Bookslut

An Interview with Viv Albertine

"Eventually the real thrust of the book emerged, it was the journey of a girl who was fairly uneducated, poor and born into times that were very patriarchal but on the cusp of change and all the obstacles and journeys and knockbacks that trying to be a creative woman in those times threw at her. I don't know where I got the strength from, but I didn't let those obstacles beat me, not in the end." by Nina Gibb

Citizen: Listening to Ferguson

Because the point is not how I reacted to the non-indictment but that I cannot talk about what I read this month without talking about Mike Brown. Nothing else I read felt important. Even as I knew, after ten years working in prisons and public high schools, what those texts would say once I was back on the ground. We, you, I cannot allow ourselves to expect news like this just as we cannot allow ourselves to be unprepared for it. Hearing it puts us in hyperspace. Where is my body. Where is yours. by Mairead Case

With and Against: Bad Feminism and Its Discontents

What Bad Feminist does in espousing consistent inconsistency is something irresponsible, and it then creates a space in which no one can call it so. Responsibility -- what it is, who has it, and especially: do artists? -- comes up several times in the book, but as with every issue, political, artistic, or otherwise, Gay’s verdict is out: just as she vacillates on whether she wants to act an example, she vacillates on what kind of morality we can and should expect of our popular culture more broadly. Her readiness to come to only the easiest of conclusions -- that unreasonable expectations are “unfair” -- in response to two conflicting truths ends up rendering most of what she says meaningless. by Lauren Oyler