Top 10 Queer and Feminist Books of 2013 2013 has been truly awesome for new queer and/or feminist things to read. Here are some of the best ones. 10. Amber Dawn combines memoir and poetry into something that is both at once as she discusses her experiences as a writer, sex worker, survivor and queer-identified person. In her interview with Ali, Dawn says: “Many memoirs cover a chronological time frame—travelling from the author’s “inciting moment,” through a sort of character or personal arch, to an ending resolution. 9. The Summer We Got Free is a fearless, semi-magical-realist queer coming-of-age story that also won the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for debut fiction. In a review at Lambda Literary, Dawn Robinson writes: “I will not give you all of the salient details of this layered, complex, and absorbing novel in this brief review—no spoilers here. 8. In an interview with Dan Fishback on Emily Books, Binnie says: 7. A.J. 6. In an interview with the Rumpus, Corin says: 5. In an interview with Persephone Magazine, Serano says: 4.
Mapping Emotions On The Body: Love Makes Us Warm All Over : Shots - Health News People drew maps of body locations where they feel basic emotions (top row) and more complex ones (bottom row). Hot colors show regions that people say are stimulated during the emotion. Cool colors indicate deactivated areas. toggle caption Image courtesy of Lauri Nummenmaa, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, and Jari Hietanen. People drew maps of body locations where they feel basic emotions (top row) and more complex ones (bottom row). Image courtesy of Lauri Nummenmaa, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, and Jari Hietanen. Close your eyes and imagine the last time you fell in love. Where did you feel the love? When a team of scientists in Finland asked people to map out where they felt different emotions on their bodies, they found that the results were surprisingly consistent, even across cultures. People reported that happiness and love sparked activity across nearly the entire body, while depression had the opposite effect: It dampened feelings in the arms, legs and head.
Habits of Mind THE INDIAN MEDIA IS LIKE pliable dough. It can be kneaded, punched, stretched and rolled in all directions. If overworked, it turns rubbery, dense and inert. And if the hands that knead it are dirty, it becomes impossible to separate the grime from the good. In the past two years, there have been a number of examples of our institutions and politicians overworking the press. Within the media industry, there was plenty of grime. Having thought through some of the specific instances of the external punches on the media and the ugly impairments inside the media, large questions bog my mind. We don’t have—like a few democracies do, and like all democracies ought to—a well-articulated philosophical framework by which to think about the media, that would define to all—politicians, judges, bureaucrats, police, academics, media owners, editors and reporters—what the rules of the game are. The judgements were an affront to egos in the new government. “I don’t know,” Hutchins replied.
India’s Post-Ideological Politician The catch-all populism of Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party has proven politically expedient in India. Arvind Kejriwal is not a socialist. He’ll be the first one to say this. In interview after interview, Kejriwal, a rising political star in India, consciously distances himself from any left-wing associations. Yet the website arvindkejriwal.net.in (clearly run by a fan of Kejriwal, not the man himself) proudly proclaims that Kejriwal is a “popular socialist.” And while the Delhi manifesto of Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi (“Common Man”) Party is far from revolutionary, it is filled with proposals that tilt leftward: fighting the privatization of water in Delhi, building more government schools and imposing an upper limit for private school fees, breaking the stranglehold of monopoly capital in the electricity sector, replacing contract labor with permanent labor as much as possible, and empowering workers in the unorganized sector. But the Obama-Kejriwal analogy can only be taken so far.
The Problem With BeyHive Bottom Bitch Feminism | Real Colored Girls In Pimp Theory, a “bottom bitch” is the one in the whores’ hierarchy who rides hardest for her man. She’s the rock of every hustler economy and her primary occupation is keeping other ho’s in check and gettin’ that money. She isn’t trying to elevate the status of her sister ho’s. She isn’t looking to transform pimp culture. The bottom bitch is a token who is allowed symbolic power, which she uses to discipline, advocate for, represent and advance the domain of the stable. In hip hop vernacular she has emerged as the “Boss Bitch” or “Bawse”, titles you’ll hear used liberally across urban/pop discourses – from the streets to rappers to the hip hop, basketball and ATL housewives. Admittedly, bottom bitch is an unfortunate metaphor to use for framing conversations about Beyonce, but when you’re married to “Big Pimp’n” and his cameo on your new self-titled album, coined a “feminist masterpiece,” is all about how he gon’ you leave us no choice. Our work is not done. What are your thoughts?
X-TRA Zarina, Delhi, 2000 The 1990s will be remembered in India as the decade of liberalization, when the Indian society and economy were opened to the world after fifty years of political non- alignment and economic protectionism. For Indian art, this was a period of self-criticism and reassessment, during which many artists, especially the younger and more globally aware among them, realized that their peculiar inheritance of nationalist sentiment and modernist aspiration had limited their practice in fundamental ways. At the same time, these artists had to deal with the threat of Hindutva — the militant Hindu-majoritarian movement — which had consolidated itself in reaction to the perceived cultural and political challenge of globalization, in parallel with its long-term aim of securing India as a Hindu nation rather than a multi-religious formation. Indian artists gradually realized that the history of their practice had not prepared them to confront such provoca- tions.
Love in the Time of Bollywood At nine every morning, Sana dons her burqa and rides pillion on her father’s scooter. He drops her off at the all-women’s college in Bhopal where she is completing a Master’s degree in English literature. On most days, though, Sana does not attend classes. Sana’s hometown is the sleepy capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Despite the new additions to Bhopal’s landscape, though, it still is not easy to carry on an illicit romance. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month. As a subscriber, you get unrestricted access to ForeignAffairs.com. Register for free to continue reading. Registered users get access to three free articles every month. Have an account?
French Polymath Paul Valéry on “The Three-Body Problem” by Maria Popova “Everything that is masks for us something that might be.” “It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. … The body becomes irrelevant,” Dani Shapiro wrote in her beautiful meditation on the pleasures and perils of the creative life. That’s precisely what legendary French polymath Paul Valéry (October 30, 1871–July 20, 1945) explores in his 1943 essay “Some Simple Reflections on the Body,” found in the altogether fantastic 1989 anthology Zone 4: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2 (public library), in which he poses “the three-body problem” — the trifecta of bodily realities that we each inhabit and struggle to integrate. Illustration from 'The Human Body,' 1959. He begins with the First Body, which possesses us more than we possess it and serves as a reference point to the world: There’s a particular amorphousness to this First Body: