like writing about.

And then those ‘It Gets Better’ campaigns started, and I thought they were weird and I thought they were unproductive. This is where the money is going as far as queer empowerment and media, this is where industries are putting their money: in this very assimilated safe propaganda for queerness. It was disappointing to see that. It was kind of the same as when gay marriage became legalized in New York and how that was seen as the primary struggle, like ‘Let’s put all our energy into gay marriage.’ But that’s not what we need right now. We need healthcare and transgender rights and less ‘gaystream’ (as the punks call it) and more justice for the queers who need that justice.

There’s already power in a lot of gay communities, but there’s still oppression, still places in the world where being gay is criminalized. So we still have to fight for these very basic rights, and for me it feels more important to give your attention and money and power to the people who don’t feel free, who don’t have this very happy ‘It gets better, I told my mom when I was 17 and everything was fine and she threw me party’ story.

SS: Right, for a lot of people coming out might mean risking being kicked out of their home, or for others being ‘out’ doesn’t change the fact that they don’t have healthcare and need it, or can’t visit their partner in the hospital. It reduces the narrative to pivot on one thing.

And speaking of gay marriage, I was really interested in the way you talk about religion and your relationship to it in ‘Spit and Passion,’ because mainstream feminist communities and movements in the U.S. have generally been pretty secular and framed religion as the patriarchal ‘enemy,’ an the obstacle between people and their liberation. Could you speak about how your religion and spirituality are part of your politics, if at all?

CR: I think the removal of religion from feminism is very white, that it comes from a very second-wave, white, privileged feminism where spirituality doesn’t matter. Everyone’s hailing the goddess but for some reason we’re not allowed to identify as Catholic. So in these communities where culture is more important than queerness, in a lot of situations we want to hold on to the spirituality. Taking away all the power from celestial bodies, your ancestors and nature is so patriarchal! That’s where capitalism came from! So much feminism and anarchism is perpetuating patriarchy by removing spirituality, because you’re taking away everything that came before you, you’re taking away the earth where you live, you’re taking away native beliefs, things that existed in indigenous native communities before slavery, before colonialism. Growing up in a family that was Latino, we cared about spirituality and ancestry was very sacred—and there is a lot of spirituality that exists in white communities and different communities all over the world, but as far as feminism and anarchism and anti-capitalism… For me at least, in order to find anti-capitalist work or ideas that are spiritual, I feel like I always end up going to people who might not even identify as anti-capitalist but just are—like witches. Las brujas.

If you don’t have the ancestral connection to whatever native culture or spiritual culture or witchcraft or whatever you want to call it but you’re still spiritual and connected to the idea of a goddess or to tarot or astrology, I think that’s really awesome. And that definitely exists, but it’s still very compartmentalized within the radical feminist third wave community. I have been in situations where I go to an anarchist punk event and I start talking about spirituality and reclaiming the Virgin Mary—because I’m Latina, and honoring spirits is about honoring your ethnicity and your culture—and it’s really annoying that if it’s a predominantly white space and they’re anarchist or anti-capitalist and don’t care about gods, then I feel like that’s racist, and if I straight up say that in those spaces, nobody wants to deal with me or they deal with me in a like ‘Oh my God, she’s scary let’s just let her talk about her god’ way.

SS: That’s the thing! Do I not say anything or do I say something and put up with the bullshit that I’m going to get in response? Because both can be really exhausting.

CR: Totally, you just want to hide in your safe space with your fucking brujas.

SS: Speaking of safe spaces, you talk about your family as providing that for you. From the images and descriptions in ‘Spit and Passion’ it seems like you were in a predominantly or only-female household, and earlier you mentioned that you talked about capitalism and sexism at home. How much were issues of gender oppression part of your consciousness as you were growing up?

CR: The idea of women’s empowerment was handed to me because I was surrounded by all working women who worked a bunch of jobs. There were no men. My dad left when I was very young. There were other men here and there, and I ended up having a step dad for a while, and he was rad, but there was still so much power in the femaleness in my upbringing. Like my grandma—everyone revolves around the grandma! I always lived with my mom, my aunt and my grandma, and I had another who was next door, so I felt like I grew up around really intense female energy even despite the fact that I couldn’t be queer and that the butchness of my preteen years was kind of frowned upon. And sometimes it still is, you know? I’m growing my hair out and some family members are a little too excited about it, and it’s like—

SS: ‘I’m not doing this for you.’

CR: Yeah! I’m like, ‘Actually, I’m actually doing this so I can dress more butch and feel centered.’ Right now I have this short hair so I want to wear lipstick and cleavage every single day. I want a ponytail and a butch shirt and I’ll button it all the way to the top and that’s what I’ll wear on Christmas.

So I did grow up with all these ideas of feminine power and there wasn’t much body-shaming, it was very comfortable. It’s a Latin family so it’s like ‘You’re losing weight’ or ‘You’ve gained too much weight’ and you’re never perfect, but there’s still this appreciation of curves and food.

SS: In ‘Spit and Passion’ you describe ordering hot wings and wearing men’s clothing so I was wondering how you see or experience the overlap of gender and sexuality. They can be talked about as discrete things but they seemed intertwined in your book. 

