"When I look at my daughter’s face, I know I flew in the face of tradition and culture. She’s an extension of my radical progressive politics. Her birth was outside the norm"

The May edition of DIVA Magazine is out today, and features my investigative article on lezsploitation in UK TV. It also contains my interview with poet and activist Staceyann Chin, on the politics of sex, feminism, the journey towards pregnancy and single-parenting for lesbians. Aging and motherhood are big topics for me at the moment, and as I navigate those things, I find myself reaching out for older, wiser dykes who have traveled/are traveling those roads and can report back with compass and maps. Talking with Chin was important and rewarding in that respect; she makes aging and motherhood look sexy, rewarding and radical.

"And god help you if you are an ugly girl/'course too pretty is also your doom/'cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room"

I can understand why any real discussion on the politics of beauty raised in Samantha Brick's Daily Mail article is being undermined under a tide of ridicule; women openly admitting confidence of this magnitude is considered an ugly thing, an exercise in vanity rather than an observation on women's internalized misogyny, and the Mail is renowned for baiting readers with terrible writers and right-wing rhetoric. But whether we like it or not, Brick is right: women can be the worst haterz.

Girls are trained to be deeply judgmental, of themselves and each other. Society teaches us to internalize rules about body and beauty and behaviour, and to enforce these ideas in competitive, violent and self-destructive ways. Women are rarely encouraged to truly support each other, and being bold enough to claim yr a victim of prettiness is massively taboo because it destabilizes the idea that women are  rewarded (in any true, meaningful or lasting way) for being pretty. We are socialized to strive for beauty, to pluck, starve, bleach and surgically modify our way to beauty, but never own it. Confronting the ways women punish each other - for being too pretty or not pretty enough - is uncomfortable, because it means acknowledging our part in propping up patriarchy, but the issue of the Mean Girls/Dawn Wiener syndrome is a conversational we need to have, preferably in more radical and progressive spheres than the pages of the Daily Mail.

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.

"A lot of people don't want to see a woman on the mic, just like they don't want to see a woman play an electric guitar"

"Race to me is a low blow that people just use when they have nothing real to hate on. To me, being a woman is the biggest hindrance; a lot of people don't want to see a woman on the mic, just like they don't want to see a woman play an electric guitar. There are a million and one things that I go through as a woman and as a human being that we can all relate to, and colour is just an extremely small thing to me.  I have to view it that way if I want the rest of the world to take on that mind frame too."
Iggy Azalea, talking to Dazed Digital on being a white female rapper. 

I originally intended to lift the guitars and mics comment of the title as a stand-alone, because it draws a smart line between the misogyny of those two worlds, and confronts ideas of permission, but Azalea's 'woman is the nigga of the world' stance is ultimately problematic if she can't/won't also address her co-existing privilege: whiteness. I suppose Azalea means "colour" (not the preferred nomenclature) is a "small thing" in terms of artistic ability, and women *are* still very much the visible minority in rap, but race is an inherent and loaded issue in hip hop, and dismissing her white privilege in that context comes across as willfully ignorant.



Like Eminem and Yelawolf, Azalea's whiteness grants her a privileged otherness in her adopted rap world, the same 'temporary minority' status that earned Kreayshaun her hype. Her gender complicates this, SURE, and we/she should have that discussion, but if we whitewash one of the things that's so clearly allowed Azalea to stand out in the hip hop blogosphere, we're only having half the conversation. If Azalea chooses to capitalize on and appropriate black culture's socio-musical traditions, she has an obligation to address that culture's histories, and the role her whiteness plays in that sphere. Subvert responsibly!



Eminem and Yelawolf earned their seats because, skills aside, their experiences intersect with rap's black working-class narratives; they have shared oppressions, and can express a complex, if sometimes problematic, solidarity. Maybe the "rural" Australian background Azalea is loosely attached to in interviews is equally working-class, maybe that's why she dismisses her whiteness as a "small thing"; there's certainly explicit links to be made between working-class gender stereotypes and the "ratchet rap" tropes Azalea favours. If that's the case, I'd really like to see Iggy elaborate on that and acknowledge those dynamics.

Yela is astute where Azalea, perhaps unwittingly, obfuscates. He made his opinions known last year when asked about White Girl Mob and V Nasty using the N-bomb. What starts out as an initially specific response turns, quite naturally, into a wider, holistic discussion on the systematic appropriation of black music cultures, and how white emcees have a duty to conduct themselves responsibly in these spheres:

"You don't take that shit lightly. Hip hop...American music culture is black culture. Don't ever get it fucked up. Know your roots, know who the fuck you're getting this music from."

Quite. 

I've been holding off on this post because I have an exclusive Tricia Rose quote sitting in my inbox that I'm waiting on permission to include, but it feels pertinent to post now, given Azalea's just-announced XXL Freshman cover. Over to Ms Banks...

