“Don’t Tell the Babysitter Mom’s Dead” Isn’t Afraid of Feelings or Jokes
Living as an adult whose parent died when they were a child can feel pretty isolating. My mom died 11 years ago, but grief is not linear. It pops up in all sorts of ways as life continues on: as I pass new life milestones, as I learn new things about myself, as I reach the age she was when she became pregnant with me — and approach the age she was when she was first diagnosed with the disease which she would fight for 15 years before her death.
The places where I’ve found the most catharsis and community around my mother’s death are with other people who lost parents young. I’ve had epiphanies over Why I Am How I Am reading Motherless Daughters. I’ve read Cameron Post over and over again. I connected with Autostraddle for the first time largely because of Riese’s writing about losing her Dad at a young age. In these books and essays, I’ve seen myself and broken that isolation.
So I heard about Brittany Ashley’s new podcast, “Don’t Tell the Babysitter Mom’s Dead,” with its first episode featuring noted bisexual and friend of Autostraddle Mara Wilson (whose book Where Am I Now? also beautifully describes her relationship with and losing her mother), I felt another sigh of relief, and another crack in my isolation.
A queer lesbian LA-based comedian, Ashley is no stranger to podcasting — she’s co-host of the Daria rewatch podcast “Sicker Sadder World,” and the Angel rewatch podcast “Angel On Top.” But the experience of losing her mother when she was six wasn’t something she had gone near in her work: “It was only within the last few years that I’ve even thought about making some form of art about losing my mom,” she told me over the phone soon after the first episode premiered. “I had always felt too personal for me; like I could talk about my gay identity and love and sex all day long, but tapping into that was always off-limits for me.” After doing a video essay for Buzzfeed about losing her mom, Ashley started thinking about podcasting to hear other stories like hers.
The title, a play on the movie Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, sets the tone for the podcast. “I think [the title] conveys that this isn’t a very super sappy sad podcast,” Ashley said. Yes, there is open acknowledgement that losing a parent never, ever gets easy, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t dark humor to take the edge off. To me, the title felt like an inside joke for every person who’s had to protect someone theoretically older and more mature — a babysitter, a teacher, a boss, whoever — from information that might make them feel uncomfortable or sad.
The title also nods to the podcast format — each episode features Ashley interviewing a different guest, who shares their experience leading up to, during and since their mom’s death, and then talks about a pop culture touchstone that they connected with around their mom’s death. Mara Wilson chose Rugrats in episode one; and Zach Dressler picked Full House for episode two.
Ashley’s closeness to the topic clearly allows her guests to open up in a way they might not to someone who doesn’t share that pivotal experience. But one of the reasons why “Don’t Tell the Babysitter” is so stunning is because Ashley lets herself disappear from the narratives her guests bring to the table. “I actually cut out a lot of me asking my questions,” she said. “My first interview I had with one of my friends in an episode that hasn’t come out yet, I almost felt like I ruined the interview by trying to engage too much with her. By the time I got to Mara, I feel like I had learned the best way to do it, which was to give her the platform and ask her questions to help guide the conversation, but for the most part to just let her speak and cut out anything I had to say — or only speak when spoken to.”
I’m looking forward to making “Don’t Tell the Babysitter” part of my biweekly podcast rotation, because I’m excited to connect further with Ashley’s experience as another queer person who lost their mom. I hope Ashley doesn’t steer away from conversations with queer guests to explore how queerness gets tied up with our relationships to our living and dead parents. Ashley told me about how this impacted her coming out: “It was very confusing, and hard to parse out if the excitement of having intimacy with another woman was based on my sexuality or based on my childhood not having that whatsoever,” Ashley said. “And obviously it’s because I’m attracted to women, but I think the question in there was what kept me unsure [for a long time].” I think people often treat this conversation as taboo, because the minute that anyone mentions how their parents’ existence may or may not have influenced anything remotely related to sexuality, everyone around them turns into a Freud expert, so let’s all roll our eyes at that and move along.
Ashley has plans to bring her own story out as the season goes on. “A lot of my experience losing my mom is trying to put together the puzzle pieces of who she was outside of just being my mom, because I have just kind of mythologized her as this angelic creature.” So she recorded a trip home to talk with her mom’s closest friends and family about the woman they knew.
“Don’t Tell the Babysitter Mom’s Dead” is not afraid to go to deep in its feelings, and it’s not afraid to cut through the feelings with a joke. It’s a beautifully produced podcast for anyone interested in exploring themes of family and loss, but especially for people looking to connect to another queer soul who lost their mom young.
LIVE STREAM: Tegan and Sara’s Halloween Concert Tonight!
It’s Halloween and it’s also Monday which means you probably spent the whole weekend celebrating and didn’t think much about how the Holiday Itself is today. Perhaps you showed up at work this morning bleary-eyed with vague traces of glitter and/or eye makeup and/or glitter eye makeup lingering in your hairline, a smudge of body paint in the crease of your elbow. You probably ate a Snickers for breakfast from the stash you “bought for your neighbors” because Snickers have peanuts, which is protein, right?
While you might already be scheming about next year’s costume, don’t pack up your festive pumpkin lights just yet. We have a very special Halloween event just for you: It’s Tegan and Sara, renowned queer twin angsty-guitar-duo-turned-pop-sensation, streaming live from House of Blues Boston and presented by Live Nation!
via LiveNation
Tegan and Sara are touring for their EIGHTH album, Love You To Death, probing further into the pop side that they began exploring on their 2013 album Heartthrob. The album is extremely danceable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not deep. The Quins explore their relationship as twins for the first time, push back against the normative expectations that come with marriage equality, and spiral through the confusion of falling in love with a girl who just wants to be best friends. Tegan and Sara may have cracked mainstream appeal in the past few years, but their music is still unapologetically and undeniably queer.
So come on in and watch this live performance with me! The show starts at 9:15pm EST. Then share all your feelings in the comments.
https://youtu.be/I_hWuz99d9Y
And also in the comments, tell me: What’s your favorite song from the new album? What old song do you hope they’ll play? How many plays do “Boyfriend” and “Closer” have on your iTunes? What’s the biggest feeling Tegan and Sara have made you feel? How was your Halloween weekend? Will you post a picture of you all dressed up?
WATCH: Tegan and Sara Are Unfazed by Suggestive Ring Pop in “Stop Desire” Video
Tegan and Sara have been on a video-making marathon, as they produce videos for every single song off their latest album, Love You to Death, and even one for their original song for The Intervention. (We can’t even keep up, so don’t miss the video for “White Knuckles,” released earlier this month.)
The duo have highlighted well known and lesser known talents from across the industry, collbaorating with Clea DuVall, putting young queer and trans performers in the spotlight, and creating a bizarre and delightful juxtaposition featuring Instagram-famous dogs.
The Quin twins released their video for their fast-paced listen-while-you’re-driving-on-the-highway-with-your-boo-on-your-mind single “Stop Desire” on Facebook this morning. Director Allister Ann has the two do some errands at otherwise-mundane spaces — the laundromat, the post office, the market — where they are bombarded by innuendo in everything from envelope-licking to ears of corn. The result is very funny and very sexy. Tegan and Sara maintain deadpan faces throughout, seemingly unfazed by the lipstick applications, cat underwear, and bulbous fruits surrounding them.
Cool alt musician Reggie Watts and a famous cat named Shrampton are also there.
Check it out on Facebook!
You Need Help: Talking to Your Family About Your Partner’s Pronouns
by Maddie and Audrey
Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.
Q:
My awesome partner is thinking about going by they/them pronouns. I’ve found it easy to use these in queer spaces, but a lot harder to use it around straight cis people with limited genderqueer/trans knowledge. My partner presents pretty femme so people usually are confused when they don’t use she. I want to be supportive, but I’m anxious about introducing the topic to older relatives. Most internet stuff is directed toward the person going through the identity changes, and rightfully so, but some guidance on how I can help my partner navigate this would be rad.
A:
Hello wonderful person! We, Audrey and Maddie, have teamed up to offer you some ideas and feedback. Audrey is a genderqueer human whose identity mostly involves waving their arms in the air and running away. They use they/them pronouns and tolerate she/her pronouns. Maddie is a queer cis woman who uses she/her pronouns. She has talked to her family a bunch about using they/them pronouns correctly for her partners and friends.
Audrey: Sweet letter writer, I want to tell you that your partner is very lucky to be with someone who genuinely wants to affirm them even when the going gets tough. I hope you don’t mind if I frame this in terms of my own experience, because in some ways, my partner Wynn is a better advocate for me than I am for myself. I tell a lot of people about my pronouns, but I rarely correct them if they use she/her because of a brutal mix of insecurity, anxiety and my compulsion to make others feel comfortable at my own expense. In fact, I’m much more likely to correct people about other people’s pronouns than my own. But around Wynn’s coworkers, family and friends, she gently and consistently reminds them of my pronouns every single time. She teaches her older gay male colleagues about genderqueer and non-binary identities and gender-neutral pronouns. When we’re at check-out counters, she refers to me with they pronouns whether the clerk looks confused or not.
By Anna Archie Bongiovonni
This makes life easier in a lot of ways, but there’s also this: Wynn’s loving and determined use of the pronouns I like best makes me believe that I might just deserve to feel that good. She makes me feel brave about telling my friends and reminds me that I have the power to ask and perhaps some day even insist that people follow through. But she also never pressures me or judges me if I’m in a space where I don’t feel comfortable or safe using they pronouns. If we are in a new environment or around my family, she always checks in about what I want her to do in that space. It’s a kind of solidarity I never knew I could have in a partner, and it blows my mind.
Sweet letter writer, I can tell from your letter that you want to be that kind of partner, and I promise you it’s possible. Not everyone will get it, but most people — unless they’re confrontational assholes — will just accept what you tell them. They may not “believe” it, whatever that means, but most people will do what you ask even if it’s not in good faith. In a way, it’s easier coming from you. They can’t as easily argue with you, devoted partner, about someone else’s gender. You and your partner could work together on a 1-3 sentence explanation you can use, kind of like an elevator speech. It can be something like this:
“Just so you know, like many people, my partner uses they/them pronouns, which have been used as a singular pronoun for centuries. I realize this may be hard for you to understand or remember, but it’s really important to both of us that you make an effort.”
