Named after a fictional girls' etiquette handbook, Elissa Schappell's 2011 short story collection, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, offers a multi-perspectival, intergenerational portrait of American womanhood. Told with impressive care and patience, the eight stories of the collection inspire a familiar uncertainty at odds with the trite didactic moral lessons the title promises.
The protagonists of the stories are involved in an intricate web of acquaintance. Characters mentioned in passing in one story appear later as main subjects, all the while coping with the shattered illusion of safety that so often pushes people toward adulthood before their time. The collection is bookended with the stories of Heather, the "school slut" whom we see first as a teenager and later as a concerned mother. The six stories in between jump forward and backward in time, examining the characters' set expecations for their own lives versus the realities they face.
“Transnational feminism” is given a lot of weight—negative and otherwise—and most said it couldn’t be done, ‘til Playing with Fire came in 2006, that is. A quick introduction: Playing with Fire was originally a collective diary that seven NGO workers in Sitapur, tucked away in North India (Uttar Pradesh), kept while they worked as Sangtins (a Sangtin is a term used by a woman to refer to her companion who sees her through life’s struggles) with the State-funded project called Mahila Samakhya (MS). The seven writers, along with Richa Nagar, documented their journey through Sitapur, an act that was enough to enrage their superiors at the Mahila Samakhya UP Branch, and eventually that got the Sangtins fired. The Sangtins flaunted their diaries fully aware of the risks they were taking, in publishing a book that critiqued the very organizations that fed them, as well as revealing intimate details of their lives.
If you read Bitch, you are likely at least somewhat familiar with Gloria Anzaldúa and her work with feminism, her beautiful writings, and her advocacy for women of color. She was a Chicana-Tejana-lesbian-feminist poet, theorist, and fiction writer, born September 26, 1942, in Raymondville, Texas. She passed away on May 15th, 2004, but still remains one of the most widely read, respected, and loved queer woman writers of color in history.
Along with economic, political, sexual, social exploitation, and god knows what else, colonialism drained South Asia of its resources; this much we know and agree on. But, this encounter also unintentionally opened spaces for women and the ex-untouchable castes in areas like education and politics. Admitting to this history would mean also accepting that a “pre-colonial” society wasn’t ideal after all, and there is no point waxing nostalgic about such an era.
A book about us? Could I get the audio version? I'm a bit busy at the moment...
The book Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (SmartPop/BenBella Books) was something I could not resist, despite the very real possibility that it would not only not answer my lingering Season Two questions, but also offer spoilers for things I didn’t even know I didn’t want to know about yet. Beyond the Wall, compiled by fantasy writer and editor James Lowder, is a collection of 14 essays on both the books and the show. It covers textual elements like their take on time and chronology (“An Unreliable World: History and Timekeeping in Westeros”), as well as ruminations on their place within literary and fantasy categories (“Beyond the Ghetto: How George R.R. Martin Fights the Genre Wars”)—a close read, in other words, on the Song of Ice and Fire phenomenon itself, and on the themes and images that pervade it.
Isn’t it the best when you stumble upon an amazing book you just can't put down? That was my feeling when I read The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich.
However, today, a question lingers with this sense of relief: Which families even have inner courtyards? Which families have traditionally segregated their women? Historically, it has always been the privileged few—the upper-castes and classes of the Indian social order within most religions—that have practiced veiling, segregation, and separation. This isn't to pit the working classes against the bourgeoisie, or the Dalits against the upper-castes, or any community, for that matter, against another. These communities do not inherently become evil or overtly patriarchal just because they practice segregation. Neither do communities that do not veil their women, for instance, become immediately resistant. Sometimes, it all comes down to who can afford to have their women not venture out of the house, or who can afford to have working women veiled in a manner that will not interfere with their labor practices. How did some of us start voicing the experience of all?
Okay, so we're basically just saying what many have already concluded. 50 Shades of Grey is a boring, badly written book that portrays people into BDSM as sick. Yes, it's popular, but we think erotica fans can do better.
Lisa Kirvirist and John Ivanko's new cookbook, Farmstead Chef, is a great eco-activist resource that could easily be placed next to the novel you're reading on your nightstand. Not only is it plump with yummy, mostly vegetarian and low-on-the-food-chain recipes, but it also has inspiring stories from the authors' own lives dotted throughout the book, as well as profiles of other food activists and farmers in today's local foods landscape.
It is no surprise that India is a Big Brother-esque figure in South Asia, especially, in histories of nation-building (the Partition, the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Independence, the decades under IPKF in Sri Lanka are just the tip of the iceberg), as researchers, we carry these legacies on our bodies and words. What kind of “secular” feminism are we advocating, if this “secular” voice comes from one platform only? Who talks of one kind of history only? What happens when this margin is speaking to you and you don’t have enough slots to categorize them? Why are stories of the Partition by Indian authors the narrative that we are mostly familiar with (Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Bhism Sahani come to mind here)—no matter how sympathetic they may be to other margins?
Lisa Kirvirist and John Ivanko's new cookbook, Farmstead Chef, is a great eco-activist resource that could easily be placed next to the novel you're reading on your nightstand. Not only is it plump with yummy, mostly vegetarian and low-on-the-food-chain recipes, but it also has inspiring stories from the authors' own lives dotted throughout the book, as well as profiles of other food activists and farmers in today's local foods landscape.
.gif)
.gif)