01.03.12 update

I spoke to Tricia Rose last year about all the debate around Kreayshaun. Our conversation covered most of the issues discussed above, and given the parallels between Azalea and Kreayshaun, the Prof has kindly given me permission to include part of that conversation here:

"There is a long and painful history of black musical (verbal, clothing, dance) and other cultural styles being appropriated by white artists and industry for far greater profit than black artists could garner. At the same time these same cultural styles are disparaged, labeled inferior or denied legitimation and under-documented. This is the proper context for the criticism you say white female rapper Kreayshaun is facing . However, it is not reasonable at this point in the industry saturated genre of hip hop to pretend that hip hop style has not become a global style to which all people around the world have been exposed and perhaps have found deep interest and appreciation. The main issues for me are:  how much does an artist know about the styles, codes, tropes, and traditions he/she is borrowing? Do they know the racial dynamics at play that consistently provide more opportunity for whites than blacks, even when they play in black cultural backyards? Is the white artist in question willing to be honest about this dynamic and express proper appreciation, solidarity and connection to the traditions and the people behind the music?"  

Complexities, treacheries, we watch through glass, we see nothing

I reviewed the new Tindersticks album, The Something Rain, for The Guardian.  Its an affecting record, streaked with jazz and loss and intimacy, and Stuart Staples' sad, rich, baritone poetry, which I think has the same kind of andro magic that I hear in Antony Hegarty.


 What I didn't have wordcount/space to say in the review:

The 9 min spoken-word opener 'Chocolate' (perfomed by David Boulter) felt initially problematic to me. It essentially ends with a MTF joke, which I think, despite being one of the worst, hackneyed transphobic punchlines, is in this song's context an unexpectedly tender (if clumsy) comment on love, acceptance and human connection, and about how precious that is when life can be so sad and ridiculous and expect so much of us. It's a shabby, ragged kind of love song (cheap pints, woodchip bedsits, Fox biscuits) and totally lacking the high jinx comedy of Cukor's films, but it made think of the queertastic outro scene in Some Like It Hot when Jack Lemon's honeytrap drag act (which by the end of the film had evolved in to a genuine trans ID) is revealed to his magnificently nonchalant millionaire lover as they ride off in to the sunset in a shiny-white fancy speedboat, with machine gun gangsters on their tail and Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis (in his own Cary Grant drag) making out in the back seat, the uniting factor between the film and song being not the punchline but the reveal that follows it, subverting that "SHE is a HE!" pantomime in to an act of trans acceptance/empowerment. 

Grief knits the album together, but I found the erotic instances the most exciting, particularly 'Show Me Everything'. Tight percussion, strip tease bassline, faintly sleazy organ notes and charged, ambivalent desire, glazed with numbness ("latex on my fingertips, we touch through glass, we feel nothing") but wanting and hoping ("We could take those stones, we could build something") to feel everything.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/16/tindersticks-the-something-rain-review

I wake up, eyes to the sun

I guested on the Guardian Music podcast this week, and talked about Georgia-based Rough Trade quartet Alabama Shakes, ex punkband kids playing a noisy, joyful fusion of blues, rock, gospel and classic RnB. Its easy to imagine Brittany Howard's huge, gravelly vox filling a revival tent, but they came up covering AC/DC and Led Zep as much as Otis Redding and James Brown, and shun the 'soul revival' label in favour of straightforward RnR. I heard their wrenching live version of 'You Aint Alone' before anything else, and was struck by Brittany in the same way I remember feeling when I heard Millie Jackson's 'If Loving You Is Wrong' as a kid, overcome by the sheer force of the song's emotion, swept up in those tumultuous leaps from huge, frayed, stomping wails to desperately hushed, shivering from-the-gut whispers. 

Dyke comix, from Second Wave counter-culture to the New 52

My Diva magazine feature on the herstory of lesbians in comics is out today. I'm not ashamed to say that writing it sent me a little crazy. Its such a niche branch of comics, with roots in Second Wave feminsim and late 60s underground counter-culture publishing, so all those early artists and volumes proved tricky to track down and draw out. The power of the lesbian phone tree came good, and I ended up e-talking with Mary Wings, Trina Robbins and Roberta Gregory, the real 70s matriarchs of dyke comix. Can you imagine emailing with women who were creating lesbian legacies in a pre-internet world? Seeing the PDF panels of 'Sandy Comes Out' in my inbox one chilly November morning was a BIG deal. I spent an obsessive amount of time drawing up timelines and cruising Amazon and Ebay, to moderately successful ends, for obscure issues, and spent a lot of cash padding out my collection with volumes I could ill-afford. I plan on pouring everything I've amassed into a bumper-sized zine at some point.

In the mean time, head to Queer Zine Archive Project to download a copy of Roberta Gregory's Dynamite Damsels. 
  

And because there appears to be a tag limit in Blogger: Wimmins Comix, Gay Comix, Tits N Clits, The 24 Group, Dianne DiMassa, Leanne Franson, Erica Smith, Girl Frenzy, Alison Bechdel, Erika Moen, Carrie McNinch, Arial Schrag, Michelle Tea, Laurenn McCubbin, the Hernandez Bros, Jennifer Camper, Nicole J Georges, Cristy C Road, Ross Campbell, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Gail Simone.