The cartoon whimsy of Drag Race continues, as does our illustrated coveradge. This week our queens are challenged with Telenova style skits and thier ability to fake tears and orgasms. Coco's cat fight creshendos, and the wrong queen is sent packing. The competion is whittled down to a fiece five, and 100 grand is on the line.
If you’ve ever scanned your Facebook feed and wondered what possessed your old college suitemate to post a full-color photo of her fresh, glistening placenta, well, Blair Koenig feels your pain. We interview Koenig about her popular blog STFU Parents, which is launched in book form today.
In Cinder, the familiar glass slipper story is set in a dystopian future Beijing 126 years after World War IV has ended. Cinder’s author, Marissa Meyer, is white. Meanwhile, Chinese-American author Malinda Lo award-winning 2010 retelling of Cinderella, Ash, takes place in a kingdom that resembles a fairy tale Europe.
What do these choices say about each author? How do their ethnic backgrounds affect their retellings?
Here's what we've been reading on this lovely Wednesday morning.
With only 38 days left to go and a little more than $20,000 left to raise, this Kickstarter campaign to fund a feature-length documentary called Gaming in Color about queer and LGBTQ presence in gaming needs your support! [Kickstarter]
I don't know about you, but I definitely rewatch Clueless at least once per year. Here's a celebration of the Amy Heckerling film and all things way existential. [Bitch Flicks]
Women make up a majority of college students, but at the top of the academic ladder, the percentage of women wanes: only 26 percent of college presidents are female. Why is this?
Puritans, assigned reading, high school: it’s a recipe for literary disaster. But The Scarlet Letter is stronger than that, hardier (like Hawthorne’s grim Puritan forbearers), and a hell of a lot more interesting. I recently read the classic and am here to tell you one thing: Hester Prynne is a babe. Hester Prynne is a super babe.
Last week, attorney Charles Cooper argued before the Supreme Court that the justices should deny the right for same-sex couples to get married because marriage has traditionally been about procreation. Time for a history lesson, Charles.
Far from being a union of one man and one woman, marriage, for most of human history, has been the union of two men: the husband and father-in-law’s wealth and property. Marriage was a business arrangement in which love was highly incidental. Forget kids or compatibility, the only thing guaranteed going in was a well-negotiated contract.
We all know Rosa Parks, but she wasn't the first to refuse to give up her seat on the bus. Democracy Now interviews Claudette Colvin, who was just 15 when she was arrested for doing the same. [Democracy Now, NewBlackMan (in Exile)]
For my last post in this series about older women on TV, I wanted to offer a list of shows worth watching (but not yet discussed here) if you’re interested in aging and feminism on the small screen. These offer glimmers of hope on the horizon, that someday women over 40 will be portrayed wholeheartedly and multi-dimensionally all over our TV dials, or wherever we watch serialized stories on small screens.
In Stoker, Director Park Chan-wook follows 18-year-old India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) as she carefully navigates the suspicious arrival of her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) at her father’s funeral. The film nods to Hitchcock’s classic Shadow of a Doubt; there’s a mystery and a possible murder, but, like in Hitchock, the story is really about India’s psycho-sexual awakening.
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