#feminist book

[eli-is-reading]

alright, time to try talking about weyward cus i finished it like a we k ago.

SPOILERS ABOUND!!

weyward for anyone who isn't aware is a novel about three generations of witches from the weyward lineage.

altha weyward- a witch on trial in 1619 for the accusation of murdering a man by way of making his cows go insane

violet ayres - the daughter of a viscount, growing up in the midst of the second world war, and her struggle with an abusive father, a younger brother fighting to get their father's affection, and her cousin, a manipulative creepy british army soldier, on temporary leave from libya.

kate ayres - violet's great niece, a young woman who escaped her abusive boyfriend's house in London to her late great aunt's small ancestral cabin in the countryside, named weyward cottage.

these women navigate through their complicated lives in a patriarchal society full of abusive men who try to hurt them as they slowly discover their powers and as we slowly find out about the history of the weyward family along with them.

now, the things I've loved about weyward:

-a LOT

so the word weyward is in reference to the original name for the three witch sisters in macbeth, and the references to their theater origin SHOWS.

the story takes place in and nearby the old town of crow's beck. a lot of the people living there have roots in the town going back to at LEAST the 17th century. that part makes it so that even when we go through different times, we hear the same family names, making a callback to theatrical plays where there is usually a small cast of actors playing multiple characters and joining the chorhses at certain points. it is even mentioned in the book: when kate goes to the village cemetery, she finds the graves have all the same names and thinks of them as a cast of players in a show.

this makes me REALLY want to watch a play based on this book, and i hope as it's getting pretty big online it might actually happen!!

- i loved their concepts of witches and the way they are women from the beginning of humanity with abilities tied to nature and understanding of medicine that help humanity survive. i especially love their connection to insects and the way they even use their connection to animals for sometimes nefarious means that are honestly always pretty well deserved, and creepy in the best sense.

i honestly loved so many things about this book that I can't say everything right now but these two things were some of my faves.

things i would've changed or wish to have seen more of:

- there are motifs of crows all over the book (i mean, the town is literally called crow's beck) and there is even am idea that the family have been raising crows for years and each woman has a specific crow with white specks that is connected to them and follows them around; think familiars - although that name is mentioned as a negative view made by the patriarchy, that's actually also about the name witches and the idea of a "witch's mark" as a symbol of evil.

i really wish they were to talk more about these crows, the idea was super cool and I'd love to have it expanded and the relationship between the weywards and crows to be further examined.

- i honestly have no idea right now of what else I'd change. it was really a great book

final thoughts:

weyward is a lovely book about female empowerment, nature, the problems with the patriarchy, and the way women with strength are treated by a society and men that wish to see themselves at the top of the food chain. it is a book worth reading till the end, because even when it seems everything is painful and bad, it has a fantastic conclusion and a gratifying power take-back for every woman there.

I'm excited to see what emilia hart comes up with next and it is obvious how great of a writer she is, her prose is absolutely beautiful and feels easy to read even when it waxes into poetic.

10 crow feathers out of 10.

[r3musmoony]

‘Feminism for the 99 percent embraces class struggle and the fight against institutional racism. It centers the concerns of working-class women of all stripes: whether racialized, migrant, or white; ciz, trans, or gender non-conforming; housewives or sex workers; paid by the hour, the week, the month, or not at all; unemployed or precarious; young or old. Staunchly internationalist, it is firmly opposed to inperialism and war. Feminism for the 99 percent is not only antineoliberal, but also anticapitalist’

Feminism for the 99%: a manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser

[the---hermit]

Early birthday present from my friend. She won't be her in July so she gave it to me earlier. It's a gorgeous edition of Difficult Women by Helen Lewis.