In that vein, it’s definitely ideal for you and your human to discuss just how hard you should push. Do they want you to correct people in front of them or in the middle of a conversation? Or would they rather you pull someone aside or text that person to remind them about your partner’s pronouns?
One of the most important things you can do is affirm your partner. It sounds like they are still in the process of deciding how to navigate pronouns and what feels right to them. They probably won’t need you to tell your sweet great grandma right away, ya know? This is a journey you two can take together, and you will both learn a lot, screw up some, and find the ways that feel right and work for you. If they are feeling hurt by people who don’t want to use their pronouns or just by a long day of having to gender in the world, listen to them and ask how you can help ease the stress.
Maddie It’s true. You probably won’t need to explain this all to your sweet great grandma tomorrow, but at some point, depending on your partner’s needs, that might become the thing that needs to happen. I have had conversations with 3/3 living grandparents about gender-neutral pronouns in various contexts, over multiple years, making reference to multiple partners and friends. There are a lot of ways for that conversation to go.
From my experience, even the most well-intentioned, liberal, gay-friendly older people have no idea how to deal with gender-neutral pronouns when they learn about them for the first time. (Honestly, they don’t even have to be that old.) What I’ve discovered is that with older relatives, if you want them to use the right pronouns for your partner, you’re probably going to need to make some time to have a real conversation (or several real conversations) with them. Otherwise, they will be confused and default to gendering everyone the way they’re used to doing.
When you do sit down with your relative, don’t make the conversation confrontational. This is not a test for your parents or grandparents. It’s about making your family a safe place for your partner. Chances are, your relatives want your partner to feel welcome, and using your partner’s correct pronouns are a way for your relatives to extend that welcome.
First of all, make sure you introduce the concept of “they” as a singular pronoun. The elevator speech Audrey explained is awesome. If you just say, “My partner uses they pronouns,” it will probably not get through. I’ve done this in the past, and I have had a variety of reactions, ranging from completely ignoring me, to a who’s-on-first-esque conversation where my family thought my partner identified as more than one person, which was not the case.
Give your relative some examples. Tell them other things about your partner using the singular they and them, both so your relatives get used to hearing they/them and so they know more things about your partner than what their pronouns are. Even though we do use the singular they all the time without thinking about it, it’s important to affirm that adapting to it is a learning process. Explain that if they mess up, it’s not the end of the world.
By Anna Archie Bongiovonni
Your relative will likely have questions. Answer them if they are reasonable. Respectfully and emphatically refrain from answering questions about the gender your partner was assigned at birth or what genitals they have, unless your partner has explicitly told you they want these types of questions answered. These are really personal questions and not appropriate for you to share, and that’s all you need to say in response, no matter how curious someone may be.
In my own experience, I’ve had family members who aren’t against my partner’s gender, per se, but who have had suggestions of other pronouns or approaches to gender my partner could adapt. If this comes up, tell your relative to get over themselves in the nicest way you can. Explain that your partner’s pronouns are not a rhetorical exercise or puzzle. Remind your relative that making you and your partner feel welcome in the family is more important than stubborn feelings on grammar. Point your relative to articles that point out that the singular “they” is used all the time, and that the argument that the singular “they” is incorrect is misguided and irrelevant.
There is also the possibility that some of your family members are excited about your partner, eager to be supportive, but just cannot remember or internalize an unfamiliar way of speaking because they are old and their brains aren’t wired to learn in that way anymore. Audrey and I experienced this recently, when they came to visit me and we stayed with my grandmother. (FTR Audrey and I aren’t partners, but all this stuff still applies with best friends.)
Audrey It’s true! Maddie handled it in a way that made me feel really safe. First, she asked me in advance how I wanted me her talk to her grandmother about my pronouns. We agreed that the most important thing would be to make her aware of my chosen pronouns and explain that Maddie would be using they/them for me. Maddie had the conversation before our trip, and Phyllis admitted that it would be really hard for her to remember. In the end, Phyllis referred to me with she/her pronouns the whole weekend, and Maddie used they/them. This was fine! But also, this may not work for everyone. In my case, she/her is not ideal and always catches my ear funny, but I don’t experience it as misgendering. However, if your partner, now or in the future, feels like they/them are the only appropriate pronouns, you will have to figure out other strategies to help the people in your life get it right. Share the load with your partner and take the heat when necessary.
Maddie We’ve mostly focused on the mechanics of introducing they/them pronouns to family members, but you also mentioned that your partner is femme and that people are sometimes confused when they don’t use she. This is really important to be aware of and ready for. When it comes to your older relatives, they likely won’t have internalized the false assumption common to queer communities that nonbinary identities and they/them pronouns connote masc-of-center presentation. But as my femme nonbinary partner pointed out to me, you still might hear “but your partner looks like a girl!” because people generally have a hard time with the distinction between what is femme and what is female. You can do the work of helping your family understand nonbinary identities in a framework that honors and lifts up your partner and their gender.
By Anna Archie Bongiovonni
Finally, after you’ve had conversations with your family and it comes time for your fam and your partner to share space, try not to make it weird! Use their pronouns as you would in everyday conversation, without flinching or pausing. Don’t lose sight of the fact that the point isn’t for your relatives to pass a test on pronouns. The point is to help your family build the tools they need so that your partner feels safe and welcome around your relatives.
WATCH: Tegan and Sara Team Up with Bojack Horseman Producer in “Hang On to the Night”
We’ve all been there, wishing we could watch an animated centaur-esque being wander through an animated nighttime scene with a lot of part-animal-part-humans with breasts. Right? But could we ever have dreamed such a blessing could come as part of a Tegan and Sara video?? No, we could not have.
With the artistic direction of Lisa Hanawalt of Bojack Horseman and animation by Nicole Stafford, the video for “Hang On to the Night,” (the final song on Tegan and Sara’s latest album, Love You to Death,) explores anxieties around mortality and the safety that can be found when the sun goes down.
In an interview with Nylon, Sara and Hanawalt discussed the catharsis of the video. “It feels good to sing something sad,” Sara said. “[Night] is a time to absorb and reflect on the day, sorting feelings and experiences.”
Catharsis is right. This song is powerful on its own, but Hanawalt and Stafford’s visuals add a gorgeous mixture of hopefulness and unselfconsciousness that have made me tear up every time I’ve watched the video.
It’s also just silly, punctuating deep exploration of emotion and struggle with moments of humor: The snakes have boobs! The weird bird people have butts! The horse uses the mountains as a blanket!
Ugh you’re gonna love it, so just watch it right now:
WATCH: Clea DuVall Directs Tegan and Sara’s New Super Queer “BWU” Video
On Friday, Tegan and Sara released the latest installment in their quest to make a video for every song off their excellent new album Love You To Death. “BWU” is a head-bouncer of a synthy pop song, which Sara wrote about not wanting to get gay-married.
The video, directed by Clea DuVall, starts with Sara proposing to her presumed-girlfriend in a park in L.A. Sara eagerly opens a red ring box, and her partner’s face immediately falls. Rejected, Sara wanders downtown L.A., proposing to everyone she encounters. After being repeatedly rebuffed, Sara encounters a person in an excellent bow tie and gets down on one knee in front of her. The person is confused and weirded out — until she sees what’s in the box.
“BWU” is a gorgeous nod to all the queers — and anyone really — whose relationship challenges were not simplified or solved by marriage equality. “Save your first and last dance for me/I don’t need a white wedding,” the twins sing, affirming commitment without the fanfare or implications of a wedding. Sara discussed this further in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
I was happy when the Supreme Court ruling legalized same sex marriage in the USA, but I was also relieved that I could finally ”come out“ as a person who actively dislikes the institution. Specifically the assumption that by not participating in the ritual you are a deviant or unlikely to share the same common values as someone who does.
“BWU” affirms that relationships can be strong and meaningful outside the context of marriage and hetero/homo-normativity. It also shows the part that comes after figuring out marriage isn’t what you want: finding partners who are on the same page.
Tegan and Sara Explore All Types of Queer Intimacy in “Love You to Death”
Tegan and Sara have always been excellent at reaching into our chests and tugging at our queer heartstrings in an excruciatingly beautiful way. Their eighth full-length album, Love You To Death, out on June 3, branches out into new layers of emotional and musical depth, and stands up to their heart-wrenching standard.
It seems important to note up-front that I loved Heartthrob and it’s what really got me into Tegan and Sara. I’m entirely here for their pop era, and though I love their old stuff, too, I’m not pining for it. If Heartthrob represented a bold definitive splash into new musical territory, LY2D shows Tegan and Sara hitting their stride in creating music ready to find a home alongside today’s Top 40. LY2D is more refined than Heartthrob. The sound is cleaner and simpler, making room for honest and direct lyrics, some of which represent more mature and removed takes on their earlier angst, and some of which dissect the twins’ sibling relationship — a dynamic they’ve yet to deeply explore in their music.
Love You To Death cover art via Twitter
Lyrically, this is my favorite Tegan and Sara album yet. As a writer, I’m a hell of a lot more comfortable deconstructing their lyrics, and I’ll do that in a moment, but first, let me put my new music critic hat on for just a second. LY2D sounds great. The belabored social media lead-up to the album’s announcement and the somewhat kitschy name “Love You To Death” made me nervous that the album was going to lean too heavily on a shallow and gimmicky sugar-pop feel, but I’m happy to say that my expectations were far surpassed. Despite some overdone distorted background vocals here and there, the choruses are catchy and the verses drive the narrative of the album. Since the head-bopping highs are matched with interesting emotions, LY2D retains a depth that keeps it interesting beyond a few listens — it’s excellent driving music, especially for when you have an existential relationship question to think through. On LY2D, Tegan and Sara kept up the “soaring synths” of Heartthrob‘s electro-pop feel, though they also stripped down to a single piano on “100X.” The twins didn’t touch their guitars to record this album, and I don’t miss them.
OK. Now the for the lyrics: LY2D is Tegan and Sara’s most identifiably queer album yet. Despite having been out queer artists since they first arrived on the scene almost twenty years ago, they’ve often shied away from making their music explicitly queer, partly because of homophobia and sexism in the music industry, which they recently discussed at-length with Buzzfeed. This isn’t to say LY2D is “queers-only” — a lot of people all over the sexual orientation and gender spectrums are going to be able to relate to and enjoy these songs — but the themes are ones I see repeated in my life and my queer communities over and over. In LY2D, Tegan and Sara wrote to queer experience, and were able to trust their audience to buy in.