CR: They felt intertwined. They don’t anymore because now I have all this language for identifying as queer and dating women or transgender men or genderqueer people, and that part of my gayness is just about who I’m with and how I experience sexuality. My gender presentation is this whole other thing. I’m older and I feel empowered by both of these things—I can experience them separately. Of course they end up merging when it’s like ‘I’m dating a femme and she wants me to be more butch and I don’t want to’ but as a kid it felt like the same thing: ‘Ew, you like girls’ or ‘Ew, you’re dressed like a boy.’ It’s all the same and it’s all gross. So as a kid I definitely didn’t know how to separate the two experiences. Because it was also this thing where when I would find myself attracted to a masculine person or a boy, I wouldn’t know what to do, because it was the 90s—‘bisexual’ wasn’t a thing, ‘pansexual’ wasn’t a thing, especially to a 12 year old in a super conservative city. It was just all very mixed for me as far as experiencing gender and experiencing sexuality and then it kind of just started making more sense to me the older I got and the more I isolated myself from the conservative communities and I started hanging around more punks and more queer punks and more women.

In punk rock there’s so many butch-looking women who are straight as all hell, straight women who look super masculine, and that was always really awesome to me. I also saw that in hip-hop in the 80s—that women could be super butch and still be straight, and that’s awesome. That’s what I appreciated about punk; that helped me coexist with my queerness and my weird gender that goes back and forth all the time. And I’m now, I’m 31, and I feel the most able to be kind of butch, but mostly femme, but I have a weird voice and sit like a man sometimes. I have very, very masculine traits. My mom doesn’t notice and my best friend doesn’t notice, she always says ‘You can’t help it, you’re so girly’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t really think so.’ I don’t know, I don’t feel it. But I feel it when I’m in a relationship with a masculine person, for example. I feel my femme identity more only because I’m being compared to the masculine. But in regular life, walking down the street talking to people, I feel like my femininity is more of an outfit choice. I identify as cisgender because my female gender identity and my anatomy and experience and all that stuff, it’s queer but I definitely relate all that stuff to identifying as a girl and identifying as female.

SS: There’s so many different moving parts: there’s the gender I was assigned at birth based on my anatomy, there’s the way I was socialized, there’s my gender presentation, there’s the people I’m attracted to, and of course society tells us they’re all supposed to align in this binary heteronormative way.

CR: And then there’s intense femmephobia in the feminist communities, and especially in punk. As I was saying, hella butch straight girls, and when those butch straight girls would give me shit for wearing lipstick and a mini skirt it’s like ‘Oh great, there’s still patriarchy in feminism.’ There have always been so many hurdles to jump through and I feel like I feel normal now because I have a queer community that’s very femme-centric. In my queer community, there’s a large presence of transmasculine people and femmes and none of us were part of a lesbian community because we felt awkward or felt too femme or we were ‘confusing.’ There’s so much patriarchy that still exists in ‘feminist’ communities. I’m not even gonna start talking about Cathy Brennan and all that lesbian separatist and Michfest [Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival]. When there isn’t justice for trans women–

SS: Then you’re just perpetuating gender oppression.

CR: Yeah and I don’t really think there’s a way around it. Like, I’m done. You know how if there’s an older person and they don’t get queerness and someone’s like ‘bear with them, they’re 70,’ I can’t really do that sometimes. I can’t bear with anyone, especially lesbian separatists. I understand that they went through some shit as lesbian in the 70s but how do you think trans women feel?

Interview with Cristy C. Road, conducted by Sophia Seawell, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Images Courtesy of Cristy C. Road

The illustrious lesbian feminist rapper, Brooke Candy, has just released the video for her new single, “Opulence.” It’s the lead single for her much anticipated début EP to be released in May. Never one to shy away from opulent imagery in her ostentatious videos, will Brooke Candy be the next Queen femcee?

By Ragnar Jónsson, Blog Managing Editor

The first time my brother allowed me to play Mario Kart with him on his Nintendo 64, I immediately selected Princess Peach as my player character: the character who I was choosing to control and represent me in the video game. Peach’s shiny hair, princess gloves, and pink dress made me feel as though there was a character just for me in a game that my brother had made seem was just for boys. But as I played the game more I stopped selecting Princess Peach–or any female character. Through strings of losses I learned that my brothers masculine characters, just as they appeared, were in fact faster and more powerful than the feminine characters I was choosing.

Choosing Princess Peach based on her appearance was not an uneducated decision on my part; in versus and battle games in which the operator selects a character based solely on the images presented on the character selection screen, it makes sense for the appearance of each character to represent their personality and skillset. Video game designers therefore costume their characters with an appearance or accessories that reflect their unique abilities.

Character Selection Screen from Mortal Kombat 1 (Source)

One of Mortal Kombat’s more popular characters, Scorpion is costumed with a ninja mask and a jagged sword that communicates his skill in armed combat. Sonic the Hedgehog wears red sneakers and an aerodynamic mohawk to suggest his speed and swiftness.

Sonic The Hedgehog (Source)               Scorpion (Source)

Princess Peach? She wears a gown, dainty gloves, and a clueless expression, which imply nothing as far as skill and ability, unless you consider her special attack: a dimpled, smiling heart that protects her cart.

 Princess Peach (Source)

This is a very basic example of the over-feminized female characters in video games that are patented by features and abilities that are, in the context of the game, disadvantages to those of male characters. (Even the Baby Mario character of Mario Kart releases a ball and chain as his special attack.) New or old-school, hero or sidekick, female video game characters like Princess Peach are too often designed as stereotypically feminine. We most often see female video game characters featured in dresses, skirts or skimpy clothing, wearing bows and make-up, and maintaining dainty, delicate, or over-sexualized dispositions. These features make any character disadvantaged in race or combat. Such stereotypical signifiers, which were specifically drawn into the design of the characters, are then mechanized as disadvantages. These characters not only stereotype women, but also send the message that qualities specific to females are limitations to a character’s ability.