[shesey]

Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love | Excerpts

She had always known that they did not connect on any deep level, but connecting emotionally need not be a priority on a married couple’s list, she thought, especially for a man and a woman who had been married for so long. She never confronted the death of anything, be it a habit, a phase, or a marriage, even when the end stood right in front of her, plain and inevitable. And it happened fast, so fast in fact that Ella had no time to realize what was happening and to be on guard, if one could ever be on guard against love. She started to cry, unable to hold back this continuing sadness that had, without her knowledge, become a part of who she was. It wasn’t fair to the angel. But then again, this world was not known for its justice, was it? They say there is a thin line between losing yourself in God and losing your mind. You see, dervish, it wasn’t always like this. Violence wasn’t my element, but it is now. When God forgets about us down here, it falls upon us common people to toughen up and restore justice. So next time you talk to Him, you tell Him that. Let Him know that when He abandons his lambs, they won’t meekly wait to be slaughtered. They will turn into wolves. She had so much love to give and yet no one demanding it. Or how come she felt so lonely even though she had a large, loving family? That was when I realized that although I loved my parents and craved their love, they were strangers to me. I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go. I have seen the worst and the best in humanity. Nothing surprises me anymore. No matter who we are or where we live, deep inside we all feel incomplete. It’s like we have lost something and need to get it back. Just what that something is, most of us never find out. And of those who do, even fewer manage to go out and look for it. When something needs to be said, I’ll say it even if the whole world grabs me by the neck and tells me to keep quiet. Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. The Tree of the Brokenhearted. Those with broken hearts write down their names on pieces of paper and tie these to the branches, praying for their hearts to be healed. One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion or passivity, may I suggest submission? Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend. But knowledge is like brackish water at the bottom of an old vase unless it flows somewhere. Ella found it odd that sex had once been so important in her life, and now when it was gone, she felt relieved, almost liberated. The glow between them, the light that had helped them to navigate the uncharted waters of marriage, keeping their desire afloat, even after three kids and twenty years, was simply not there anymore. An outsider watching them might assume they were a perfect family, as graceful as the wisps of smoke slowly dissolving in the air. Something inside Ella snapped. She understood with chilling clarity and calm that despite her inexperience and timidity, one day she would abandon it all: her kitchen, her dog, her children, her neighbors, her husband, her cookbooks and homemade-bread recipes... she would simply walk out into the world where dangerous things happened all the time. Intellect and love are made of different materials. Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, beware too much ecstacy, whereas love says, oh never mind! Take the plunge! Intellect does not easily break down, whereas love can effortless reduce itself to rubble. But treasures are hidden among ruins. A broken heart hides treasures. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied. Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at night and see the dawn. She sat curled up in her rocking chair, and wondered how she, hurt and cynical as she was, could ever experience love again. Love was for those looking for some rhyme or reason in this wildly spinning world. But what about those who had long given up the quest? The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new Self to be born, hardship is necessary. Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become string, Love can only be perfected in pain. The quest for Love changes us. There is no seeker among us those who search for Love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for Love, you start to change within and without. She had read in women’s magazines that families who regularly had a proper breakfast together were more cohesive and harmonious than those in which each member rushed out the door half hungry. And though she firmly believed in this research, she had yet to experience the joyful breakfast the magazines wrote about. Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away. Don’t you think? Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come? Personally, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with sadness. Just the opposite - hypocrisy made people happy, and truth made them sad. Though it is less profitable, I find begging much easier than praying. At least I am not deceiving anyone. Your hand opens and closes all the time. If it did not, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding. The two are as beautifully balanced and coordinated as the wings of a bird. At first, I liked what he said. It warmed by heart to think of joy and sorrow as dependent on each other as a bird’s wings. Despite their seemingly endless differences, all of these people gave off a similar air of incompleteness, of the works in progress that they were, each an unfinished masterwork. Where do you get these ridiculous ideas? Do you think God is an angry, moody patriarch watching us from the skies above so that He can rain stones and frogs on our heads the moment we err? Befitting her general mood, Ella woke up sad. But not sad as in weepy and unhappy, only sad as in unwilling to smile and take things lightly. She felt as though she had reached a