In many ways, LY2D is about the desire to be seen and understood, which caught me like a baseball bat to the gut more than once. The opening track, “That Girl,” begs, “So recognize me, so recognize me,” which will resonate for anyone who has gotten lost in a relationship, and asks “When did I become that girl?” The album continues, examining the struggle between trying to be the person you feel you are and trying to be the person who you think other people want you to be.
Tegan and Sara explore that tension in all kinds of relationships: In “Boyfriend,” which I think is their queerest song ever, they wrestle with the confusion of unspoken attraction in supposedly platonic relationships: “You call me up/like you would your best friend/You turn me on/like you would your boyfriend.” In “Faint of Heart,” they describe the disorienting frenzy of falling hard and fast for a person, even though the rational voice in the back of your head and all your friends are telling you the relationship seems inevitably doomed. They deconstruct the complexities of their identical twin sibling artist relationship in “White Knuckles” and “100X”: “Doubled like a couple we stood, stood out in the light/ …breaking each other like/ knuckles in a fight.” They vent about the frustrating erasure of queer love when it doesn’t conform to heteronormative standards in “B/W/U.” The album’s final song, “Hang on to the Night” answers the lingering question from “That Girl,” in an ’80s-esque ballad with soaring synths: “Hang on to yourself/no good will come from being untrue.”
photo by Pamela Littky via Twitter
While the twins’ on-stage and public image has always featured their ability to collaborate alongside some entertaining on-stage teasing, behind the scenes, things haven’t always been so relaxed. In 2008, they even got in a physical fight while on tour with Neil Young. They spent several years living in different cities, in part to have space from each other between tours. Though the dust has largely settled as they’ve aged, in an interview with Time, Sara also discussed how part of the reason they’ve avoided writing about their sibling relationship in the past to was to keep people from making comments “borderline suggesting [they] were incestuous.” She continued, “writing a song like ‘100x,’ which everyone will think is about a romantic relationship, that would have made me so uncomfortable even five years ago. I would have been afraid people wouldn’t underestimate how truly intimate and like a marriage my relationship with Tegan is.” In LY2D, the Quins took a chance by offering up vulnerability about their relationship, and it pays off.
It’s amazing to see a queer artist comparing her relationship with her sister to a marriage. It’s amazing to see the intimacy of a non-romantic relationship examined and picked apart. As queer people, we are often critically aware of how complex and many-layered our relationships are, across the board. It takes hard work to maintain any partnership — whether it’s between lovers or friends or the person you shared a uterus with. Ending or shifting a relationship with a friend or family member can feel exactly as dramatic and difficult and painful as breaking up a romantic relationship, and we don’t usually get to see that reflected back at us in songs.
Tegan and Sara’s opening up about their sibling relationship adds a profoundness to LY2D that takes it from a collection of songs about various stages of romantic love, which would have been fun and relatable, to a deep and complex exploration about sharing any kind of intimacy, be it romantic or platonic or familial, which I felt in the deepest and rawest pieces of my heart.
Love You To Death is out today, June 3. Buy it HERE, through our affiliate link and support Autostraddle while you listen!
25 Incredible 8Tracks Playlists from Autostraddle Days of Yore
Autostraddle has been around for SEVEN years, and we’ve been making playlists that whole damn time! Even though our newest playlists are on Spotify, all those 8Tracks playlists from the early days still exist, and we thought we might remind you about them! So here we go: From the mixes we’ve made for people we had heart-eyes for, to soundtracks for when you need to get the fuck outta town, to quiet mornings, to tracks to jam to with your gal pals, here are some of our favorites from the 8Tracks archive.
1. The Most Beautiful Song in the World by Laura (2013)
Pristine A-Camp mountains, uncorrupted by the patriarchy.
2. Sugarbooty Blackout Mix by Brittani Nichols (2015)
3. Here/Queer by Riese (2012)
4. 100% Country, 0% Asshole by Fonseca (2012)
5. Former Disney Child Stars by Crystal (2014)
6. Getting Ready for A Femme Meetup by Mey (2014)
7. Sleeping-In Dream Day by Robin (2015)
8. A Thing Called Female Rap by Rachel, Phoenix, Gabby and Carmen (2012)
9. Keep on Fightin’ the Good Fight by Robin (2014)
via Golden GatExpress
Women of the Black Panther Party
10. Emotionally Intense ’90s Women by Laneia (2013)
11. Bitches Who Brunch by Carmen (2012)
jayne mansfield, 1956, via retronaut // life magazine
12. Everything Is Changing and You Are Excited but Also Terrified by Maddie (2014)
13. Ellen Page Is Gay by Grace (2014)
14. When You’re Feeling Helpless by Hansen (2012)
15. You Can Go Home Again by Cara (2012)
16. We’re Finally Dating, Everything Is Wonderful, I Want to Pick Dandelions by Carmen (2011)
17. Classic Rock Radio Is the Best Radio by Riese (2013)
18. Playlist: This Photo by Crystal (2011)
19. Sexytime, ’90s R&B Edition by Jamie (2011)
20. So You’re Panicking About Graduate School by Ali (2012)
21. Music For Queers by Queers by Rachel (2012)
22. Tiny Songs for Your Sleepy Brain by Gabrielle (2012)
23. Pack Your Bags and Move On Out by Hansen (2012)
via {heliotrope3 on flickr}
24. Work Your Shit Out at the Gym by Riese (2011)
25. Drop It Lower Than Your Credit Score by Brittani (2012)
What are your favorite Autostraddle playlists from the archives??
Tegan and Sara Just Released TWO New Music Videos for Your Eyeballs
feature image via YouTube
In the past 48 hours, Tegan and Sara have released TWO new videos, lifting the curtain on what their forthcoming album Love You To Death has in store.
“U-Turn,” released Wednesday, is a masterful execution of the bizarre dance moves and weird faces Tegan and Sara videos are known for. The Quin twins sport elaborate eye makeup, while dancing against a cityscape depicted in animation reminiscent of early 90s educational cartoons. It’s fun and silly and over-the-top.
On a completely different note, “100X,” released this morning on Noisey, is a masterful collaboration with Instagram-famous dog groomer Jess Rona. “I swear I tried to leave you/ at least a hundred times a day,” the twins croon to the rich sounds of a single piano, as tiny dogs hilariously and, somehow, heart-wrenchingly, gaze into the camera, their fur rippling in slow-motion from the wind of an off-camera fan. The twins’ only appearances feature them gazing into the camera with the exact same earnest expressions as the dogs. It’s simple and understated, just like the song, but also entirely absurd.
“U-Turn,” “100X,” and “Boyfriend” (the video for which was released last week), give a great look at where Tegan and Sara are heading with LY2D, which will be released in-full on June 3. They’ve retained their poppy-yet-lyrically-interesting vibe introduced by Heartthrob, while introducing simpler heartbreakers that seem to be more grown-up and retrospective takes on the angst of their earlier work.
Tegan and Sara’s “Boyfriend” Video Was So Much Gayer In My Imagination
feature image via YouTube
Tegan and Sara’s single “Boyfriend,” off their forthcoming album Love You To Death is arguably one of the gayest songs they’ve ever written. It details the agonizingly relatable experience of falling for a girl who will be emotionally intimate with you, but is either actually straight or too tied up in internalized homophobia to reciprocate the feelings. (That’s my takeaway at least; am I just projecting?)
If you were hoping for some sort of visual depiction of that classically gay narrative in their eagerly anticipated video for “Boyfriend,” released this morning on Pitchfork, that’s not what you’ll find.
Directed by Clea DuVall, with cameo appearances from Mae Whitman (Arrested Development, Parenthood) and Sarah Ramos (her character was queer on Parenthood), this video is a bit mystifying. A frazzled video director played by Rachel Antonoff tries and rejects various backdrops and props including balloons; a green screen featuring a running herd of zebras; and weird paper doll outfits. The director finally has a meltdown and Sara comforts her and they hold hands, staring into each other’s eyes. Is that a queer moment?
It’s pretty weird, you guys!
Not that Tegan and Sara are in any way obligated to make a super gay video for their SUPER GAY song. They’re not obligated to, and their lyrics and videos are pretty consistently not so much queer as they are somewhere on the spectrum between gender-nonspecific and gender-inclusive. The video for “Closer” did that really well, and I think I expected the video for “Boyfriend” to be some kind of follow-up to that — like showing the way you would feel the morning after that party, when the friend you’re crushing on insists that cuddle sesh on the trampoline at 3 a.m. was PURELY platonic.
Watch “Boyfriend” below and please share all of your feelings and/or fan fic based on this video immediately.
Soggy Bottoms: Rough Puff Pastry Is Like Classic Puff Pastry, But Easier
Welcome to Soggy Bottoms, where, lacking a tent in the British countryside, Autostraddle writers attempt to bake things inspired by The Great British Bake Off in their own homes, to varying degrees of success. This month, Maddie and Audrey made rough puff pastry.
About 90 percent of the foods they make on the Bake Off are random but extremely specific European desserts that I’ve never heard of. It’s exciting to peer into a world of carbs beyond cake, pie and things from a Pillsbury can. So when I went to visit Maddie in Philadelphia, we decided to take on one of the most consistently challenging recipes on the show: Pastry. Y’all, I’m not even sure I entirely knew what constituted a pastry until now. But I can tell you: It’s mostly butter and sweat.
Y’all, this is Maddie writing now, and I would just like to add that usually, when I’m cooking or baking, I work alone. I am not… the best… at sharing that space. Throughout this process, Audrey was very patient with me and my propensity to be a “kitchen top.”
So, minus a few moments of panic (the salt, the salt!) we came through this challenge with our selves and our friendship unscathed. But did the recipe work? Read on to find out and learn to make your own.
Ingredients
- 3 (THREE) sticks of cold butter (24 Tbsp)
- 2 ½ cups flour
- ¾ cup cold water
- ½ tsp salt
Tools
- pastry blender
- sharp knife
- rolling pin (if you don’t have a rolling pin, a wine bottle without its label works JUST FINE
- cutting board
- saran wrap (“cling film” if you want to keep it British)
Method
Make sure your three sticks of butter are cold, then use a sharp knife to cut the butter into small (roughly ⅓ inch) cubes.
Sift the flour and butter.
Put the cubes in a pile on the cutting board, and dump all the flour on top of the butter.