Tina Armstrong (Source)

We see this heuristic in detail in games that include history and backstories when introducing each player character for the operator to choose from. Tina Armstrong, a player character in the Dead or Alive fighting game, is described to have joined the fighting tournament in hopes of becoming discovered as an actress or supermodel. Not only does this description make for an over sexualized and unfavorable player character for a combat game, but Tina’s character is a legitimate disadvantage in the second round of the game, where her father joins the tournament to defeat her and put an end to her dream.

Ayane’s backstory in DOA includes little more than her having been raped by male character Raidou, and her jealousy and hatred toward her more attractive older sister. Meanwhile, male players such as Jann Lee and Bayman are depicted as brave and skilled fighters with backstories that praise their years of discipline and success in mastering specific fighting styles. Again, we see absurd stereotypes designed into female characters as disadvantages, crafting them to hardly be playable and reverting them into side stories that exist only to ‘spice up’ the DOA backstory with sex and farce.

According to Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, the lack of strong female characters present in video games is due to the fact that “there’s a sense in the industry that games with female heroes won’t sell”. However, it seems that this is only true because of the manner in which female video game characters are designed. It is less the female character that wouldn’t sell, but what is currently designed as the female character. The predominantly male (88.5%) and heterosexual (92%) community of game developers designs their female characters as weak, distracted, and as having vices. Male or female, it is obvious that such a hero would never sell. By lifting the ‘damsel in distress’ heuristic from female video game characters and designing female characters that are as capable and badass as are present in real life, women could easily take the role of the hero- and could absolutely sell video games.

By Eugenia Zobel De Ayala, Contributor 

For further discussion of the Damsel in Distress trope, check out the in-depth, 3-part video series on Feminist Frequency

Retail “Tribal Print” Crop-Tops

I remember looking out the window of my mother’s car as she drove me home after school. I remember seeing a bumper sticker that read, “I was Indian before it was cool,” on a curiously pristine 1982 black Datsun with the tacky neon decal scribbles on the side. I instantly imagined the driver  riding a zoomorphic horse version of his awesome truck. No saddle. Stereotypically ribbon-like Native hair blowing in the wind. The fantasy Native is easy for anyone to imagine.

And despite being a rather naive 14 years old, I had an inkling of the kind of person the sticker referred to. Having grown up closer to a reservation than a college town (i.e., hundreds of miles away from anyone who’d wear a headdress for fun), I knew it had to be an earthy variety of white person almost foreign to me. I’d occasionally see them at powwows – sore, pale thumbs wading dumbly in a crowd of melanin, interested in soaking up all the culture the Southwest has to offer. But where did they come from? Surely if my people had homelands, they did too. (Or maybe they didn’t and that’s why they colonized the world.) I became accustomed to the tannic variety of white people; the reservation border town white people who would try to convert me to Christianity and wave confederate flags (sometimes at the same time, like a Spanish Inquisition color guard), not ones who’d ask me questions like, “Wow! Like, yeah so have you been on a vision quest?” or casually don a pair of dreamcatcher earrings in my presence. Because that’s what dreamcatchers are for, wearing on your ears when you’re awake.

I can almost detect sense of disbelief at my presence when people tell me I’m the first Native they’ve ever met. There’s a tinge of disappointment in some people’s voices that tells me they weren’t expecting me and I’ve somehow ruined the fun. It’s as if they’ve spent their entire lives with this image in mind of what an ”Indian” is like and in comparison I’m profoundly disappointing with my wavy hair, shifty eyes, indifference to alcohol. The only chief I know is Chief Keef (bang bang). The real life “Indian” spoils the fantasy and crashes the appropriation party. She tells you your Minnetonka moccasins look stupid, spends her Halloweens wishing someone would walk past her in a headdress. She thinks Dan Snyder should keep his blankets, but not his football team (and their losing record). She won’t be your mascot and she’s not your sexy squaw.

Fall of my sophomore year of high school my uncle and my aunt died, leaving their son and daughter (ages 12 and 7 at the time, respectively) orphaned. The family gathered in the kitchen to break the news to my cousins while I sat in the adjacent living room. After a few moments I could hear muffled weeps through the walls, then silence. Silence for a long time. Time moves pretty slowly right after people die. And then laughter. At first I thought they were the high energy cries that sound like laughter, but no. This was actual something-funny-made-me-laugh laughter. And then time sped up. You see, my family, like a lot of other Native families, can’t be serious for too long. Push aside those stoic “Indian” stereotypes in your mind because we laugh a lot. Even after people die. This isn’t to say that racist mascots, Pocahontas, and Tonto don’t have real negative psychological consequences for us, because they sure as hell do (exposure to them is correlated with a lower sense of self esteem and community worth in Native American people). But we all would have keeled over long ago from broken hearts and broken treaties if we didn’t sneak in a laugh or two (usually at the expense of white people). Laughter is a form of medicine. Laughter doesn’t buffer us from harm; it takes that harm and turns it into something beautiful.

So when I pass a girl on the main green in a crop top from Urban Outfitters with a Navajo rug design on it, on the most basic level, yes I am hurt. I am hurt because she probably doesn’t even know it’s a Native design. She probably doesn’t know that my mother’s parents would have had their mouths washed out with soap and been beaten with a cane if they dared to wear that same pattern to boarding school in the 40s. She probably doesn’t know that this pattern once told a story woven by a Navajo woman on a loom that rested on the earthen floor of a hogan. But that story has long since been lost, white-washed and beaten out of her children. This girl in this crop top doesn’t know that my culture exists, that I exist because in the mind of the American consciousness, Native Americans are dead. We’re costumes to put on when one feels like getting in touch with nature, we’re mere tools of “artistic” expression and not living, breathing, feeling people. It hurts when you’re nothing but a drunk, sexy, stoic, freeloading — but above all — defunct symbol to an entire continent that rightfully belongs to your people. We’re not vanished, but this girl thinks I’m more interesting when I’m dead. Her oblivion is so blatant and in such direct contradiction to my existence, it’s hilarious. So hilarious that I have to make eye contact with her and giggle in her face as I pass her.