milestone she was not prepared for. Birthdays have always made me happy, but this morning I woke up with a heaviness in my chest... I kept wondering, is the way I’ve lived my life the way I want to continue from now on? And then a fearful feeling came over me. What if both a yes and a no might generate equally disastrous consequences? Things become manifest through opposites. Behind all hardships was a larger scheme. If the same drink made some merry and tipsy and others wicked and aggressive, shouldn’t we hold the drinkers responsible instead of the drink? We raised our glasses and toasted together, hard though it was to believe, to a God who could love and forgive us even when we ourselves clearly failed to do so. She asked God to either provide her with a love that would absorb her whole being or else make her tough and careless enough not to mind the absence of love in her life. Some men have a way of wanting to sleep with prostitutes and yet at the same time insulting them. If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. The past is a whirlpool. If you let it dominate your present moment, it will suck you in. Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow. If God’s paradise is reserved for people of your kind, I’d rather burn in hell anyhow.  Doubts are good. It means you are alive and searching. In everything we do, it is our hearts that make the difference, not our outer appearance. To him, people who had not made their heart their primary guide to life, who could not open up to love and follow its path the way a sunflower follows the sun, were not really alive. Aziz was that rare type of man a woman could love without losing her self-respect. “What will be, will be” has never sat right with me. The rest is not in my hands. And this is what the Sufis call the fifth element - the void. The inexplicable and uncontrollable divine element that we as human beings cannot comprehend and yet should always be aware of. I don’t believe in “inaction” if by that you mean doing nothing at all and showing no deep interest in life. But I do believe in respecting the fifth element. What ingredients do you think you are putting in the collective strew of humanity. It always made me both immensely sad and elated to listen to a town sleep, wondering what sorts of stories were being lived behind closed doors, what sorts of stories I could have lived had I chosen another path. But I hadn’t made any choice. If anything, the path had chosen me. The fragility and brevity of life struck me once again, and I recalled another rule: Life is a temporary loan. As I spoke, I watched the dervish’s expression change from subtle scorn to open acknowledgement and from there into the soft smile of someone recognizing his own thoughts in the words of another. Fanatics of all persuasions were unbearable, but deep inside she thought that fanatics of Islam were the worst. In a world beset with mistranslations, there was no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be that even our strongest convictions were caused by a simple misunderstanding. In general, one shouldn’t be too rigid about anything because “to live meant to constantly shift colors.” Time centered on this very moment, and anything other than now was an illusion. For the same reason, he believed that love had nothing to do with “plans for tomorrow” or “memories of yesterday.” Love could only be here and now. There are times I want to rebel against having been created a woman. It was as if she were waiting, confidently and patiently, for something momentous to happen. It was the laughter of a woman who had never learned not to pay too much attention to the judgments of others. It was as if her withdrawal into a calm, private space of her own stripped away the polite decorum behind which her marriage had slept undisturbed for many years. Now that the pretenses between them were gone, she could see their defects and mistakes in all their nakedness. She had stopped pretending. They they remained silent, acknowledging the blunt fact that they didn’t have much else to talk about. Not anymore. It was precisely this new aloofness that scared her husband. Ella could understand him, because deep inside it scared her, too. A month ago if David had taken even a tiny step to improve their marriage, she would have felt grateful. Any attempt on his part would have delighted her. Not anymore. Now she suspected that her life wasn’t real enough. How had she arrived at this point? A strange calm had descended upon Ella. She felt more stable than she’d ever been, even as she was swiftly gliding away from the life she’d known. Nothing had changed, and yet nothing was the same anymore. I keep telling myself that this is a temporary stage. Rumi used to be everything to me. Now he is a stranger. I never knew it was possible to live with someone under the same roof, sleep in the same bed, and still feel that he was not really there. But if you ask me, anyplace where there are more than two people is bound to become a battleground. Bountiful is your life, full and complete. Or so you think, until someone comes along and makes you realize what you have been missing all this time. Like a mirror that reflects what is absent rather than present, he shows you the void in your soul - the void you have resisted seeing. That person can be a lover, a friend, or a spiritual master. Sometimes it can be a child to look after. What matters is to find the soul that will complete yours. It’s as if for years on end you compile a personal dictionary. In it you give your definition of every concept that matters to you, such as truth, happiness, or beauty. At every major turning point in life, you refer to this dictionary, hardly ever feeling the need to questions its premises. Then one day a stranger comes and snatches your precious dictionary and throws it away. All your definitions need to be redefined, he says. It’s time for you to unlearn everything you know. And you, for some reason unbeknownst to your mind but obvious to your heart, instead of raising objections or getting cross with him, gladly comply. This is what Shams has done to me. Our friendship has taught me so much. But more than that, he has taught me to unlearn everything I knew. Is there a way to grasp what love means without becoming a lover first? Love cannot be explained. It can only be experienced. Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all. She questioned every detail in life, waging battles against society. You like distinctions because you think they make life easier. In this world take pity on three kinds of people. The rich man who has lost his fortune, the well-respected man who has lost his respectability, and the wise man who is surrounded by ignorants. As hurtful as it is, being slandered is ultimately good for one on the path. Destiny took me on a different route altogether, one of unexpected twists and turns, each of which changed me so profoundly and irrevocably that after a while the original destination lost its significance. Either way, I suddenly knew that I didn’t need to go anywhere. Not anymore. I was sick and tired of always longing to be somewhere else, somewhere beyond, always in a rush despite myself. I was already where I wanted to be. All I needed was to stay and look within. Through an illness, accident, loss, or fright, one way or another, we all are faced with incidents that teach us how to become less selfish and judgmental, and more compassionate and generous. Twenty years of marriage, twenty years of sleeping in the same bed, sharing the same shower, eating the same food, raising three kids... and what it all added up to was silence. She didn’t know what surprised her more: to hear that David knew about Rumi or that he cared about what she read. I don’t blame you, Ella. I deserve it. I neglected you, and you looked for compassion elsewhere. Thanks for your concern, young man, but sometimes nasty encounters are not only inevitable, they are necessary. A man with many opinions but no questions! There’s something so wrong with that. It must be a huge relief, and an easy way out, to think the devil is always outside of us. The message is that the torment a person can inflict upon himself is endless. Hell is inside us, and so is heaven. But having spent my whole life regretting the things I failed to do, I see no harm in doing something regrettable for a change. Not knowing what to say, I stared into her wounded eyes and wondered how she, young and fragile as she was, had found the courage to abandon the only life she knew. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough. Where there is love, there is bound to be heartache. Strange things happened to people when they were ready for the unusual and the unexpected. In that long moment, his eyes were the eyes of a man who had neither the strength nor the emotion left in him to stop his wife from going to another man. Mawlana is writing verses. They are beautiful. Sham’s absence is turning him into a poet. I don’t know about that, but it is true that I find silence painful these days. Words give me openings to break through the darkness in my heart. Wherever he saw any kind of mental boundary, a prejudice or a taboo, he took the bull by the horns and confronted it. Because of him I learned the value of madness and have come to know the taste of loneliness, helplessness, slander, seclusion, and finally, heartbreak. Abandon security and stay in frightful places! The poems do not belong to me. I am only a vehicle for the letters that are placed in my mouth. Traveling to a new place often engendered a dreadful sense of loneliness and sadness in the soul of a man. But in chess, just as in life, there were moves that you made for the sake of winning and there were moves you made because they were the right thing to do. I knew I had reached the age to marry, but I also knew that girls who got married changed forever. I slept peacefully that night, feeling exultant and determined. Little did I know that I was making the most common and the most painful mistake women have made all throughout the ages; to naively think that with their love they can change the men they love. There is no such thing as early or late in life. Everything happens at the right time. In every wedding celebration, there was a mourning for the virgin who was soon to become a wife and a mother. It made my blood boil that society imposed such ridiculous rules on its individuals. These codes of honor had less to do with the harmony God created than with the order human beings wanted to sustain. I felt a strong need to run away from everything, not only from this house, this marriage, this town, but also from this body I had been given. It pleased me immensely that he appreciated my thoughts and encouraged me to think more widely. The way to a man’s heart can sometimes take a woman far away from herself, my dear. You see, Ella, all I can give you is the present moment. That is all I have. But the truth is, no one has more than that. It is just that we like to pretend we do. It is never too late to ask yourself, Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within? After grief comes another season. Another valley. Another you. And though I know that there are no words that can express this inner journey of mine, I believe in words. I am a believer of words. Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except for the face of God. Little by little, one turns forty, fifty, and sixty and, with each major decade, feels more complete. You need to keep walking, though there’s no place to arrive at. With that knowledge we dervishes will dance our way through love and heartbreak even if no one understands what we are doing. And that is how Ella had come to understand that if there was anything worse in the eyes of society than a woman abandoning her husband for another man, it was a woman abandoning her future for the present moment.