Use the pastry blender to cut the butter into the flour, until you have a relatively uniform crumbly mixture of flour and butter.
Arrange the flour/butter mixture into a mound of sorts with a little divot, like a volcano with a crater at the very top. Add about a third of the cold water and mix it into the dough. Repeat the water-adding process twice more. The dough should be moist and roughly held together; however, it should not look anything like your mental image of puff pastry dough yet.
Audrey used the pastry blender (also called a pastry cutter) to chop the pile of flour, butter and water into a mass. This process feels endless and useless at first, but with patience you will achieve greatness.
It’s time for your rolling pin! Or your wine bottle. Roll out the dough into a flat sheet. It won’t look smooth yet! That’s ok.
Once you have a flat sheet (it’ll still be piecey, but you’ve just gotta trust the dough that it’s gonna work out), fold it in thirds like you would if you were folding a letter.
We were not sure about the first rounds of folding. It didn’t seem like this sticky pile would ever look like food. But Maddie kept up her spirits about it.
This is what we got after the first turn.
Then use your rolling pin to flatten it out again, and then fold it like a letter again.
Repeat those steps two or three times (each rotation is called, in baking terminology, a “turn”).
After the second turn! The flour and butter are looking more blended, and it’s getting easier to fold. Sprinkling the cutting board with flour definitely helped.
This is the process called “lamination” – it’s how the layers develop. If you were making real puff pastry, you’d be laminating a literal sheet of butter between sheets of dough, but this is ROUGH PUFF (ruff puff? rough pough?) and it’s a lot less precise and therefore it’s easier for the first-timer. Like you. Like us.
By the second or third turn, your dough should finally look like the pastry dough you’ve been imagining: a smooth and flexible sheet that doesn’t stick to anything or itself.
Maddie’s friend made us very strong cocktails at dinner so Audrey was extra pumped about this dough.
Fold it again and wrap it in saran wrap; then chill it in the fridge for half an hour. Then give it two or three more turns. After this, chill it for at least another half hour. You can use it right after the half hour, or leave it for up to three days (we left it overnight).
If you leave it for more than the half hour, you might want to let it soften up out of the fridge for a few minutes – I tried to unfold it immediately, but it broke into pieces, so I decided to leave it folded and roll it out again. That worked fine, too.
NOW YOU HAVE A ROUGH PUFF PASTRY DOUGH! AMAZING!
A M A Z I N G
Please do not forget the very important step of posing with your dough.
But what are you going to do with it?
We went the savory pastry route, using this recipe as inspiration. We caramelized some thinly sliced onions and peppers and let some goat cheese get nice and soft.
Caramelizing onions always takes longer than you think it should, but I promise it’s worth it.
Then we cut our pastry into eight pieces (this whole “equal pieces” thing is a combination of baking technique and geometry I have yet to master and that continues to present baking challenges to me).
We scored edges into them using a butter knife.
This is after we cut off the wonkiest edges.
Then we pre-baked the pastry at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes, and then the idea was that the middle parts would “push in” and the outer edges would puff up more to make a crust…
That concept kind of worked. At any rate, we then loaded the pastries up with the onions and peppers and dolloped goat cheese on top, and then we baked them for another 20-30 minutes.
The little pastries that could~
When they came out, it was the moment of truth: WOULD THE BOTTOM BE SOGGY? That is, after all, the only question that matters. It’s the “real challenge” of this whole process.
via HuffPo
The verdict was…… NOT REALLY!
Overall, the bottoms were mostly crisp! They were a littttle greasy (remember how there are 3 sticks of butter in this recipe?), but the bottoms themselves were not overly soggy. The top was golden, and the dough had developed layers and puffed up!
Look at that crispy bottom! That’s the crispiest bottom that ever bottomed.
The inside was another story. Imagine Paul Hollywood saying, “it’s not cooked,” and you have a pretty accurate representation of what we were dealing with. Overall, I think they could have pre-baked longer, because the wet ingredients on top stopped it from being able to cook through entirely.
For a first attempt at rough puff pastry, though, I’d say we did ok. Follow this recipe at home and see what you come up with! Audrey ate one at my house and then another one on the plane and they said it held up as well as you’d expect a pastry in a ziploc bag in a backpack. My roommates inhaled them. I ate two despite severely overestimating how much butter my lactose intolerant stomach can stomach. So if those aren’t endorsements for a solid first swing at rough puff pastry… I dare you to do better.
…no but really try to make them and come report back on how it went.
18 Excerpts from Maddie’s Babyqueer Diary, 2005-2007
Welcome to Excerpts From My Super-Secret Diary, a new A+ feature for Silver & Gold members in which we publish for you some of our incomplete and/or highly personal thoughts we’ve written down, usually with actual pens. Today, Maddie has selected excerpts from her journals chronicling her earliest queer days.
This week, I turn 25 and it’s the 10-year anniversary of the first time I came out as anything: when I told two of my friends on my 15th birthday that I was pretty sure I was “totally bisexual.”
My early teen years had their share of heavy angst. But that period was also one of the first times I found myself feeling really happy. Sometimes, in-between pining over girls that I couldn’t articulate my feelings for, and spending afternoons at the hospital with my mom, I got to just be an adolescent who did stupid shit with her friends and really loved Rent and the West Wing.
I compiled these journal excerpts because I find them hilarious and heartbreakingly earnest, but also because I have a lot of love for the person who wrote these things down. Reading through these old journals has viscerally transported me back to my high school bedroom where I wrote these words and then hid them under my mattress. I want to hug this version of me, and tell her that 10 years later, maybe she won’t have been John-Cusack-in-Say-Anything-ed (yet), but she’ll have a much better handle on this whole “being queer” situation, and that she’ll have had some incredible experiences of love and connection beyond what she would have ever imagined at 14 or 15. I also want to tell her that she gives 25-year-old me hope, because when I think of all the learning and growing that’s happened in the last 10-year period of my life, it makes me eager and open for what the next 10 will bring.
For now, here’s a window into my brain from eighth to tenth grade:
nothing like a good political slogan on a journal.
1.
May 8, 2005
I canNOT believe that my best friends are who they are. [Redacted] was shocked to learn that I know and — gasp — like gay people. She thinks that people didn’t used to be gay! What the hell?!? I liked my response to that, though: “They were gay, they just didn’t say so because they were afraid of being burned at the stake!”
But seriously, the worst part is that she would disassociate herself from someone who came out. That just blew me away.
I don’t especially want to be gay, but If I was, no big deal, and who knows?
It makes me want to cry that she would dessert me if I was a lesbian. It tears my heart out and rips it to shreds.
2.
May 12, 2005
Today, Mom and I were walking in Morristown. I was talking about what I’ll be doing in 20 years (when I’m 34). I wonder if I’ll be working in politics or journalism or writing. Maybe I’ll be a teacher. Maybe I’ll be a mom and a wife. Maybe I’ll be dead. Maybe we’ll all be dead. Maybe she’ll be dead.
3.
May 14, 2005
In my West Wing fan fic, Josh and Donna need to be together, as do Toby and Amy, CJ and Danny, and Charlie and Zoe. They really should have kept Aaron Sorkin until the end of Bartlet’s second term, when the show would have ended a success.
4.
May 15, 2005
I know I believe in evolution, and I’m definitely pro-choice and pro-gay rights.
I want equal rights for EVERYONE, including homosexuals.
5.
June 1, 2005
Empress of the World is the best book. I really relate to Nic. She’s confused about her sexuality, like I am.
6.
June 10, 2005
I had my first slow dance. With [redacted]. We were dancing to a fast song, and sort of talking, and then a slow song started. He said he was going outside, but I asked him to dance. He put his hands on my hips and I put mine on his shoulders and we swayed and moved around a bit. It was sort of awkward, but not really.
7.
July 17, 2005
According to V, who was here [at sleepaway camp] last year, “the food was OK, some of the guys were nice, some of the guys were dykes, none of the guys were hot.”
8.
October 2005
[This is from a page I typed on a typewriter, written as though I were speaking from the perspective of a new high school friend, who I was, incidentally, in love with]
“Maddie once said that she’s straight, but open. I have another name for that: denial.”
9.
November 17, 2005
[above this entry I’ve written, “DON’T READ, I can’t believe I wrote this down.” Sorry, past Maddie – I’m going to expose your secrets to all of A+ now.]
I don’t know exactly what you’d call these. Friend-crushes, maybe. But anyway. There are these people in the world who fascinate me. I think it’s because they’re who I want to be. I’m so shy around these people, and I become klutzy.
I can see myself reading this years ahead and burning it.
10.
February 17, 2006
I’m so fucking confused. I don’t know if what I feel is love or crush, or just friend-love that I’m not used to. Whatever it is, it’s not helping me figure out my sexuality.
I really don’t want to be a lesbian at school. It would complicate everything. I want to be visible in our class, but I don’t want it to be because I’m a lesbian; I want it because I can do good things for the school. (Doing good things can come out of being LGBT, but still.)
11.
March 29, 2006
I’m becoming more and more convinced I’m gay. I could be wrong.
12.
April 1, 2006
SHIT! WHY MUST LOVE BE SO COMPLICATED?
13.
April 17, 2006
So yeah, I told Q I’m attracted to her. I told her first and more blatantly than X [the other girl I am attracted to], but since then, I’ve felt really really drawn to X. When I saw X this morning, my heart flipped over. Fuck I’m confused.
14.
June 17, 2006
Q got up my shirt at Relay for Life which was REALLY nice.
15.
October 11, 2006
I want to be in love and have someone love me back. I want someone to stand outside my window with a radio over their head playing “In Your Eyes.”
16.
October 23, 2006
long list of things that happened at the homecoming dance
-Drunken lesbians with [redacted]!
continue long list of things that happened at the homecoming dance
17.
October 25, 2006
[four lines of text entirely blacked out and rendered completely indescernible by my scribbling over it in pen]
18.
January 1, 2007
In 2007, I want to not get depressed and be slightly less awkward and write more and play guitar more and manage to survive oboe and get a first kiss.
Soggy Bottoms: How I Mastered The Fine Art of Making English Muffins
Welcome to Soggy Bottoms, where, lacking a tent in the British countryside, Autostraddle writers attempt to bake things inspired by The Great British Bake Off in their own homes, to varying degrees of success.