I am alive and I am Indigenous and I am laughing at you.

By Myacah Sampson, Contributing Writer

When the story of Solange Knowles attacking Jay-Z in the elevator broke, my Facebook transformed into an endless repository of commentary and speculation. Not only was TMZ predictably all over the story, but major news outlets and online feminist publications also got caught up in the feeding frenzy. At first I thought I had missed out on the latest piece of major ‘Yoncé news that I could chew on with my friends over dinner, but as I continued scrolling, I couldn’t help but feel this crawly, troublesome feeling while reading.

Take the celebrity out of the mix, and the affair was an instance of domestic violence, plain and simple. While the event could potentially remind people of difficult personal experiences, no trigger warnings graced the news coverage. In fact, the media handled the violence as a profitable and at times comical commodity. This type of reporting is trivializing and unacceptable, playing off gender and racial stereotypes. Solange has been portrayed as an overly-emotional, potentially insane woman.  She has also been subject to negative depictions of Black femininity, with media coverage depicting her as the substance-abusing “angry Black woman.” Through the framing of this event, the media has lampooned Solange for fulfilling these stereotypes to a “comical” extent. Beyoncé, on the other hand, has been criticized for being a bystander in the altercation. Oh, the paradox: Solange gets endlessly parodied for (allegedly) conforming, while Beyoncé is made fun of for not living up to the same stereotypes. Demeaning memes have exploded all over the Tumblr blogosphere with the same patterns.

Jay-Z hasn’t escaped the firestorm, either. Remember that warn-out grade-school tease, “You fight like a girl?” Similar deal. This does not change the fact that 15% of domestic abuse victims are men, and 1 out of 4 women (24.3%) and 1 out of 7 men (13.8%) over 18 in the United States “have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.” While this particular event was not between intimate partners, domestic abuse is a rampant problem. Men are victimized too, whether or not it’s discussed or reported. Being beaten by a female means that Jay-Z hasn’t conformed to historically manufactured ideals of Black masculinity: angry, crazy, violent, athletic, and animalistic. Yet he, too, has been criticized.

I don’t mean to confuse mainstream media with Tumblr. I’m all about blogging and its ability to bring marginalized voices to light. Yet in this instance, the two seem to mimic each other in their perspectives. I have little faith in mainstream media getting it all right on a consistent basis, especially in cases like this. I believe that blogs, Tumblr, etc. (as well as activism in general) have the potential to create a groundswell that is eventually reflected in the mainstream. But even Jezebel and Tumblr have not been able to able to overcome their cultural obsession with Beyoncé that has spawned this uncritical media coverage. Where has the extensive Beyoncé feminist fan social media presence been to critically analyze the recent events?

To be perfectly honest, “researching” to write this article made me even more uncomfortable than I had been starting out. I feel like I partook in the same mass media consumption that I was critiquing, intimately invading the personal lives of a family that I do not know. And while I may pretend to be Beyoncé while emphatically singing “Single Ladies” in the shower, my image of her is just that: an image. I do not know her personal struggles (or Solange or Jay-Z’s, for that matter). What if Beyoncé is—gasp—human like the rest of us? That only makes her accomplishments all the more worthy of legitimate, contextualized praise.

This could have been (and could be) a moment of cultural growth that used the superstar status of the people involved to spark discussion, similar to the conversations following the Chris Brown assault on Rihanna back in 2009. Yet even worse than the lack of conversation has been Tumblr’s joking conflation of the two. This diminishes the seriousness of both assaults and domestic abuse more broadly, and wipes away the memory of the discussion of abuse surrounding the Chris Brown instance. For example, this image focuses on the pair’s masculinity, as if Chris Brown’s presence is supposed to make up for the aggressive, Black male stereotype, predicated on the degradation of women, that Jay-Z failed to uphold.

Sifting through yet more posts on Tumblr with the hashtag #solangegate, I came across one that read “I relate to Beyonce because I’ve been in that situation way too many times.” Though buried in the Internet abyss, the post gave me hope a discussion would happen in the future. I understand that what’s done is done; the media has already gotten a hold of these tapes and interspersed the public into private lives.  What I hope that we can take from this moment is to use the widespread media coverage to talk about issues worthy of conversation – namely, domestic abuse, constraining gender roles, and oppressive racial stereotypes.

By Malana Krongelb, Culture Editor

Images via Tumblr and the Atlanta Black Star

A tired, but always needed, conversation of colorism in the POC (people of color) community is in constant rotation. Colorism is a manifestation of how Western imperialism has exported European ideals, most notably the universal idealization of light skin, to American shores; not only have whites discriminated against blacks because of skin color, but people of color have also discriminated against one another, according to Ronald E. Hall, Ph.D. However, I think the topic is usually told from only one-side.

In 2012 filmmakers Bill Duke and Channsin Berry produced a documentary titled Dark Girls, picked up by the OWN Network, which explored the deep-rooted biases and attitudes about dark skinned women particularly within the African-American community. The documentary also touches on colorism in India and throughout the world. The women interviewed candidly shared their experiences that went beyond the surface of the issue, recounting their traumatizing stories of wanting to bleach their skin, or remembering their mothers telling them they would be more beautiful if they were just a few shades lighter. These types of messages (amongst other things) are passed on from generation to generation and are making black women feel like they aren’t good enough/light enough/just enough period. And unfortunately this self-hate can turn into resentment towards other black women of lighter variation. The controversy with this documentary is that it failed to show any dark skin women who were confident and unaffected by colorism.