[anolis3]

"The Book of Eve", by Meg Clothier.

"In principio... In the Beginning... But instead : a blank page. A blank page. Just imagine... Imagine what we could do with that...", from The Book of Eve.

"The snake stands still... and speaks. Its voice is a roar, a surge, a whisper... It is the voice of the book, the voice of the origins of the Mother, the voice of the naiads dryad sibyls mantes sphinxes priestesses prophetesses, it is the voice of the reverend mother Chiara, that of all our mothers, of the Mother. And its voice, even though it's just telling him what happened, what really happened, its voice is driving him mad.", from The Book of Eve.

[liberaljane]

Ban Bigotry, not Books.

digital illustration of a pile of books that read, 'ban bigotry not books’ There’s a cat sitting on top.

[belle-keys]

I hate how the booktokification of the “unhinged woman” genre has completely reduced the concept of female rage to just “girlboss” without taking seriously how important it is to unequivocally portray female rage.

Throughout the history of literature, we’ve been given countless instances of women in despair and in sadness but save for a few writers (take Euripides, for example), we’ve rarely ever been given angry women who aren’t the villains or the foil for the perfect poised passive princess. Female rage has constantly been subdued and erased or warped into “she’s just batshit crazy” in pretty much every society.

And now that publishing and media marketing has reduced women showing rage in books to the “white hypersexual girlboss with a knife”, instead of uplifting the way women are allowed to have more dimension and sympathy in their visible anger than ever in literature, the media still isn’t taking this subgenre seriously.

[letscumfornow]

Happy new year lovelies ✨🌹

[butchazepam]

updated radical feminist library

the radical feminist library, by aggrolesbo/ladielabrys, is great. but it has a lot of repeated and illegible files, and without the proper authors so it gets difficult to search for things. I cleaned it put and then added a lot more books recommended across the internet. Plus very good releases by suny press and routledge.

i separated the trans folder from the rest of the library so you can send it to people who would otherwise be turned off.

If you have any recommendations i would be glad to add it!

spread it far and wide please

[radykalny-feminizm]

Lucy Delap's book "Feminisms: A global history" just came out in polish, the description looks kinda promising but idk, is it worth reading or is it a typical libfem bullshit?

[elizareed]

every day I log onto tumblr dot com and I have to see people claiming charlotte bronte wasn't a feminist unlike their totally unproblematic fave jane austen and I am physically unable to grab them by the shoulders and giving them a good shake and it makes me real sad

[fictionadventurer]

Maybe the problem with Christian fiction is that it's non-denominational. People are just "Christian", with no effort put into showing what practicing that religion looks like for them specifically. No indication that there are other Christians who could have different beliefs. No wrestling with differing ideas and the struggle of how one should live out their Christian faith. And that makes it unrealistic and unrelatable.