Have you seen The Great British Bake Off? If you haven’t, you’re missing a reality show that manages to be entirely dignified, while simultaneously packing in a lot of dry British gender-nonspecific sexual innuendo. But my favorite thing about The Great British Bake Off is that it has inspired me to start baking!
However, in this baking endeavor, I have discovered that, while anyone can bake a thing, mastering all the components that add up to produce a good-quality baked good is a refined craft that is much easier said than done. Maybe it looks good, sure, but is it cooked all the way through? It might taste good, but if the bottom is soggy, a kind-but-honest elderly British woman might shake her head at you with the kind of disappointment that makes you feel ashamed of yourself.
Bake Off judge Mary Berry sets high expectations. via HuffPo
So today, I’m going to tell you all about my attempts to bake English muffins, inspired by a Bake Off technical challenge set by judge Paul Hollywood. While English muffins are pretty much guaranteed to not have a soggy bottom, there are still plenty of opportunities to go wrong.
Bake Off host Sue Perkins takes everything VERY SERIOUSLY. via Cosmo
Who bakes English muffins? Don’t they just come out of the pack with all their nooks and crannies, ready to lay the foundations for tasty meals like egg sandwiches and English muffin pizzas?
Turns out, there’s a reason no one bakes them: they’re hard to bake! Six weeks and about ten batches after my initial muffin-making attempt, I have developed a reasonably passable English muffin recipe that would probably land somewhere around the middle of the pack in an early-season GBBO technical challenge. Read on for that recipe and some of the lessons I learned about how not to make an English muffin in the process.
I feel you, Tamal. via Giphy
First Attempts
My first batch was ok. The dough was really wet and sticky and hard to work with. My roommate came in while I was up to my elbows in dough and laughed at me. But after the dough rose for a few days, I cooked them and they came out looking like English muffins! But in my haste to get away from the super sticky dough, I didn’t knead it enough, and so they were lacking the nooks and crannies I’d hoped for.
I was not deterred. I was going to get these guys right.
Just like Nadiya. via Giphy
I’ll just do it again and knead it some more, I figured. The second dough came out looking great. I left it to rise. The dough puffed up. I formed them into circles and left them to proof another time. They puffed up more. I put them on the stove, because that’s where you cook English muffins. The outsides cooked. The insides were doughy and raw. Turns out they’d puffed up WAY too much. We cut them open and toasted them to dry them out. They were still doughy. We ate them anyway.
The third batch was much the same, but I was determined they would cook through. I resorted to some creative measures:
Bet you’ve never had an English muffin cube
For batch four, I popped them in the oven at the end to finish cooking through. That worked, but wasn’t very satisfying. English muffins are supposed to cook on the stove and only on the stove. I prodded at my muffins in despair, wondering what I needed to do to make them cook all the way through. At this point, I’ve watched so much GBBO that I always hear Paul Hollywood’s critical voice in my ear while I’m baking.
“i just keep poking at the middles and hearing his voice say, “raw”
”
– @madderka, determined to succeed
— laneia (@grrreen) February 11, 2016
@grrreen @madderka “Don’t eat that, Mary.”
— Heather Hogan (@hhoagie) February 11, 2016
The Paul Hollywood Approach
I decided it was time for a different recipe. So I went to the source: Paul Hollywood’s technical challenge recipe.
I stayed away from this initially, because most other muffin recipes had a much longer rise time, and I figured that since I didn’t have the time constraint of a technical challenge on GBBO, why impose it on myself to the detriment of the muffins? But a longer rise wasn’t having good results, so I decided to give it a shot.
The dough recipe on this one is a lot different than the first: there’s an egg involved, and slightly less flour. The dough ended up being a lot sturdier and less sticky.
I made these twice, because the first time I accidentally dumped way too much salt in. The two batches came out roughly the same: they were pretty small, and while they did cook through, they didn’t have the nooks or the crannies, and the taste wasn’t that interesting.
Uniform in size and color, but otherwise kind of unremarkable.
So I turned back to the depths of the internet, where I found Sheryl’s recipe, developed in direct response to the lack of nooks and crannies she’d had with other internet English muffin recipes. They were the best bake of the three internet recipes I tried. The trick with this recipe, Sheryl explains, is to actually leave it proofing long enough to overproof so that a lot of air pockets develop – this is something that you should try to avoid with bread, but with English muffins it’s exactly what you want in order to form the nooks and crannies. But Sheryl’s recipe had way too much yeast and they ended up tasting sour without the flavor depth of sourdough.
Maddie’s English Muffin Recipe
So I went rogue. I took all the components of each recipe that I liked, and I made my own, introducing a new component: bread flour. My first attempts all used all-purpose flour, but bread flour is more glutinous, which means it’s more elastic when you knead it, and ultimately makes a sturdier type of structure when it’s baked.
via DK
Ingredients
Not pictured: semolina.
1 1/4 cup milk
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp sugar or honey (I used honey this time, but I’d probably use sugar if I did it again)
1.5 tsp active dry yeast
2 cups strong bread flour
½ tsp salt
semolina (about 2 tbsp)
The Process
Heat the milk on the stove and once it’s simmering, mix in the butter and the sugar with a small whisk. Transfer it into a glass bowl or measuring cup and leave it to cool. Once it’s lukewarm, put the yeast in and stir it again. Let it sit for 10 minutes or until the yeast bubbles up.
Bubbled yeast from two angles.
Mix the flour and salt in a glass bowl, and then mix in the yeast and milk mixture using a wooden spoon. When it gets too hard to mix with the spoon, use your clean hands to bring the flour and liquid together into one doughy mass with all the flour incorporated, and then knead it either in the glass bowl or on the counter.
First it’s all floury and piece-y, then it’s a glob, then it’s a smooth ball!
You’ll know it’s done kneading when it can pass the “windowpane test,” which is when you pinch a golf-ball-sized chunk of dough off and pull it apart. If you can see light through the dough without it just breaking, then you know the gluten has developed it enough.
This is what a windowpane looks like… right?
Put the dough in the glass bowl and cover it with a cloth or plastic wrap. Leave it for about eight hours outside the fridge. (If you do this right before you go to bed, it’s good timing for making fresh English muffins the next morning.)
Before rising
The dough will rise…
It doubled in size!!
…and then fall again.
Not so big anymore
That’s the goal: to get it to puff up and then sink back down. If you were making bread, this would be considered “over-proofed,” and it would leave your bread with big giant air bubbles. But with English muffins, that’s exactly what we want: big giant air bubbles, aka “nooks and crannies.”
Rad nooks and crannies developing!
Then, tip it out — you should be able to hold it in one hand — and GENTLY stretch it into a large flat blob.
Feel free to ignore the change in setting here and trust that i’m showing you the pictures that illustrate this process the best.
Then split it into six pieces. I usually do this with a sharp knife.
Put the two tablespoons of semolina flour in a small bowl you’ll be able to dip the raw muffins into.
Shape each of the six pieces into the roundest shape you can. Techniques really vary for this part. Some recipes recommend you cut out circles, but then what are you supposed to do with the extra dough? Others will tell you to roll the dough into round spheres, but then, all the air gets squished out of them. I did my best to shape the six pieces into rounds without squashing them too much.
Then plop each one in the bowl of semolina to get a thin coating on the tops and bottoms. The semolina keeps the muffins from sticking to the pan.
Once they’re all shaped and semolina-ed, leave them on a tray for 30-40 minutes to proof again. They’ll puff up a little.
And now, the trickiest part: cooking the muffins.
I highly recommend a cast iron skillet for this. I’ve never used anything else. I imagine a typical frying pan would work, too, but the following instructions are based on my experience using cast iron on a gas stove. You might need to adjust based on your specifications.
Turn your stove on VERY LOW. Melt a bit of butter into the pan and wipe out any excess beyond a light coating. Once the pan has gotten hot but not extremely hot, place your muffins in (I typically get three at a time in one pan).
They will cook on the first side anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. Check them periodically to see if they’re cooking unevenly and move them around if necessary for them to get an even bake. DO NOT RUSH THIS PROCESS. If they brown too fast, they’ll be raw on the inside and Paul Hollywood will tell you so.
But you also don’t want them to burn. So a long slow bake is key. If you actually watch the technical challenge where they make English muffins (episode two of PBS’s season two, but the British season five), they’ll tell you that if they cook for too long, they’ll dry out, but I have yet to encounter dryness as an issue in my desperate attempt to cook them to beyond raw.
Once the muffins are brown on one side, flip them and repeat.
Adjusting the temperature to as low as i can possibly get it while making sure that the gas doesn’t go out entirely
Then take them off and put them on a rack to cool. Let them cool so the middle will be less doughy.
Split them in half and toast them. Then top with whatever you want! The true test is if they will split open with a fork. If they can, and if the edges are “squidgey” as Mary Berry likes, then hooray! You’ve done it!
Toast and enjoy with…
…an egg shaped like a creepy bunny…
…a veggie burger…
…and maybe your friend’s turquoise lipstick will rub off on it.
I hope you enjoyed this first installment of Soggy Bottoms!
via The Buzz
Special thanks to Hannah Mogul-Adlin for helping with photography!
Let Us Speculate About the New Tegan and Sara Album, “Love You to Death”
feature image by Pamela Littky via Twitter
After an excruciatingly drawn-out social media build-up, Tegan and Sara released the cover art for their eighth studio album and announced its release date: Love You to Death will drop on June 3, preceded by new music on April 8.
Love You To Death cover art via Twitter
Their last album, Heartthrob, dropped over three years ago. We had a lot of feelings about it. Or rather, Crystal had a lot of feelings about Tegan and Sara on Autostraddle, and I had a lot of feelings about them alone in my room.
Tegan and Sara have had a big few years. They went on tour, recorded an infectious song hated by adults and children alike (which they then sang at the Oscars), were the voices of an Oreo jingle and Sara wrote the score for a film. They also got an Instagram account. And cats.
Based on Tegan and Sara’s social media presence over the past year, I can only conclude that this long-anticipated album will be a collection of songs from their previous records, rewritten to be about how they love Sara’s cats – Holiday and Mickey — to death.
