Feminist Art Club: Help a Sister Out

M.K. Hajdin, who blogs as Exiled Stardust, has started a Feminist Art Club. Basically, those who can afford to help purchase art supplies then get a piece of feminist art in exchange or you can donate to help another feminist acquire a piece of Hajdin's art. I love this idea as a form of feminist activism; subverting capitalism by helping other feminists: 

Join my art club 

Like art?  Think you’ll never be able to afford any because it’s too expensive? 

Why not join my Twitter Feminist Art Club? 

It’s simple.  Follow me on Twitter and either donate things I need to make art or money to buy them with, get artwork in return or you can contribute to help another feminist acquire a piece of art.
It’s basically artistic socialism. 

I live on a very low income and everything helps, so if you like my site and want to support the cause  and/or help keep my cats fed. 

You can donate here. 

In the interests of full disclosure, this is the beginnings of my painting: 

I am very, very excited. 

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International Women's Day Annual Playlist

(Image from Here)

Last year, I started #buyingmusiconlybywomen*, I've discovered some brilliant new women artists like Leela Gilday, The Raincoats, Isobel Campbell, Alix Dobkin, Imelda May and Heather Nova. I tweeted it yesterday and got some new (and some old!) suggestions for my Annual International Women's Day Playlist.   

As ever, I haven't actually compiled my annual playlist yet but I'm always looking for more suggestions like the lovely ones below tweeted at me by @planetpavs and @BackgroundSpin

Melissa Etheridge
Tracy Chapman
Indigo Girls!
Judy Collins
Jennifer Warnes
K.D. lang
Alix Dobkin
Carly Simon
Barbra Streisand
Ani Difranco
Alison Moyet
Aretha Franklin
Kirsty MaColl
Tracy Chapman
Joni Mitchell
Jen Foster
Emily Barker
Mary Chapin Carpenter
Nancy Griffith
Lucinda Williams
Kitty Barber

* Okay, I admit it. I did buy the new Red Hot Chili Peppers Singles but, other than them, only music by women. I swear. 

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Lana Del Ray's Ride

I have only recently come across Lana Del Ray and that is only due to the Feminist backlash to her being named GQ's Woman of the Year and being the only winner to be nude on the cover. Coincidentally, she was the only woman. It's fairly obvious that her value to GQ was for her body rather than her career as a talented musician; a situation which isn't exactly abnormal in the music industry. Today, for the first time, I have actually watched one of Del Ray's music videos: Ride. I came across whilst researching the backlash to No Doubt's newest video for my piece of Victoria Secret's cultural appropriation of the Plains Indian' warbonnet which is frequently used as a cultural signifier for the entire Native Peoples, First Nations, Metis and Inuit of North America. The reductive use of the warbonnet as a cultural signifier is, simply, racist so I was disappointed to see yet another female singer using the Plains Indian warbonnet as part of their sexualised eroticisation of abuse.

Lana Del Ray's video is beautifully deconstructed here and here. There is very little I can add to these deconstructions except to say how incredibly depressing and distressing I find the eroticisation of sexual abuse and the forced prostitution of women's bodies. It is that same old "the child is responsible for their own abuse and continuing self-harm as an adult" with no contextualisation whatsoever of how the adult woman came to be in trapped in self-destructive behaviour. The video features Del Ray as a "wild child" who "believes in the country American used to be". Manifest Destiny anyone? The whole issue racism exhibited by Del Ray running about being "crazy" in a Plains Indian warbonnet aside, the video is an incredibly disturbing tribute to the sexual abuse of a young woman at the hands of many men, most of whom are old enough to be her father. It is both racist and misogynist and Del Ray is far too talented for this type of shit.