[shesey]

Excerpts from Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. I just can’t engage with the bewilderment and the defensiveness as they try to grapple with the fact that not everyone experience the world in the way that they do. The words hit a barrier of denial and they don’t get any further. Watching the Color of Fear by Lee Mun Wah, I saw people of color break down in tears as they struggled to convince a defiant white man that his words were enforcing and perpetuating a white racist standard on them. All the while he stared obliviously, completely confused by this pain, at best trivializing it, at worst ridiculing it. So I can’t talk to white people about race any more because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others? Trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that. I cannot continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get this message across. I don’t have a huge amount of power to change the way the world works, but I can set boundaries. I can halt the entitlement they feel towards me and I’l start that by stopping the conversation. Thinking about power made me realize that racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. It was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances. Entire lives sustaining constant brutality and violence, living in never-ending fear. I wondered how often history would have to repeat itself before we choose to tackle the underlying problems. If all racism was as easy to spot, grasp, and denounce as white extremism is, the task of the anti-racist would be simple. He might look at the white kids he went to university with and watch them effortlessly transition from student booze-culture-loving lager louts to slick-young-professional status. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance. How can I define white privilege? It’s so difficult to describe an absence. And white privilege is an absence of the negative consequence of racism... It is an absence of funny looks directed at you because you’re believed to be in the wrong place... Trying to convince stony faces of disbelief has never appealed to me. The idea of white privilege forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence. White privilege is dull, grinding complacency. It is par for the course in a world in which drastic race inequality is responded to with a shoulder shrug, considered just the norm. But there simply aren’t enough black people in positions of power to enact racism against white people on a the kind of grand scale it currently operates at against black people. Are black people over-represented in the places and spaces where prejudice could really take effect? The answer is almost always no. I tried to encourage her to consider the suspicion and anger of a person who has suffered racism their entire lives. Everyone is complicit, but no one wants to take on responsibility. You learn to be careful about your battles, because otherwise people would consider you to be angry for no reason at all. I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate... the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of a tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,”... shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. He is the kind of white person who will do that unlearning and unpicking. I only have a few white people in my life like that, and I couldn’t be in a relationship with a white person who wasn’t. I think what made me feel defensive is that I was embarrassed that there was a chance that someone knew something that I didn’t. On some level, maybe I could sense that accepting whatever that person was saying would open a can of worms. It was a combination of embarrassment and panic. I can’t put my finger on exactly what I was trying to protect or defend. I think it was an indignation.  I’m trying to do more things in my ordinary day-to-day life that aren’t in activist spaces, to bring issues up when they’re relevant at that time. Because I don’t know what the other people in the room are thinking, but if I’m thinking about that and no one else is saying it, then it’s on me to say something. Being accountable for that, really only to myself. Doing things when there’s nobody there to see it, because it’s not really about somebody witnessing it or patting me on the back for it. Racism bolsters white people’s life chances. It affords an unearned power; it is designed to maintain a quiet dominance. It looked like he just wanted silence, the kind of strained peace that simmers with resentment, the kind that requires some to suffer so that others are comfortable. When they make it about offence rather than their own complicity in a drastically unjust system, they successfully transfer the responsibility of fixing the system from the benefactors of it to those who are likely to lose out because of it. Tackling racism moves from conversations about justice to conversations about sensitivity.  The imaginations of black Hermione’s detractors can stretch to the possibility of a secret platform at King’s Cross station that can only be accessed by running through a brick wall, but they can’t stretch to a black central character. There is an old saying about the straight man’s homophobia being rooted in a fear that gay men will treat him as he treats women. This is no difference.

Even though I wrote about my experiences with so much contempt, feminism was my first love. It was what gave me a framework to begin understanding the world. Being at feminist events was a relief; to be in a space where people just got it - the shared anger, frustration, the burning will to do something, anything, to change the messed-up world we live in. People’s knowledge was very varied. But we were all kind of describing the same hurts, the same frustrations, and the same anger-inducing moments. That, to me, was just absolutely powerful. Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. I choose to reappropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression. The modesty expectation is just as limiting and judgemental as the compulsory bikini-body one. Both obsessively focus on a woman’s looks and how covered or uncovered her body is in determining her value, as though her body belongs to a male gaze before it belongs to her. There are always external factors influencing the way a woman dresses, but the ultimate decision should be her own. This isn’t about good men or bad men - binary notions that we feel comfortable enough with to slot into neat boxes - but about rape culture. We should be asking why, when children and women speak up about being raped or sexually assaulted, there are always people around them who bend over backwards to try and find the ways to suggest that she incited or invited it. The taboo in discussing these crimes isn’t about race, it is about men. Predatory men. Every woman who has ever been a teenage girl could tell you a tale about an encounter with a predatory man, men who smell youth and vulnerability, and seek only to dominate. [Feminism] will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default. The mess we are living is a deliberate one. If it was created by the people, it can be dismantled by the people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few. Above everything, feminism is a constant work in progress. We are all still learning. I have always loved feminism’s readiness to viciously rip into the flesh of misogyny, to stick its chin out defiantly and scare the living daylights out of mediocre men.  Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they attempt to address. Men inhabit different spaces. Some face racism. Some face homophobia. Even if we as feminists decide to put the differences between men aside, does equality demand parity with people who have always had a disproportionately large share of resources. I don’t want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. Women in general aren’t supposed to be angry. Women are expected to smile, swallow our feelings and be self-sacrificial.  The ‘angry black woman’ phrase says more about maleness and whiteness than it does about black women. Often, there will be no one fighting your corner but yourself. It was black feminist Audre Lorde who said: your silence will not protect you. Who wins when we don’t speak? Not us. We need to see how it seeps, like a noxious gas, into everything. Structures, she said, are made out of people.  You don’t have to be the leader of a global movement or a household name. It can be as small scale as chipping away at the warped power relations in your workplace. It can be passing on knowledge and skills to those who wouldn’t access them otherwise. It can be creative. It can be informal. It can be your job. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re doing something.

[the-ghost-of-mr-dolphin]

when i say “i can’t talk right now, i’m doing hot girl shit.” what i really mean is “i can’t talk right now, i’m doing my bio hw while listening to classical music and pretending i’m a female scientist in the 1700s learning in secret using books i stole from the academy when they refused to let me in, i’m hiding away in the attic of the opera house (where i work) while the orchestra rehearses beneath me. they’ll never accept me in the world of academia, but i know i’m destined for greatness.”

[anistarrose]

The thing about the "fridged" trope is that obviously you can't have a female love interest dying as a defining moment for a male character because that's not feminist, but you also can't have a male love interest dying as a defining moment for a female character because then she's just going to have an arc revolving around her relationship with a man and that's also not feminist, and you also can't kill off a love interest from a gay relationship or a relationship involving a nonbinary person because that's burying your queers, which is at least as bad as misogyny if not even worse, and now suddenly you can't kill off romantic partners at all in stories because no matter the demographics, it's going to be problematic somehow, which is... a pretty ridiculous limitation to impose on storytelling.

And, like, it would be satisfying to have a solution other than "it depends on context if not straight-up vibes, and it's usually very reasonable for audience members to have a range of opinions on the execution of one specific instance," but. Yeah, you do kind of have to just vibe check it in a deeply subjective manner sometimes.

[liberaljane]

Support Your Local Library!

Here’s 3 easy ways to get started: 1.) Get a library card (it’s free and usually just requires proof of residency!) 2.) Attend your local library’s events and programming. 3.) Advocate for increased support and funding. 

Digital illustration of a redhead fem with cat eye glasses wearing a green sparkly dress. She's leaning on a bookcart next to a tuxedo cat holding a book that reads, 'support your local library.' Behind her are books with titles that are commonly banned in schools.