Find the track list that I assume will be on the album below:
Track List (based purely on my ability to draw a logical conclusion)
1. Back in My Bed
2. How Come You Don’t Want Me (Please Just Come Cuddle)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
3. Living Room (Is Where the Shiny Box Is)
4. Relief Next to Me (Purring in My Lap)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
5. So Jealous (That You Get to Sleep All Day)
6. Don’t Confess (Because You Can Only Meow)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
7. Drove Me Wild (Jumping on My Head at 3am)
8. You Went Away (Under the Covers)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
9. Nineteen (Is the Number of Cats We Would Like to Have)
10. Knife Going In (No, You’re Just Biting Me)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
What are your hopes and dreams for Love You to Death?
Read a F*cking Book: “(RE)Sisters” Knows That to Be Queer Is to Be Powerful
I immediately fell in love with (RE)Sisters: Stories of Rebel Girls, Revolution, Empowerment and Escape, a new YA/adult fiction anthology by emerging women writers, published by For Books’ Sake and edited by Jane Bradley. My heart was hooked somewhere in the middle of the first story, “Kin Selection,” by Eliana Ramage. Ramage chronicles a young woman’s navigation of the many spaces and identities she inhabits: college life, adoptive family, birth family, racial identity, Navajo identity and fame she never asked for, which follows her after a childhood at the center of an infamous custody battle.
Ramage’s story is not a false start; it’s just the first of a beautiful selection of stories by young women, about young women, all trying to carve paths in the uncharted territories of their lives. It’s not a specifically queer anthology, but there are a whole bunch of queers to be found in the pages of (RE)Sisters. And I’m not talking vague references to gal pals – there are stolen kisses, straddling and public declarations of love. Queerness is resistance in (RE)Sisters. It’s powerful; it’s brave; it’s celebrated; it’s reveled in.
(RE)Sisters is populated by emerging women writers from all over the world, speaking to a wide diversity of experience. Though there’s not a lot specifically dealing with gender identity or trans identity, nothing cissexist or gender-essentialist jumped out at me while I read. I think trans women and gender-nonconforming people who connect with the experience of girlhood and womanhood will be able to see themselves reflected in the pages of (RE)Sisters.
In the book’s introduction, Bradley outlines (Re)Sisters’ aims:
“(RE)Sisters contains works of fiction. But it also contains a lot of truth. The characters feel the same pressures and pains, fears and frustrations, and employ the same survival strategies as their real-life counterparts. Some of the situations depicted are extreme, but they are a reflection of girls’ experiences, and to exclude them would be at best an omission and at worst dangerous. No-one wins when we look at girls with rose-tinted glasses. (RE)Sisters explores girlhood in all its gore and glory.”
And it does. Through rule-breaking, more than one unauthorized hot air balloon flight, and many other creative and brave attempts at escape, (RE)Sisters reveals truths about what we know, but may not always be able to say: that we are itching to break free of the implicit and explicit confines the white supremacist, patriarchal, heterosexist, cissexist, ableist, imperialist world puts on us. Some of the escape attempts are successful, some are left ambiguous, but the hope and resilience are always tangible.
While all rooted in fiction, the stories in (RE)Sisters take place in the past, present and future, sometimes with a hint of magical realism. Two of the hardest-hitting stories take place in dystopian worlds, pulling back the curtain on some conditions of our current reality. In “A Whole Plate of Biscuits” by Angela Kanter, girls are separated out from the boys in their classrooms. Their teachers don’t acknowledge them. We later learn that girls aren’t allowed to have pens or contact lenses – they can be present in society, but they can’t have the tools they need to thrive. Two girls, Isha and Matty, find a space for subverting, resisting and generally saying “fuck you” to the rules and rule-makers, through the teaching of women elders and through their own attraction to each other.
In “Disharmony,” Tanvi Berwah depicts a world where people with dark skin are isolated from society until they have a dangerous operation to lighten their skin. The narrator has lived her life in isolation, waiting for her operation and the so-called “freedom through blue eyes” she is promised, when her dark-skinned infant niece is put into her care. Her love for her niece inspires her to call into question the racial order she’s taken as fact and internalized. Again, the love between women inspires strength, bravery and resistance.
One of the unexpected delights of this book is that, while the stories largely resist falling into tropes, they do have original takes on everyday young-queer minutia that I’ve rarely found in mainstream fiction. In “The Bathtub” by Kate Spivey, two women road-trip through a vast and open landscape, accompanied by their cats who roam free inside the sweltering car, climbing on the dashboard and copiloting in the driver’s lap. In “Upside Down” by Alaina Symanovich, the main character, Kate, chronicles her complex relationship with friend and sex interest, Ari. Symoanovich writes, Kate “kept a box in her bedroom where she stored fossils of Ari: handwritten notes, water bottle caps, movie ticket stubs.” She perfectly captures the way everyday items become artifacts with hidden significance, and made me think of my own boxes of fossils, pushed far under my bed.
The label of “young adult” for this collection is broad – subjects of the stories range in age from teens to early 20s. I went in expecting to feel it resonate with a younger version of myself, which it did. But I also found the stories reaching straight into the rawest parts of my 24-year-old heart.
(RE)Sisters is a great read for anyone who finds power in resisting patriarchy through their relationships with people of any gender.
7 Ways I’ve Compared My Pet Turtle to a Cat
photos by Rachel Adler
This is Galapagos. She is a turtle.
Sometimes, I feel like I will never be able to live my very best queer life because I developed an allergy to cats in my late teens. Yes, I’ve heard there are hypoallergenic options, but however much money it takes to obtain a hypoallergenic cat isn’t really in my financial picture at the moment. Plus, I don’t really have anything in my life planned past a few months from now, so making the long-term commitment of pet-having isn’t really feasible for me.
But when my friend asked me if I could care for her turtle for a year while she lived abroad, my answer was an immediate yes. A year with a turtle, it seemed to me, was a perfectly acceptable short-term alternative to a cat – mostly because it wouldn’t make me want to scratch my eyes out of my face, but also because my general impression was that turtles are chill and low-maintenance while also being willing to react with affectionate enthusiasm towards their human captors.
A week later, Galapagos the Turtle was residing in a large tank by my living room. She is a red-eared slider, about 8 inches long. She spends her days swimming, basking under her sun lamp, and sometimes wandering the apartment while supervised.
Galapagos being reluctantly photogenic from beneath the radiator.
And what I’ve found is that, while she isn’t a cat, there are more similarities than you might expect. Here are the ways my turtle is and isn’t fulfilling all my dreams of cat-ownership:
1. The turtle is not fuzzy
I’m just making sure everyone is on the same page: the turtle is not fuzzy, and she will not cuddle with you.
She is animated enough to make it very gratifying to project whatever kind of desire for anthropomorphized companionship you might have onto her, just as long as you are okay with that anthropomorphized companion being a withholding introverted weirdo, unless she thinks you have food. Usually, when I approach my turtle, she runs as far from me as she can. Except when she’s out of her tank and I’m trying to clean it using the bucket she usually eats in. Then, she tries to bite my toes.
uninterested turtle is uninterested
2. She would probably eat me if she were bigger.
Have we all read the study about how cats would eat you if they were bigger? I’m pretty sure the same is true of the turtle, who tries really hard to be ferocious, but fails pretty much every time because she’s just too damn small. If I hold my finger up to the glass of her tank, she’ll snap at it, but she can’t bite me. If I take her out of her tank to let her roam the living room or put her in the bucket to eat, she’ll squirm around or try to bite at me, but I can easily avoid her toothless jaw just by holding her from the tail-end of her shell. Her claws are pretty sharp, but I don’t anticipate them breaking skin the way cats’ claws can.
Probs coming to eat you.
3. The turtle eats fish. And bugs.
Like a cat, G’s diet consists mostly of pellets made of some sort of dried fish substance. I take her out of the tank in a bucket and dump a handful of pellets in with her and she scrambles around the bucket eating them. When she’s done, I plop her back in the tank, dump the gross pellet-y water down the toilet, and put a bucket of fresh warm water back in the tank. She gets really excited about this.
Is this turtle love or does she just want to eat my finger?
But SOMETIMES, to keep her diet (and life) varied and interesting, she gets to eat live food. This can be in the form of fish or worms or crickets. I’m not trying to set a bunch of crickets loose in my living room; worms are fine, but not very exciting. Feeding her fish, on the other hand, is a show worthy of a Friday night. Literally, I’ve had friends over on a Friday night just to witness the turtle eating fish. You have to go buy them from Petco for like 17 cents each, and then when the turtle sees the bag she knows and starts swimming like crazy against the side of the tank.
Then you dump them in and the turtle proceeds to spend the next significant period of time zooming around the tank chasing them. The thing is that both the turtle and the fish are really fast. Sometimes the fish get out of the way just in time and the turtle does a face-plant into the side of the tank (her shell absorbs most of the impact; don’t worry about the turtle’s head). But when the turtle does catch a fish, she swallows it whole. It can feel a little sadistic to watch in fascination, but it’s really not much more graphic than watching Ms. Pac Man gobble Inky or Blinky. It’s also a lot more fun than when a cat catches “live food,” because usually when a cat catches “live food” it means she’s caught a mouse or a chipmunk or the family goldfish, and she plays with it while it fights for its life, kills it with satisfaction, and then shows it off.
4. Turtle tanks are more annoying to clean than litter boxes
In a similar fashion to cats, you have to clean up the turtle’s poop, except instead of scooping it out of a box where some magic combination of chemical dirt has made the poop dry and clumped, the turtle poops in the water it lives in, and you have to scoop it out by submerging a net and probably a good part of your forearm into the turtle water. Then you have to get rid of the waste, and sometimes you have to empty out all the water from the tank and fill it up again. Let me tell you, managing that process while living in an apartment building is a real party. Any water from the tank has to be dumped, bucket by bucket, into the toilet, and then refilled, bucket by bucket, from the sink. Hauling buckets of water around an apartment is not my favorite way to spend two hours. Litter boxes are, quite frankly, just easier.
For us, one thing that makes it a lot easier to keep things clean is that the turtle’s rocks for basking under her heat lamp are totally separate from the water in her tank. She can climb between the two areas, but the rocks never get wet.
Hey.
5. Turtles can carry salmonella
It’s part of their “natural flora.” And chances are, unless you let your turtle co-mingle with raw chicken or egg shells, your turtle probably doesn’t have salmonella, but it’s still pretty unadvisable to cuddle your face into your turtle’s shell, or kiss it on the nose.
Also be aware of all the surfaces the turtle hangs out on. We try to avoid cuddling with our shoes, anyway, so they’re pretty much the turtle’s domain.
