> what a girl wants
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week, we're talking about women—AOC, Carmen Maria Machado, the Combahee River Collective, Aracelis Girmay, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.
Hello friend,
> Help a friend make a plan to vote.
> From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s profile in Vanity Fair: “This is not about a decision between two candidates. It’s about a decision between two countries.” (h/t Laura Olin).
> Speaking of AOC, her Get Ready With Me for Vogue is great. One comment: “I love the fact she can break down the patriarchal corporate system while applying eyeliner.”
> Still reading: Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, which is full of women haunting. Which is to say, it’s full of ghosts. A profile for Vulture notes that her fiction “unearths the misogyny hidden in plain sight.” I’m still reeling from “Especially Heinous,” a novella made entirely of episode synopses for the first 12 seasons of Law & Order: SVU. Also reeling from “Real Women Have Bodies.” Actually, maybe you should just read the book.
> If you’re interested, Carmen Maria Machado did an interview with Phoebe Bridgers in Playboy earlier this year (Machado wrote the bio that accompanies Bridgers’ latest album, Punisher).
> These past few weeks I have been mostly knitting and teaching and cooking, and I am aware that these are stereotypically female spaces. Sometimes I think about how I might want to be a pediatrician or a palliative care doctor and I think that these are also mostly female spaces. I wonder if I should resist stereotypically female spaces, by weightlifting and becoming a heart surgeon or something, I don’t know why, maybe to prove something. But the thing I’m trying to prove isn’t “women are just as good as men,” and co-opting “masculine” stereotypes certainly isn’t going to help either. I want to be able to choose what I do—my hobbies, my career—without worrying that it’s because it’s the easy way out, without worrying that I’m doing this because it’s what most women do.
> After reading How We Get Free, also thinking about what intersectionality really means, how struggles against sexual, racial, heterosexual, and class oppression are distinct and interlinked. What I’m saying is, maybe I should read the Combahee River Collective Statement again:
We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy…We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives.
> Aracelis Girmay’s essay, From Woe to Wonder, comes from the lineage of the Combahee River Collective, I think, perhaps not directly, but perhaps in the way she wields her identity. The essay interrogates the way we decenter Whiteness when we talking about violence against Black bodies:
I imagine a seesaw. My children are on one side and this White child, my son’s same age, same height and weight, is on the other side. She is one child, my children are two. And yet they are the ones hovering in the air, ungrounded. He was killed because his skin was brown. So goes the sentence that holds my children, dangling and subject, and that grants the White child her ground, her safety, her natural habitat, and close-to-the-earthness. The consequences of White supremacy are named only in terms of my child’s suffering or potential suffering, named only in terms of the suffering of our beloveds, but not in terms of the causes, the perpetrators, the inheritors, not in terms of the consequences on the minds of the White children who have already been failed, have already been taught wrongly to stand outside of the equation with their families.
> “Elliptical” by Harryette Mullen:
They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . They ought to be more . . . We all wish they weren’t so . . . They never . . . They always . . . Sometimes they . . . Once in a while they . . . However it is obvious that they . . . Their overall tendency has been . . . The consequences of which have been . . . They don’t appear to understand that . . . If only they would make an effort to . . . But we know how difficult it is for them to . . . Many of them remain unaware of . . . Some who should know better simply refuse to . . . Of course, their perspective has been limited by . . . On the other hand, they obviously feel entitled to . . . Certainly we can’t forget that they . . . Nor can it be denied that they . . . We know that this has had an enormous impact on their . . . Nevertheless their behavior strikes us as . . . Our interactions unfortunately have been . . .
> Female space brought to you by [Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro].
Cheers,
Tiffany