Within books 50 to 41, you’ll find several controversial takes on motherhood and many a memoir, including a reflection on the personal impact of breast cancer, a graphic autobiography from a dyke to watch out for and some gutsy revelations from a Nation columnist. You’ll also see a satire of how the patriarchy tries to dampen […]
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was a trailblazing writer, intersectional feminist and civil rights activist. Her works include Sister Outsider, which is still considered an important text for Black studies, women’s studies and queer theory, and The Cancer Journals, which details her experiences with breast cancer and her mastectomy.
Scapegoating Black Women in a Recession
You know the media spin cycle and the propagandists are winning when you advise a young, promising black woman undergraduate student about her prospects for doctoral studies, and she immediately takes herself out of the running. Not because there are fewer fellowships to help pay for graduate school or because she wants to pursue a […]
Setting The Record Straight… Or Rather, Queer!
Hey, my fellow queer folk! Guess what? We’re finally making history! Or rather, California is finally acknowledging that we’ve always been making history. In an it’s-about-time turn of events, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the FAIR Education Act into law on July 14. The act: …would amend the Education Code to include social sciences instruction on […]
Can Tyler Perry Pull Off a Black Feminist Masterpiece?
The mediasphere has been buzzing with skepticism since Variety announced over a year ago that Tyler Perry would write, direct and produce the adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s 1975 choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. The film is the first production for Perry’s 34th Street Films (a production division of […]
Where Do We Go From bell?
Is it true that feminisms are everywhere? Are they really, as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest, “in the water”? Yes and yes. From music, film and literature to the online world of social networking and blogging, women are (and have been) creating kick-ass political analyses and social commentary on the intersection of oppressive social […]
A Month into Summer of Feminista
In June I launched Summer of Feminista, a blogging experiment where I am asking Latinas to write about their relationship with feminism, and after a month of posts I am in awe of how similar our stories are, yet how unique as well. Elizabeth, at 8, was teaching feminism to other third-graders. A grammar school […]