I stopped talking an hour ago

Deborah M Withers' 'Women's liberation, relationships and the 'vicinity of trauma' is essential reading for anyone who organizes, participates in or is connected to feminist activism. I'd really like to see this conversation expanded to a point where the issues she addresses - the dis/function of trauma in feminist spaces, silencing in group activities, inchoate personal/collective voices and invisible/inarticulated languages of inter-personal oppression - can be properly confronted, and strategies for evolving the WLM out of these traps can be considered and implemented.

Withers takes the 70s women's lib movement (specifically Bristol-based groups) as a jump-off point, but I was struck by how the verbal accounts of those women who felt marginalized and silenced in supposedly safe spaces could just as easily be women of today, me even, speaking about their experiences in feminist and homosocial spheres.

Take a minute to sign up (if yr not already an Academia.edu member), and grab the paper, for free, here.

I ate the meklah fruit, I fell in love with blues

My Q+A with Cat and Stas of rad Sub Pop duo THEEsatisfaction is out now, in the April edition of Diva magazine. We talked about recreating samples, the (unspoken) power of instrumentals (and slang), hip hop rebellion, and making music "travel". THEE are crazy talented, and also the first out black queer female outfit to be signed to Sub Pop. I've been hyping/hearting them for some time (here and here).

 

Long, supine upon the bank, his gaze is fixed on his own eyes, twin stars

I got sick of seeing all those 'ROCK IS DEAD aka where have all the men gone?' articles in January, so I wrote about how awesome rock in 2011 sounded to me.

Take a lathe, and scrape all the glitter off

I saw this in Liberty, just before Christmas. How do girls know what they really want when we grow up in a world that force feeds them aspirations before they've hit puberty? It made me think about the wild yearning power of Courtney Love's early journals, and about how we use diaries to write our futures, how they are spell books, a place where we pour out our secrets and desires.  I couldn't see a target age group sticker on this creepy little life-planner, but the bold, bright font colours look like crack for the pre-school crowd. I wanna go back and slip queer-feminist zines inside each copy.