Two years later a Light Girls documentary is in the works and slated to drop later this fall, which will also premiere on the OWN Network. Within the African-American community there’s a stigma that lighter skin POC do not experience any biases or pain associated with colorism. Some may not see the reason a Light Girls story needs to be told, because of this belief that a light skinned person struggles pales in comparison to a dark skinned persons. But colorism affects both ends of the spectrum – from the palest beige to the deepest brown. Gradations in color amongst blacks exude skin tone bias rather than traditional racism. All of our voices and experiences need to be heard.

In fact, discrimination towards light skin POC can too be psychologically damaging. Bias can make the fair hued feel separated from the black community, often having their identity challenged. Some assume that lighter skin blacks don’t face racial discrimination from whites. This also raises an issue when light skin blacks can “pass” as white. They may be forced to endure racist comments from both white and black people. The plight of colorism for lighter skinned African-Americans shouldn’t be overlooked.

In my personal life, it has been nothing new. I, as a lighter skin African-American, did not understand why I was treated certain ways by darker skinned girls and young women.

It never occurred to me until my adult years that the reason I was tormented and bullied throughout middle and high school stemmed from something other than materialistic reasons. The term colorism was something I was unfamiliar with. I grew up in a predominately black neighborhood – I didn’t think such a thing existed. I thought we were all paddling up the same stream. But many are under the assumption that lighter skinned people think they are superior.

This is not to say I feel this way from all brown skin women – I have friends of all shades. But from the opposite perspective of colorism, I get dirty looks from random women on the street, especially when I’m with men with darker skin (maybe they think he “only likes light skin women”?). I’m told three months into a friendship, “I used to think you were stuck up but actually you’re really cool”. Uh, thanks? Or how about when I’m told I don’t understand the “real struggle” because I’m not “black enough”. Instead of figuring who’s more hurt than whom, we should all come together and find a solution to this slave-induced mentality.

It’s unfortunate that society and the media, especially within hip-hop/rap, highlight lighter skin women as being more exotic and lust-worthy. It’s unfortunate that some little girls with dark skin think being black equates not being pretty, smart, etc. And it’s especially unfortunate that many African-Americans are still battling in a colorism war.

By Ariana Atwater, Contributor

How does a magazine disperse its content among different platforms without losing a unifying vision?

With the advent of electronic publications, the intermixing of music, videos, images and language has created new possibilities and considerations for art magazines. GIFs, paint strokes and 35 mm film can be curated together in order to say something in common.

Often, though, making these media speak to each becomes a disjointed effort to appear innovative, and the driving mission of the project in question is diluted beyond recognition. Such is definitely not the case with The Editorial Magazine, an art publication based out of Montreal. Curated by women but not exclusively for those who identify as female, The Editorial exemplifies the best of hybrid media. Showcasing unique images through a printed magazine and a blog, The Editorial responds to the contemporary proliferation of forms with truly engaging artistic practices.

Claire Milbrath, the founder and editor-in-chief of The Editorial, describes it as a fashion/photography magazine. However, to say that The Editorial is limited to these realms is to humbly downplay how the images within its pages (both in print and online) rethink the use, value and presentation of certain objects, especially objects traditionally associated with femininity. The tenth and current issue includes a notable interview with internet artist Mary Bond, who uses “selfies” to theorize about selfhood and about decontextualized nudity in the 21st century. There’s also a very intimate interview with Mac de Marco, framed by pictures of the artist lounging coyly in a bathtub. Another highlight is an assortment of digitally manipulated images in which a John Doe figure attempts to sell digitally manipulated “fine art.” All in all, the different and complex pieces result in an engaging examination of the hybridity of contemporary aesthetics. In addition, The Editorial’s blog complements the print issue with music playlists and mixes, behind-the-scenes videos, and photo diaries. The result of these combined forms is a rethinking of the gaze, an opening towards new ways of seeing and thinking critically about the surrounding world of objects.

I highly recommended that you order a copy of The Editorial, and check out their online content here (http://the-editorialmagazine.com/)

By Maru Pabón, Managing Editor (Print)

My sister and I sat on her bed in Baton Rouge a week and a half ago having a relationship-changing conversation. No, I wasn’t coming out to her; I did that last year.

She said something that socked me in the gut, something that I as a trans activist, and hell, as a sibling had completely overlooked, “There’s a huge difference between lending your brother women’s clothes and accepting that you have a sister.”

She’s been nothing less than fantastic about changing my pronouns from he/him/brother, which she’d been saying since our mother’s ultrasound, to both they/them/sibling and she/her/sister in the course of a year, so I assumed that she knew everything she needed to know about my transition. The biggest part of my assumption was that she, mathematically, knew more about everything than I did.

She’s nine years older than I am, queer-identified, and poly, so she must get it, right?

Wrong.

“I didn’t know what cisgender meant until you told me,” she said.

For the past year, I’ve lived and hung out almost exclusively with queer and trans-identified people, so I’ve been in a bubble to a certain extent. I forgot what a lifetime with a disability had taught me, that accommodation and education are two-way streets.

As much as it isn’t our job to answer every probing question about our genitalia, we have, to some extent, a responsibility to speak candidly with the people who stick by us about issues that matter to us. Whether those people identify as allies or not is irrelevant.

When we were getting ready to leave for a weekend in Lafayette, my sister said, “Ty, it’s rural Louisiana, I’m not sure it’s the best idea for you to wear a dress.”

