More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Each month, I provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. It’s already August and the heat is on. And while we are working hard to save the world, we must take time to read, rest and renew.
These 27 books are bound to support you, learn you, trouble you and try you. They may even heal you. So take some time and take care.
Renaissance, Beyoncé’s seventh solo album, offers a much different vibe and one that also represents an intergenerational inheritance engulfed in the pleasures of Black dance music vibrating across the various subcultures of Black communities around the world.
Black women—across genders, sexualities and communities—have been the blueprint, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance proves that.
On July 18, the music video for P!nk’s new song, “Irrelevant,” dropped and has since been deemed a ‘protest anthem.’ She explained, “As a woman with an opinion and the fearlessness to voice that opinion, it gets very tiring when the only retort is to tell me how irrelevant I am. I am relevant because I exist and because I am a human being. No one is irrelevant. And no one can take away my voice.”
The proceeds from the new track will be donated to Michelle Obama’s national, nonpartisan voting initiative When We All Vote.
Beyoncé returns on Renaissance to challenge listeners to ask a life-saving follow up question: Who taught you to love yourself? And she tells us: If you want to learn Black self-love, listen to Black queer and trans voices.
In a world where the meaning of “feminism” is increasingly being questioned by those on both the right and the left, a thoughtful contemplative examination of the term’s history and future can be hard to find. But the Oakland Museum of California’s “Hella Feminist” exhibition does just that.
(“Hella Feminist” is on view at the Oakland Museum of California in Oakland, California from July 2022-January 2023.)
During the 45 years that award-winning author Nikki Grimes has been publishing children’s and young adult novels, she’s seen massive changes in the industry. Protagonists today are far more diverse, featuring more protagonists of color and characters who are disabled, non-binary, questioning or LGBTQIA+.
Right-wing organizations think many children’s books are offensive and have launched a campaign to squelch this progressive turn.
“The right is wrong. A more inclusive, accepting and humane world is possible.”
“We felt it our responsibility to depict the war on Black women’s bodies raging in this conservative state,” said Katori Hall, creator of Starz’s P-Valley.
After researching princesses for five years and reading what feels like every book on the market about western women and royalty, Barbara Bourland could share what she discovered in one sentence: Princess stories are narratives of state control over women’s bodies.
It’s time we all stopped seeing them any differently.
“For the first time in my life, I felt allergic to poetry. A radical, rogue Supreme Court decided Americans with uteruses no longer have the human right to control our own bodies but are subject to the whims of our state. I couldn’t bear to read a poem. … Then came Independence Day. The painful irony of a July 4 on the heels of such profound loss of liberty left me suddenly hungry for words. I needed poems the way some need scripture.”
Welcome back to Ms. Muse, a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of female resistance.
