Psst!Don't miss this month's What A Girl Wants#11: Feminist is not a Dirty Word. Do today's young adults recognize feminism as an ideological concept? Is it reflected in young adult literature? Is it a positive, or an old-school thing that needs to fade? The brilliant young adult authors who discuss this have a lot of intelligent and surprising things to say. Check it out.
28 Days Later: twenty-eight of the best and brightest in youth literature in the African American community, going on right now at The Brown Bookshelf. Today, our girl Kekla is up. Woot!
Bookslut looks back at the recent episodes of whitewashing with children's book covers (and no one mentions Liar by name, and yet, there it is) and interviews authors as to their take on what happened and why. Full disclosure: I have the last word, amusingly enough.
So, You Want To Write About Sex? Of course you do. And now that I have your attention, check out the article in this week's Hunger Mountain, which is the Vermont College of Fine Arts online journal of the arts. They have a whole bunch of essays in YA and children's lit including that sex thing. What I really love is the fiction included in each edition. Some good stuff.
If you haven't joined the Sesyle Joslin Hine fan club on Facebook, you should.
Also: does anyone else think this unicorn/dragon thing is disturbing? They're everywhere here, but I hadn't taken the time to look closely at their haunches... which end in claws. And their horribly weird necks. *shudder* Monsters amongst us.
3 comments:
Thank you for passing that Chasing Ray link on! It's an uphill battle now, it seems, to convince many young women that feminism isn't actually a bad word.
They're strait-jacketed by a culture that calls them "prudes" if they draw any lines in the sand about sex and "sluts" if they don't. If the complain about things like wage inequality they're called "shrill" and "feminazis" but if they're not aggressive enough in these matters it's considered their own fault their wages aren't in line with their male co-workers'.
It's a total set up - it's impossible to win playing by those rules! That's why the word "feminist" has been run down, because people who don't believe in true equality want women to stay in line and keep drinking the kool-aid.
Amen, C.K. Feminism may have become a dirty word (to some) or a dated word (to others), but it's the fact, the idea of it, that we still very much need. If we've brainwashed our entire society, INCLUDING women and girls, into thinking of feminism as laughable or quaint or passé, then there's still work to be done.
I just saw a quote from Rush Limbaugh (yes, I know it's Rush but still) and he said the while he was all for women's rights he was against feminists. And although it's easy to just bash Rush, I thought you know that's probably what a lot of people think; that feminists are something creepy and wrong and different.
How the heck did that happen?
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