6. Bonding over turtles can help humans deepen their own relationships
So I live with one of my best friends from college and her boyfriend. I do like this boyfriend person a lot, but he’s even more introverted than I am, so we don’t talk a whole lot. But once the turtle entered our lives, we began a new chapter in our relationship. He LOVES THE TURTLE, and so now she has become our main topic of conversation. Sometimes he even sends me snapchats of her. We have an ongoing project of trying to discern if the turtle recognizes us and/or her food and/or the color of the canister that holds her food.
7. It would be shitty to release my turtle to the wild if I got bored with her
Hello, it’s me, up here on my soapbox. This is the part of the article where I give you a little public service announcement about invasive species, which red eared-sliders are. They are native to the southern United States and northern Mexico, but when they’re introduced in other areas, they outcompete the other turtle populations – they eat like monsters, dominate habitats and transmit disease. Unfortunately, they’re now prevalent all over the world because they either escape or are released from captivity. Some countries and states have banned them, so if this article has convinced you they’d make a great pet, look into that first. Also, if you’re considering getting a turtle, make sure you can commit! Red-eared sliders can live for as long as forty years! There are ways to ethically unhand a turtle if you can’t care for it anymore, so don’t just dump it in a pond if you can’t take care of it anymore. Give it to someone who wants it. Similarly, if you would like a turtle as a pet, see if you can adopt one from someone who can’t care for it anymore.
Do you have a turtle or other small reptile? Is it like a cat or not like a cat? How does your turtle feel about shoes?
<3
Were We Ever So Young: Revisiting “Empress of the World”
Welcome to Were We Ever So Young, a series where we revisit gay/queer books we read as young people that were Very Significant for us and rereading them as adults, noting the differences in our reactions.
On my 14th birthday, with a fresh gift card burning a hole in my pocket, I found myself standing before the fledgling Young Adult section at Barnes and Noble, picking out Empress of the World by Sara Ryan. I read the back of the book and was excited because it was about kids at an academic summer camp, and I was about to go to an academic summer camp.
The names of the main characters, Nic and Battle, were gender neutral enough that I projected heterosexuality onto them, not yet knowing that gay YA lit was something even there to be looked for, but when I showed it to my mom, she said, “Mad, this looks good —I’m pretty sure it’s about two girls. You know that, right?” I hadn’t yet articulated anything definitive about my sexual orientation to myself, but I remember feeling a little like I’d been caught in the act. I played it cool and shrugged. I knew my mom didn’t care, and mostly I just felt subversive because the gift card I was going to buy it with had been given to me by one of my most conservative friends. That’ll show her for being so homophobic, I thought to myself, though I knew I’d never tell her. Empress was my first gay YA novel.
I don’t remember ever talking with my mom about Empress again. I don’t know why she pointed out that it was about two girls. I don’t know if she noticed how many times I read it. But my mom was always supportive, so much so that I came out to her by accident, assuming she’d already figured it out. My bigger concerns with coming out were related to my friends.
We got home from Barnes and Noble and I fell into the book, lost amidst Nic, Battle, Isaac and Katrina, four friends made fast on their first day of camp. Isaac and Katrina are infatuated with each other, Nic and Battle are infatuated with each other. They are all bad at telling each other their feelings, until an organized hike goes awry, Nic twists her ankle, Battle brings her an ice pack, and they kiss. Isaac and Katrina, their own crushes unacknowledged, don’t miss a beat. The four of them hang around campus doing homework and making fun of each other and avoiding bad dining hall food. Nic and Battle hold hands and kiss sometimes. Teen drama unfolds. Identity and sexual orientation play a huge role in the story, but the only people who are less-than-nice about it are clear villains. I’d never experienced a dynamic like that, and I wanted it.
At the time that I first read Empress, I was becoming more and more isolated from my friends at school. We had spent a lot of the beginning of eighth grade, which coincided with the Bush/Kerry election, having lively “debates” at lunch, which mostly meant I would defend the right to get an abortion while everyone else shouted at me. I was also afraid they were all going to disown me if I turned out to really be gay. My journal entries from that time are mostly political treatises (“I want equal rights for EVERYONE, including homosexuals.”), discussion of my life aspiration of becoming a congresswoman (my career path has since diverged), and my deep love of Jethro Tull (nothing’s changed there, TBH), but then there’s also this, from June 2005:
Empress of the World is the best book. I really relate to Nic. She’s sort of lost with friends. She’s quiet, but ambitious, and strong in her convictions. With her relationship with Battle, she’s happy with it because she’s in love, but she’s still confused about her sexuality, like I am. She faces problems with tolerance like I would, if I’m a lesbian. I don’t know. It’s confusing, and in the world and town I live in, it’s scary. I’d lose all the friends I have because their religion tells them that homosexuality is a sin. I don’t get it.
Empress of the World, with my Empress of the World feelings, from June 1, 2005. (Immediately followed by a journal entry about slow-dancing with a cute boy at the 8th grade dance.)
Empress gave me a roadmap that allowed me to be confused about my “label” while also letting me figure out who I wanted to be kissing, which was mostly girls. It gave me some language to start understanding desire. Nic’s self-conscious but diligent journaling throughout the book indulged and validated my own propensity to analyze the reasons behind everyone’s behavior.
Nic and Battle’s romance is delicate and sweet. You can feel the tension of their desire mixed with shyness: “If she wants a back rub, is it too much to kiss the back of her neck?” Nic wonders to the reader. I can feel my 14-year-old self just dying to have someone to share that gentle intimacy with. And of course, I wanted to know more about how they were being intimate. I wanted erotica, let’s be honest. But YA books don’t work that way, so I had to read between the lines as Battle and Nic’s physical relationship escalated, climaxing at a nighttime excursion to the woods: “all of it gets blurry and soft until all that’s left is sensations.”
I longed for those sensations, and I read Empress over and over, searching for new answers to make my life as a baby queer a little easier, a little less isolated, a little less filled with unrequited love and unfulfilled desire. Empress became a guide, a comfort, an aspiration, and a shield.
Reading Empress now, it’s still a comfort, still a book I’ll pull of the shelf and flip open at random to calm me in the middle of the night, when I’m looking for something familiar to hold my focus. These days, though, I feel more connected to Ryan’s perspective as the writer than Nic’s as narrator. I’ve experienced the love, the intimacy and the heartbreak I yearned for as a kid, and now I’m drawn back by the sweetness of the story. I appreciate the subtle misandry directed at the boys in the group of friends Nic falls into (“They sit across from us and spread out in a boy like way, taking up the maximum possible amount of space.”), and at the arrogant (and ignorant) boys in her archaeology class. I can also see how Ryan quietly but deliberately gives the reader a window into different queer cultural milestones: Battle shaves her head in defiance of her parents; Nic learns Isaac has gay aunts and is overjoyed to hear about adults like her actually existing. But Ryan also pushes back against queer tropes and stereotypes: while Isaac and Katrina good naturedly try to impose labels and butch/femme dynamics onto them, Nic and Battle shrug them off, not sure if they really fit. I think I was frustrated with this as a kid, really wanting Nic and Battle to take a definitive stance so that I might know what stance to take for myself. But looking back, I appreciate the ambiguity; I think it helped me be better at accepting the more fluid pieces of myself and others.
Empress came out at the height of my Harry Potter obsession, and at the dawn of the age of prolific young adult writers who turn out volume after volume chronicling the same characters or at least the same themes. I wanted a million more volumes of Nic and Battle’s story. I wanted more Sara Ryan on my shelf than Sarah Dessen. I watched Sara Ryan’s website like a hawk, looking for any possible sign of what became of Nic and Battle when they left their nerdy summer camp.
Six years after Empress, Ryan finally published The Rules for Hearts, a smart, lovely book that speaks to the angst of being totally enamored with someone who is not really available. It’s more of a companion more than a sequel, focusing on Battle, but not about Battle’s life with Nic. While my young teen self still itches for more of Nic and Battle, I’m satisfied that Empress of the World stands alone, a simple, sweet story I found by chance, but that I knew was mine.
Holigay Gift Guide 2015: Bring on the Flannel, Hold the Shirts
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You are reading Autostraddle, so probably there is a person in your life who can’t be spotted during the cooler months without a flannel shirt rolled up around their elbows. Are you that person? I am that person. I have accumulated enough flannel shirts to wear a different one every day of the week, and I always want more. So I have cut myself off. No more flannel shirts! However, the great news is that more than just shirts are made of flannel! And that’s what this gift guide is all about: all flannel; no shirts. Whether you want a flannel dress, a flannel sleeping bag, or flannel boxers to wear under your flannel dress and then later inside your flannel sleeping bag, it’s all here.
Pants
Old Navy Flannel Lounge Pants
It’s always important to give a person the opportunity to wear a flannel shirt and flannel pants at the same time. Some mornings I wake up and put on a flannel shirt over flannel pants and go into the kitchen to make coffee, only to find my straight male roommate wearing a flannel shirt over flannel pants, too. These are some of the moments I appreciate him the most.
Old Navy Flannel Boxers // Hanes Assorted Flannel Boxers
I often ask myself why I don’t have flannel boxers. We should probably all have flannel boxers.
Things With Flannel Lining
Woolrich Classic Fit Flannel Lined Pants // Eddie Bauer Flannel Lined Boyfriend Jeans
Maybe you would like to walk around in pants that have a secret, and that secret is that they are lined with flannel.
Element Hemlock 2Tones Jacket
This coat is lined with fuzzy flannel, and also it will probably make you look like a bad ass, thus intimidating the cold away from your bones.
Dresses
ModCloth Start of Something New Dress
This dress incorporates flannel AND a sweater vest. Sweater. Vest. Okay?
ModCloth Chicago A Go Go Dress
I really like this flannel dress’s simplicity and that it buttons allll the way down. Honestly, it’s almost too close to being a shirt for this list, but I’ll allow it.
Asos River Island Check Shirt Dress
This has a neat tie and probably feels like wearing a bathrobe while looking like a gorgeous dress.
Advanced Loungewear
Premium Flannel Robe
This is not a dress but, in fact, an actual bathrobe to wrap yourself in. Nine print options. 100% flannel.
Big Feet Flannel Pajamas
An honest-to-God flannel onesie.
Minnetonka Flannel Lined Moccasin Slippers // Columbia Packed Out Omni Heat Slipper
My toes have been cold just writing this, as if to remind me that they need some flannel love, too.