I was furious.

I will not closet myself for anyone, especially not complete strangers in a town I’ve never been to at the request of someone who has no idea what it’s like to be trans.

Then it hit me, she has no idea what it’s like to be trans.

“I saw two gay men get beaten to the point of intensive care in a bar in Baton Rouge. Honestly, I’m concerned for your safety here,” she said.

Even if it’s coming from a place of concern, that kind of sentiment only feeds into violence against LGBTQ+ people. Shouldn’t she know that?

As wrong as that was to say, as quickly as she apologized, it occurred to me that we had never had an actual conversation about violence against LGBTQ+ people. I don’t get to closet myself in Louisiana and then go back to DC and frolic around in the frilliest dress I can find; that’s a slap in the face to those two men and every other out queer person in the state of Louisiana.

As I rode the train from New Orleans back to DC, I started compiling articles, videos, and songs that have made me feel more comfortable writing and talking about my transition in my head. This list is the furthest thing from comprehensive and if I believed every word of everything on here, my viewpoints would be a jumbled, contradictory mess of other people’s ideas.

These books, articles, and songs are meant to provoke discussion about what it means to be trans, not provide a hard and fast rulebook for trans identity. A good deal of the material on here is by and about people I’ve spoken to personally.

Of course, I’ve been lucky enough to talk to Ginger Coyote, Jayne County, Kayley Whalen, Adhamh Roland, and Sadie Smith of the band Peeple Watchin’ about trans issues. I got in a brief conversation and a hug with Laura Jane Grace, so I’m going to count that too. First and foremost, this list is a gift for my sister. I’m glad I have the opportunity to share it with all of you. 

Books:

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano

Man Enough to be a Woman by Jayne County

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & so much more by Janet Mock

Blogs and Essays:

“Am I Black Enough, Woman Enough, Trans Enough?” by Koko Jones

“Not Your Mom’s Trans 101” by Asher Bauer

“A Personal History of the ‘T-word‘ ” by Julia Serano

“Ask Matt: Nowhere to Live If I Transition” by Matt Kailey

“#StandWithMonica to end Profiling and Criminalization of Trans WoC” by Kayley Whalen

Video and Text Interviews:

Laura Jane Grace on Strombo (Canadian talk show, 22 min)

Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera on Katie Couric (4 min, 11 sec)

CeCe McDonald on Melissa Harris-Perry (8 mins)

Why Atheists Should Care About Transgender Issues: A Conversation with Kayley Whalen by Chris Stedman 

Delightfully Redefining Debutantes: An Interview with Ginger Coyote of the White Trash Debutantes by Gia Lee Giles 

Playlist:

Tonight We’re Gonna Give It 35% by Against Me! (Laura Jane Grace acoustic, live)

I’m Still Here, Asshole by Peeple Watchin’

Androgynous by The Replacements

God Has a Voice, She Speaks Through Me by CocoRosie

Man Enough to be a Woman by Jayne County

Bathrooms, Boxes, Binary by Adhamh Roland

By Tyler Vile, Summer Staff Writer

This spring,an episode of Feminist Magazine featured a brief interview with Chanelle Adams, one of our Editors-in-Chiefs, by Cherise Charleswell. 

LISTEN HERE.

Feminist Magazine is a weekly So. Cal. radio show with feminist perspectives.

You can listen on Tuesdays 3pm PST 90.7 FM Los Angeles 98.7 FM, Santa Barbara, 99.5 FM Ridgecrest/China Lake & 93.7 FM San Diego.

OR, YOU CAN LISTEN LIVE HERE KPFK.org

The British singer-songwriter Jessie Ware just released a new single, “Tough Love.” Check it out via Soundcloud.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Blog Co-Managing Editor

Feminist Tracks is part of Bluestockings’s Music section. It spotlights music made by feminists, women, and marginalized communities from all genres and countries and in all aspects of music-making. To suggest Feminist Tracks, please email blogbluestockings@gmail.com.

Based in Copenhagen, the Danish singer Kwamie Liv has released her new single, “Follow You.”  She released her last single, “5AM”, last March, and even dished out a cover of The Weeknd’s “What You Need”. Liv’s genre falls somewhere between XXYYXX and a future pastoral Abel Tesfeye. Check it out!

By Ragnar Jónsson, Blog Managing Editor

Feminist Tracks is part of Bluestockings’s Music section. It spotlights music made by feminists, women, and marginalized communities from all genres and countries and in all aspects of music-making. To suggest Feminist Tracks, please email blogbluestockings@gmail.com.

via Je Ne Sais Pop

Though Samaris released its self-titled debut album in 2013, the latest album release, Silkidrangar, of the young Icelandic trio marks its first foray into full-album production. Comprised of sung poet Jófríður Ákadóttir, producer Þórður Kári Steinflórsson, and clarinetist Áslaug Rún Magnúsdóttir, Samaris’s clarinet-suffused downtempo beats serve as the euphonic background for Jófríður’s poetry. Written in the eddic styles of late 19th-century Icelandic poesy, to the non-Icelandic listener, Silkidrangur may conjure the image of a rave in an abandoned church somewhere far away from Reykjavík, like the one that Ethan Kath of Crystal Castles produced their album II.  Or perhaps some other mythos, of glacial passages or lapping waterfalls under the viridescent skylight of the aurora, that recurs within nonnatives imaginaries of Iceland. It seems Samaris is aware of the endless risk of this inventive exoticism that comes with global perceptions of Iceland, as it has with Björk and sigur rós before them, but it does not inhibit their acceptance of their foreignness.

