Here’s our roundup of the best that ladyblogland had to offer.
Rihanna channeled Josephine Baker at the CFDA fashion awards (her dress was gorgeous). Sesali Bowen at Feministing has a great read about Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou, and Rihanna.
Tank Girl director Rachel Talalay will direct two Doctor Who episodes next season. Bitch Magazine has an interview.
The ladyblogosphere had some great remembrances of Yuri Kochiyama. Racialicious reminds us that Kochiyama was ahead of her time.
Rookie Magazine tells us how to look like Lupita Nyong’o.
Found on Skepchick, this app is made to teach kids about nutrition by telling them which foods might make them gassy. I say this is essential for any person who is going on a first date. Fast Company
Carrie Fisher would rather have played Han Solo. The Daily Dot
A must read: N.K. Jemisin’s speech to WisCon on racism in science fiction and fantasy:
Reconciliation is a part of the healing process, but how can there be healing when the wounds are still being inflicted? How can we begin to talk about healing when all the perpetrators have to do is toss out dogwhistles and disclaimers of evil intent to pretend they’ve done no harm?
This could be really, really cool: HBO has greenlit a miniseries of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam and tapped Darren Aronofsky to direct. Jezebel
This awesome quote from Orange is the New Black’s Uzo Aduba made the Tumblr rounds last week, via Improper:
My family is from Nigeria, and my full name is Uzoamaka, which means “The road is good.” Quick lesson: My tribe is Igbo, and you name your kid something that tells your history and hopefully predicts your future. So anyway, in grade school, because my last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”
Writers at Slate’s XX Factor hung out on college message boards for two years. The results will depress you.
On the campus we studied from 2011-2013, students of both sexes not only accepted but embraced extreme and alarming sexist language that objectifies and hypersexualizes women. We spoke with 44 students directly in focus groups, as well as 379 others who responded to an anonymous survey, and the vast majority of them found the ranking of women by appearance and sexual prowess commonplace and of little concern.
Can Orange is the New Black change the way Congress thinks about prisons? Bitch Magazine
Meet dance icon Carmen De Lavallade. Clutch
The BBC has a fascinating story about the female reporters who covered WWII.
Saya Taha writes about the hijab and feminism:
Secular and Muslim women all over Iran are posting photos of themselves without the mandated headscarf, in secluded places where there are no Basij (religious police) to punish them for violating the country’s dress code. The movement is led by women who are removing their headscarves and posting photos of themselves of their own free will.
And finally, Orange is the New Black, told by kittens.
5 replies on “Dispatches from Ladyblogland”
Oh, and, new favourite phrase thanks to Syreeta McFadden at Feministing:
“That is some buttery bullshit.”
http://feministing.com/2014/06/11/photo-of-the-day-normalizebreastfeeding/#more-82729
“This could be really, really cool: HBO has greenlit a miniseries of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam and tapped Darren Aronofsky to direct.”
ASOIJFLKWEOIJGWSOIHISHDNAHHHH!!
I could be a bit excited about that.
Also, a blog post responding some fucking ‘columnist’ or other – I won’t dignify him with a name (TW: sexual violence)
I am a 47 year-old financially and professionally secure woman in a stable, loving relationship and it took 25 years and your jackass column to get me to speak up about my rape.
http://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/an-obgyn-writes-to-george-will-about-college-rape/
The college attitude findings were pretty expected, but the students are not the only ones on campus to have those views. Professors, administrators, and TAs have those views and worse. I’ve sat through a group meeting where a male grad student was joking about a woman who had been raped on campus the week prior, and when I made an issue about it *I* was seen as the problem. Dealing with overt, in your face sexism day in and day out is a big part of the reason why I am taking a break from graduate school.
I’m always surprised at how bad academics can be about gender issues in practice. I sometimes wonder if it’s because they’ve read so much gender studies that they don’t realize they actually have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk (or read the talk.)
It’s the lack of oversight more than anything else. If you have an issue with a hostile work environment as a graduate student, for example, the title IX office and the HR office can shuttle you back and forth until you get exhausted and give up.
For example, if someone at work told me that I wasn’t hot enough to have an opinion worth listening to (a student officer actually told me this in my second year of graduate school) I’d be in HR before the sentence was over. In this case, I was told by both title IX and HR that they “can’t make people be nice to each other.” Blergh.