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Victoria Secrets' Annual Demonstration of Misogyny: This Time With a Side of Racism

Victoria Secret's annual Fashion Show is testimony to the mainstreaming of the pornification of women's bodies. It represents everything which is wrong in the Patriarchy rendering women not only into objects for men to wank over but commodifying their bodies with the woman given the honour of wearing a $2.5 million dollar diamond studded bra considered The Ultimate Woman. It isn't so much a fashion show as a live action soft porn show with titillating photos of the models leaked online prior to the broadcast. I won't link any here but the images are the same poses as found in Playboy or any other mainstream soft porn magazine. Victoria Secret's trades on an image of respectability despite the fact that it uses the same techniques as porn to entice men. They reinforce rape culture by parading women in their underwear for male audiences. They are not selling underwear to women but the image of fuckable women to men who then by the underwear for their partners who can not be expected to look like the models who routinely go on crash diets involving only liquids in the run-up to the show so they don't look "fat". It normalises the Patriarchal Fuckability Test on women who have no hope of passing it.

The women-hating and exploitation of Victoria Secret's has become so common place that I don't even notice them anymore but this year they added racism to their bow. One of the themes of the production this year was the calendar and November was represented by a white model wearing a fairly racist signifier of "Indian". The use of a Plains Indian Warbonnett as a signifier for all Native Americans, First Nations, Metis and Inuit people is racist because it is reductive. You can not reduce huge, disparate cultures down to one item which was worn by men who had earned the honour and pretend it isn't anything but culturally insensitive. The cultural appropriation of such item on the objectified body of a white woman is doubly insensitive.

It really isn't that hard to take ten minutes and think about cultural appropriation. It isn't that hard to think about the links of a nearly naked white woman dressed in cultural signifiers of 'Indians' when Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other group of women in the US. The majority of the perpetrators of this sexual violence are non-Native men. Yet, the representation of white women dressed in outfits sexualising a construction of Native Americans derived from racist discourse in 'Cowboy and Indian' films has become a trope in our visual culture, one which has been repeated multiple time in the last couple of months. Lana Del Ray's latest video is possibly the most offensive of the recent insurgence in cultural appropriation; interestingly she seems to have received far less backlash than No Doubt or Victoria Secrets. Whilst I don't think No Doubt's apology is a proper apology what with the whole we have non-white friends trope being called up, they at least seem to understand that they have caused offence. Neither Del Ray nor Victoria Secret's appears to have understood at all. No Doubt pulled the video within days of the complaints arising. It seems unbelievably arrogant for Victoria Secrets not to take 10 minutes to rethink the outfit a week later.

And, FFS, using a cultural signifier for 'Indian' in the month of year where the major American holiday is a celebration of their genocide seems, I don't know, really fucking stupid. 

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Flaming Chickens of Mass Destruction

It's a reference from this book which is fucking brilliant. Everyone should read it. Especially cus I'm not telling what Flaming Chickens of Mass Destruction means. 

[It's also an excellent name for an anarcho-Feminist punk band but only if you give me naming recognition.]

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Lisa O'Donnell's The Death of Bees

This is the best book I've read in ages and I've read some pretty freaking brilliant books lately. The Death of Bees was one of my random choices from the Edinburgh Book Festival. I always buy a few books by authors I've never heard of but this is the best one by far. It is triggering since it covers the systemic violence against women, particularly against those young girls who aren't considered "proper" victims but it is also beautiful, funny and full of hope.  It is the story of two sisters, Marnie and Nelly, struggling to survive in  a Glasgow housing estate without their parents, who they've just buried in a shallow grave in the backyard. They are victimised and revictimised in every manner possible and left to self-destruct by a welfare state that doesn't give a shit about poor kids from the housing estates. After all, when school is only "a convenient way for all of us to congregate in one place", it is obvious that these are the kids no one cares about (p.47). But, it's more than a litany of abuse. It's about surviving, friendships, the meaning of sisterhood and what really makes a family.

I don't tend to rate books but if I did, this one would have 5 stars. It's beautiful (as I said when I bored Twitter senseless whilst reading it).

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Ode to the Doom Cats

This is written by lovely friend Philippa Molloy. It refers to a joke on Mumsnet many, many months ago; a joke which still makes me smile.

Ode to the Doom Cats

I am a doom cat of cognative dissonance

Fuck off, fuck off you awkward feminists

I see its my right to be marginalised or terrorised

Just cos my genitals don't hang on the outside.

So what if I want to cook meals for my man

Ignoring the fact that if thats what I want

Feminism says I canI am a doom cat of cognative dissonance

Don't make me feel awkward you nasty feminists.

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