Yet to Icelandic listeners, particularly those knowledgeable about Icelandic poetry, any supposed simplicity of its lyrics masks its dedicated revival of national poetic histories, their historical importance in the maintenance of communities, and its ability to combine the styles of lore with the pressures of the Icelandic people to conform to global modernity with and after the World Wars. Perhaps the greatest strength of the trio is its return to the eddic and its unwillingness to render its lyrics in English, though it still utilizes imported production technologies. Their vision is not that of Kath’s in the bombastic “Year of Silence,” which sampled and distorted sigur rós’s Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur, but rather its reverse: minimalist, expansive, recursive as waves that lushly lap the shores. Like the works of Nobel Prize-winner Halldór Laxness, their discography embodies the impulse of Icelandic artists postwar modernity to seek a return to the past yet to situate this nostalgic romanticism within the realities of the present.

Grimes’s self-designation of her music as “future pastoral” fits seamlessly into the larger project of Samaris, which combines mythology, folklore, history and Iceland’s bucolic landscapes with the electronic beats that have been found in Reykjavík’s downtown clubs that have been part and parcel to youth culture since the 60′s post-disco. Their popularity within Iceland attests to their success in such an untimely juxtaposition, and the rave reviews abroad indicate a thriving exoticism that’s been the cause, in part, of the heavy expansion of Iceland’s tourism industry. They offer a novel rendition of Icelandic cultural history that has yet to be matched since Laxness himself.

Check out the video for their lead single, “Ég Vildi Fegin Verða.”

Stream their full album via One Little Indian Jukebox on Youtube below.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Co-Managing Blog Editor

Feminist Tracks is part of Bluestockings’s Music section. It spotlights music made by feminists, women, and marginalized communities from all genres and countries and in all aspects of music-making. To suggest Feminist Tracks, please email blogbluestockings@gmail.com.

Still from “Goodie Goodies”

The LGBT rapper, Cake Da Killa, just released his 3rd mixtape, Hunger Pangs. Check it out via Soundcloud.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Co-Editor-in-Chief of  bluestockingsmag.com

Feminist Tracks is part of Bluestockings’s Music section. It spotlights music made by feminists, women, and marginalized communities from all genres and countries in all aspects of music-making. To suggest Feminist Tracks, please email blogbluestockings@gmail.com.

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“The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).”

-Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: conversations with Duccio Trombadori (Semiotext(e) , 1991), p. 11-12

April 2013 marked the return of The Knife with Shaking the Habitual, after Gothenburg-based siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Anderssen had gone their separate ways to explore new creative projects. Karin released Fever Ray under her eponymous solo project and a soundtrack for a feminist avant-erotica short film series Dirty Diaries in 2009, collaborated with the Norwegian duo Röyksopp on The Understanding and Junior, and wrote the music for a theatrical rendition of Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968). Olof, on the other hand, released four EPs under Oni Ayhun and played in underground clubs all across Europe, always demanding that there be at least a fifty-percent female lineup for the sake of gender parity in representation. Their previous work, Tomorrow in a Year, a Danish operatic reinterpretation of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, failed to garner the mass popularity of Deep Cuts or the critical acclaim of Silent Shout, yet Shaking the Habitual embodies the divisive criticism that’s accompanied their entire discography: bombastic, genre-bending, eclectic, awe-inspiring, overdrawn, difficult, in a league of its own.

The influences on the album have been much-discussed by the siblings and by the ever-curious press that seeks to capitalize on their art-as-politics ideology (think Jezebel or Bustle as click-bait popcorn feminism par excellence), while criticizing their project once the music-as-art “fails” to conform to the esthetics of music’s elitist critics (as was the case with the similarly daunting Tomorrow). Named after a passage from a conversation between the similarly schismatic Michel Foucault, and Duccio Trombadori, an Italian communist art critic and journalist, the siblings sought to “shake up” the normative frameworks Shaking the Habitual that we are subjected to individually and systemically, on the basis of divisions of class, labor, race, gender, and ethnicity (to name a spare few.)

“What we do is political…there’s no doubt about that,” Olof and Karin relay in their self-released interview (seen above); “We want to question The Knife.” Just as they question the cultural mythologies around them, they seek to shake up themselves as well: for instance, the that-which-goes-without-saying status of the Swedish royal family as much as the alleged self-evidence of cisnormative gender ideals. Released in conjunction with a public statement on Romani discrimination in Rome regarding the right to housing in 2011, an impassioned sense of justice reverberates throughout the album process and final end-product, and where “the border between normal and strange is erased.” The album draws from a number of academic disciplines: Marxism and post-Marxist criticism, feminism, queer and gender theory, environmentalism, and various voices in structuralist and post-structuralist discourse in Continental European & American philosophies. Though these varied influences are prevalently evident on the album, the siblings avoid extensive citations or interrogations of specific arguments (which is the album’s greatest strength and weakness in that it boasts such a diverse bibliography without any actual addendum, but manages to discuss theory without becoming too inaccessible in its approach.) It was even co-released with a manifesto.

Nevertheless, the ability of the duo to adopt and adapt these concepts has yielded incredibly exciting work. The Knife is no longer a “commercial product,” effacing “the mask behind the mask,” but now a group of activists combining the potency of aural production with the bite of radical politics. “Yes, we are privileged,” Karin recounts, as they navigate “the ideals produced in the extremely hierarchical and conservative structures that the music industry constitutes,” but The Knife does not allow their (relative) privilege to deter their activisms. While the lushly detailed memoir of Silent Shout is lost in the labyrinthine void of Shaking the Habitual, the latter manages to utilize The Knife’s far-reaching outreach to catechize a number of intersecting institutions and systems that disempower and disenfranchise people. While Shaking the Habitual has been hailed as their magnum opus in bringing issues of justice and marginalization to light, such criticisms usefully fail to relay the powerful narratives created by Karin in Silent Shout previously, as well as on Fever Ray: tales of Communist rebels fleeing, a stripper wondering if she’ll survive the night, an intersex person struggling with gender dysphoria, a mother’s agony at the loss of her child, or a girl suffering from anorexia begging to be “sharpened like a pen.”

