Reading List: Cultural History Nerds, Rejoice!
Happy Friday, sweeties! Here’s some reading material for your chilly weekend, wherever in the polar vortex you may reside.
Lili Loofbourow, The Male Glance (VQR) - I’m still working through this piece, but it's totally for my cultural history nerds: “There’s a long history to grading aesthetics on a gendered curve.” Loofbourow deconstructs that curve, providing examples of the “quick” ways woman-created art can be dismissed before it has the chance to catch fire, leading to assumptions that “the effects these female texts produce are small, or imperfectly controlled, or, even worse, accidental.” And I especially love her providing language around “how blind we are to female intentionality” in performance.
Davey Alba, How Duterte Used Facebook To Fuel the Philippine Drug War (BuzzFeed) - This is brutal and scary, which is why I want to pair it with Does Technology Favor Tyranny? from Foreign Affairs.
Caitlyn Collins, The Real Mommy War Is Against the State (New York Times) - Collins recently published her first book, which compares the experiences of middle-class working moms in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the US. Here, she examines the impact of government social supports (or lack thereof) on working moms. Spoiler alert: it’s a helluva lot harder to raise a family with a huge gender wage gap, and without paid parental leave, universal health care, or access to affordable childcare.
Maggie Astor, ‘A Woman, Just Not That Woman’: How Sexism Plays Out on the Trail (New York Times) - Sexism in politics and political coverage is back, because it actually never left! Woooooo! #blessed
Jessa Crispin, All the sad young literary fakes (The Outline) Thank you Colin for reminding me how much I love a good ol’ fashioned memoir scam, the opening of doors into the publishing world when “a con man us[es] a sob story to sashay his way to literary power.” Because remember, folks: “Imagining and selling tragedy works.” BRB while I add that to my 2019 intentions.
Have a lovely long weekend, darling ones. And be kind to each other.
Xoxo Amy