how do narratives change when we erase their roots?
our favorite posts from april
happy first friday of the month! if you missed any of them, be sure to check out our essays from april: pop! goes my heart and I found the tenth circle of hell. Tomorrow, Steph is celebrating their 29th birthday–if you’ve been enjoying the work they’ve been doing here you can show support by sending a tip or sharing the work they’ve posted here!
our fave long(er) reads
How therapy-speak ‘processed’ its way into pop-music (Emma Madden, GQ)
What it’s asking: What is therapy-speak trying to do in pop music, and where is it really coming from?
Favorite quote:
It’s this simple: the age we live in is a therapeutic one. But other genres have been able to transmute it with far greater success and less resistance than pop. Intergenerational trauma, and the therapeutic attempt to reverse it, has been well represented in rap, from Dave’s Psychodrama to Danny Brown’s successfully self-reflective Quaranta. But pop music, it seems, has a limited imagination when it comes to the therapy plot. In most cases, therapy-speak has become lazy shorthand for emotional insight, a convenient way to fill in the potholes and plotholes of a star’s persona. It feels joyless – the stuff of human resources departments rather than real life, or even therapy. a place in which deploying ‘therapy-speak’ is not a substitute for emotional growth.
Don't Call It Girlhood ()
What it’s asking: What are we doing for girlhood (and girls, and women and patriarchy…) when we define girlhood through consumption?
Favorite quote:
Because what is girlhood? To defend girlhood we must first define it; as in, how is it different from childhood? Kids mimic the behavior of the adults around them. That’s a normal and healthy part of childhood for children of all genders. Girlhood differs (mostly) in its social conditioning — what behaviors to mimic, and why. Manipulating your own physical appearance to meet an often unattainable, often inhuman ideal is not an interest inherent to tween and teen girls! It’s one that’s indoctrinated. (Perhaps this is partly why the same demographic is experiencing record rates of loneliness, anxiety, depression. They aren’t learning to understand themselves as human beings, but to perform themselves as girls.)
Just call it jihad: On Media Erasure ()
What it’s asking: What does it do to our collective imagination to erase Arab voices from Arab stories? How do narratives change when we erase their roots?
Favorite quote:
At a time when Arab people, Palestinians specifically, and Chinese people are being explicitly constructed as American enemies, it’s not a coincidence that they are being erased from the media we consume.
…There’s not only violence but also intentionality in this sort of erasure. The media we consume makes up our personal universes- it steers our imagination. What would it do to our collective imagination to watch a movie and see Arab people speaking Arabic, locked in violent resistance with an occupying force? It might begin to allow people to question why that’s such a terrible thing.
our picks from instagram:
our picks from tumblr:
community action for Palestine:
click this link daily to raise funds for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East)
however, if you have even $1 to spare, donating that directly to UNRWA will contribute more than clicking the link daily for four and half years.
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fill a mutual aid request from Operation Olive Branch
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