Now, a series of remixes from their past discography, Shaken-Up Versions, has been released concurrently with their North American tour, adding new textures to familiar tracks, questioning what, exactly, is The Knife.

Stream it in full via Spotify.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Co-Editor-in-Chief of bluestockingsmag.com

The British singer-songwriter FKA Twigs has released the video for her first single, “Two Weeks”, off her upcoming debut LP1. Unsurprisingly, it’s sensational. Check it out!

By Ragnar Jónsson, Co-Editor in Chief

Still from “Chandelier” (2014)

The Australian singer-songwriter Sia has released a 3rd single, “Big Girls Cry”, from her upcoming 6th album, 1000 Forms of Fear, which comes out July 8th, 2014.

Her 1st single, “Chandelier”, was accompanied with a video featuring the spellbinding dance performance by 11-year-old dancer, Maddie Ziegler (originally from the infamous Dance Moms reality TV series), and choreographed by Ryan Heffington.

Her 2nd single, “Eye of the Needle”, also provides a promising peek at Sia’s musical direction.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Co-Editor in Chief

Image Courtesy of Sia’s “Chandelier” (2014)

One of the most outspoken feminists in music of our time, Grimes released her latest single featuring Blood Diamonds, “Go”, previously intended for Rihanna, which she premiered at Governor’s Ball in NYC.

Check it out via Soundcloud! Download it free via her website.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Co-Editor in Chief

Near the end of her iconic verse on Kanye West’s “Monster,” Nicki Minaj’s voice proliferates the stereo field, coming at the listener from all angles. In doing so, Minaj contradicts the expectations of a single performer who traditionally occupies a singular position, or a series of moving positions. She exists in all available positions at once.

The result of this effect is that she appears “larger than life,” which in the context of “Monster,” can frighten the hell out of the listener. This “larger than lifeness” also works in conjunction with Minaj’s rap style, which includes various alter-egos: Harajuku Barbie, Roman Zolanski, Martha Zolanski, etc. There is a long tradition in rap and hip-hop of adopting characters like these, with corresponding and distinct voices that engage the listener in different ways. In the case of Minaj and most rappers who do this, these personas can be tied directly to singular, gendered bodies.

Various less mainstream musical projects, such as electronic artist Karin Dreijer, have found ways of subverting gender expectations through vocal production; in Dreijer’s case, she distorts her voice with pitch shifting technology. Big Freedia, an ambassador of New Orleans Bounce music, uses vocal manipulation techniques in a similar but much more interesting manner, offering a different way of thinking about disembodied vocals and their representation of gender identities.

Big Freedia has come into the public consciousness as a queer-identified Bounce vocalist. Bounce is an extremely high energy form of hip-hop, on top of which Freedia characteristically releases a barrage of overlapping calls-to-move that, in their rapid and ceaseless delivery, seem to mock the mere thought of breathing. Rarely traditionally rapping or developing a linear verse, Freedia’s style is more reminiscent of DJ equipment such as a vocal samplers or turntable scratching than a vocalist.

First gaining mainstream exposure during the late 2010’s, Freedia now has three albums to her name, including “Just Be Free,” which came out on June 17th and features the single “Explode.” Consistent with her earlier work, “Explode” features layers and layers of vocal lines that do not simply function as a chorus of Freedia’s, but rather as various individual parts.

The presentation of Freedia’s vocal lines in “Explode” bears similarities to Nicki Minaj’s verse on “Monster” in that they both separate voice from the image of an individual performer. Although it can be said that all recorded music separates sound from its original source, these two examples are instances in which disembodiment is foregrounded in the production of the song.

In both Minaj and Freedia’s music, the disembodiment of vocals is striking and exciting for the listener because it contradicts our expectations, and because the many vocal lines each vie for our attention. Importantly for Freedia, the creation of independent vocal lines also contradicts traditional understandings of identity. Multiple Freedias exist simultaneously on “Explode,” none of which hold absolute authority over the others. Unlike Nicki Minaj in “Monster,” in which there is a central performer accompanied by alter-egos, there is no fixed performer in “Explode:” there is no vocal line that is clearly Freedia, with the other vocal lines being background Freedias. It is this aspect of her work that most significantly can be applied to issues of gender identity.

In her interviews, Freedia disregards conventional constructions of gender identity, confusing even (and sometimes especially) those who desire to be perfectly accepting. While Freedia understands the importance of not making assumptions about gender pronouns, she herself does not insist on a preferred pronoun. Instead, she encourages others to call her whatever they feel comfortable using, since she feels a empowering security within her own unique self [1]. Exceeding normative and nonnormative constructions of gender, Freedia exists as an uncharacterizable individual and encourages others to do the same.

By searching through Freedia’s lyrics and understanding her production as disregarding a fixed notion of identity, it becomes clear that her ultimate call-to-move is “Do you,” be that through gender constructs or through the cracks that separate them. Freedia’s music champions the in-between and uncharacterizable, the perhaps unknowable ways that our bodies desire to be.

^[1] http://www.out.com/entertainment/interviews/2013/09/10/big-freedia-queen-bounce-miley-cyrus-twerking-gender

By Grant Meyer, Contributor