Accessories
Tartan Plaid Flannel Infinity Scarf
I think one of my favorite things about flannel shirts is that their collars keep my neck warm in the winter. Well now I’m here to tell you that you can take that to the next level with a flannel infinity scarf.
American Apparel Flannel Cap
The folks over at American Apparel made you a flannel snap back.
Jackman Buffalo Plaid Bow Tie
Perhaps you would like a flannel bow tie to go with your flannel shirt? Probably my advice would be to just pick one thing to be flannel, but if you can pull off both, I will heartily applaud you.
Red Flannel Clutch
So there is a version of this that is covered in chiffon roses, and apparently a lot of people used it for their weddings and a lot of reviews include accolades like, “the bride loved it!” and, “very classy and pretty for a wedding clutch.” Just an idea, but maybe the flannel would work better with your [wedding] aesthetic.
Flannel things for sleeping on
Pinzon Lightweight Cotton Flannel Sheets // Eddie Bauer Portuguese Flannel Sheet Set
I recently learned that flannel sheets are controversial, but I don’t understand why. THEY MAKE WINTER SO COZY, especially when they’re seasonally patterned.
Sheep Patterned Flannel Sheets
I feel like a lot of people had sheep-patterned flannel sheets when I was a kid, so here are some for your kid or for your own bed if you are feeling nostalgic.
Eureka Cayuga 30 Sleeping Bag
Also, don’t forget you can have a flannel lined sleeping bag. I had one as a kid and definitely sometimes requested to just sleep in it on my bed.
There are so many ways flannel can make the Holigays a softer place for you and your loved ones!
Playlist: October Rain
Well, that was abrupt. Earlier this week I was sweating in front of my fan, desperate for some air to flow into my third floor converted-attic apartment. Today it is 50 degrees and raining, my fingers have turned to icicles, and I am piled under all my blankets, hunkered down and refusing to leave the house, even though it’s Coven Night at the monthly queer dance party. I can’t say that I’m mad about this new dreary weather, though. I’m excited to be wearing pants again; I’m excited to cook things on my stove without regretting how hot it makes the whole apartment; I’m excited to read and drink tea on my couch while listening to gloomy music. I’m excited for when the rain clears up and leaves a slight lingering melancholy to mix with invigoratingly crisp air.
This would be me if my fingers weren’t frozen to my keyboard. via Shutterstock
So in honor of in-between month, I bring you a playlist for cold, autumn rain. Break out your stew recipes and hot cocoa mix, sharpen your pumpkin-carving knife, unearth your slippers from the back of the closet, press play, and settle in for the fall.
Oh Sister – Andrew Bird
Living Proof – Cat Power
Wanna Be On Your Mind – Valerie June
Sentimental X’s – Broken Social Scene
Archive – Mal Blum
Swimming in Your Ocean – Crash Test Dummies
Ghosts – Ibeyi
Your Apartment – Jenny Owen Youngs
Write to Your Brother – Perfume Genius
Every Time the Sun Comes Up – Sharon Van Etten
That’s the Way – Led Zeppelin
Afraid – Posse
Where I Will Be – Emmylou Harris
November Rain – Guns N’ Roses
57 Feminists Riff on What the World Could be in “The Feminist Utopia Project”
The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future is a brave book, both in what it asks its contributors to speak to, and in what it asks its readers to take away. Its strength comes from its breadth of perspective and the incredibly hopeful visions of all 57 people who contributed short stories, essays, interviews, comics, poems and photographs to build a composite view of how we would create — or what we would need to create — a “wildly better world.”
While a flipbook on the book’s outer margin depicts a rocket taking off, towards the wildly better world, the fact that the Project is an anthology of short contributions actually meant that it could stay pretty well grounded in the lived and varied realities of its contributors. One person didn’t stay holed up in a room for a year to write 350 speculative pages on utopia. 57 people wrote a few pages, and then went back to whatever they were doing. Common themes emerged, but each writer’s voice and vision were distinct, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes conflicting.
I will say, the bright red and yellow cover and its claims of a “wildly better future” made me brace myself for sunny depictions of a future of harmony and sameness. The singularity I associate with serious discussion of utopia made me uneasy. I wondered, can a utopian project be contained in a single volume, written and published in English, compiled and edited by two young women of somewhat similar relatively privileged backgrounds, that you can buy on Amazon? I wasn’t sure.
But opening the book, I was excited to find the table (designed as a wheel) of contents full of my own feminist heroes alongside people I’d never heard of. I was relieved to learn that a single utopia was not what editors Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff had in mind. “The collection of pieces in this book does not draw a perfect roadmap for a single, cohesive utopia,” they write in the introduction. “We started the project cautiously, knowing from our own organizing experiences that the quest for radical purity can come at the expense of urgent, ugly realities on the ground. …As one of our contributors asked us, might utopian thinking devalue those who adapt their strategies — for progress and for survival — to current conditions?” Instead of laying out a definitive blueprint or roadmap or set of ideals, Brodsky and Nalebuff invite the reader to join them and their diverse team of contributors in a creative and collective thought experiment to imagine what the world could be. This book is not a manual to create The Feminist Utopia; it is a process that you are invited to share in. Brodsky and Nalebuff hope that the book will “ignite your feminist imaginations to help you dream bigger.” Now that I’ve read all fifty-seven visions, I think they were successful.
The contributors take the utopia prompt and push it in all directions. Some prod at the question of utopia in a way that deepens the discussion from “What does utopia look like?” to, “How do we need to approach the question of utopia in order to make it something we want to see?” Melissa Gira Grant discusses how often, in conversations about sex work, the idea of envisioning what sex work does or doesn’t look like “after the revolution” is often used as a tool to exclude and erase sex workers from conversations about realities of sex work now. She pushes us to consider what we need to be shifting now to build a foundation for a future that is still far beyond our own lifetimes. Melissa Harris-Perry, relatedly, asks us to consider feminism as a method and considers utopia as a literal project, “to keep pushing the feminist question of what truths are missing, who’s not sitting at the table, whose concerns are not being articulated, whose interests aren’t being represented, and whose truths aren’t being told or acknowledged.”
Other contributors imagine specific components of the future in ways that would have never occurred to me, like Kate Riley and Richard Espinoza’s “What Will Children Play With in Utopia?” and Yumi Sakugawa’s comic, “Seven Rituals from the Feminist Utopia — Prebirth to Postdeath.” Some offer imaginative visions of the future that are also very specific critiques of present realities, like Mariame Kaba’s story “Justice,” which tells the story of the murder of a girl on a different planet by a visitor from Earth. She describes the other planet’s justice system, based on community, accountability and remorse, in stark contrast to how the American criminal justice system operates today.
Several contributors offered vignettes of their imaginings of the future: an abortion in the future, surrounded by supportive helpers; a young mother supported by her family and community, both as a parent and a student; radically varied family structures in a gender-variant world. A lot of the contributions written from the point of view of someone living in the actual utopia, often referring to the horrifying past (AKA present-day), didn’t work for me. They were sweet, but the absence of context for how those worlds came to be left me feeling more despair about the world we have than invigoration for the imaginary future. But then, I also found myself connecting deeply with a few of the narrative pieces in ways I didn’t expect. And even for those that didn’t sit well with me, I have appreciated the opportunity to reflect on why some of those narratives left me feeling unsettled or unsatisfied. Imagining utopia doesn’t need to be a comfortable project.
While plenty of the contributors are in their twenties, like Brodsky and Nalebuff, contributors range in age from their teens to their seventies. In interviews with movement elders, it’s fascinating and important to read about the ways in which they draw from the past in the course of imagining the future. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy asks for acknowledgement of trans women who have always been fighting for survival, before trans issues became widely understood: “What about the girls who suffered and died before there was a Laverne Cox?… There needs to be some appreciation of those skills and prior activism, and in this ‘real world’ we don’t get that.” Contributions from youth bring inventive takes on their worlds to the table. The last interview of the book is a group interview with a band of teen girls, Harsh Crowd, who talk about the power of making music and imagine a world where “good for a girl” is not considered a compliment.
I closed the book with more questions than I began, and I think that’s actually a marker of the book’s success in being intentionally incomplete and imperfect. While I was pleased to find a variety of different approaches to things that are important to me, including transformative justice, universal access to healthcare, radical teaching, and how to place social value on listening and empathy, there were also things that I missed. I noticed that, in many of the utopian imaginings, electronics were either entirely absent or low-key players. Given what a huge role our smartphones, social media and the internet play in the world we have now – especially in the context of building a contemporary feminist discourse — it left me desperate to know what the place for those things would be in a feminist utopia. So many of our relationships are mediated and facilitated by the speed of global communication capabilities — do those still get to exist in a feminist future? If so, how do we employ and develop this technology in a feminist way? If not, how do we keep the types of accessibility they’ve created for people who would otherwise be isolated or excluded from communities they’ve found on the internet? I have similar questions about traveling between places, and living lives that span the globe. How does mobility, migration, and citizenship work in the feminist utopia? How does a long distance relationship work in the utopia? How do our families spread across the world work in the utopia?
The contributors are the main event of The Feminist Utopia Project, but it’s also worth noting that the book is painstakingly and intentionally designed to uphold the principles of equity and transparency laid out by so many of its contributors. The table of contents is written in a wheel, and the front book flap encourages readers to start wherever they are moved to begin, disrupting the habit of giving preference to the first and last contributors. The book also notes how the money from the advance and book sales is being distributed. It might feel gimmicky, but it’s also cool to think about the little aspects of book design that can change and shift to break the norms of the publishing industry. I also think it’s useful that they prod you to read the book however you feel like — I powered through from page one to 346, and reading 57 different contributors in a short time was sort of challenging. Moving through at a relatively fast pace meant that a lot of the contributions blended together in my head, and because of how utopia is culturally understood and the quickness of the pieces, some of the writing grew a little tiresome. By the third story told from the POV of a narrator who can’t understand why people couldn’t breastfeed at the office in the Olden Times, written by a person with an amazing vision who also clearly usually writes analysis, I grew a little fatigued. That being said, I totally hope that there’s a future where breast-feeding at the office is no big deal, and I also loved that I got to see some of my favorite writers writing pieces that are outside their usual style. Reader, I advise you to take it slow.
I approached The Feminist Utopia Project with raised skeptical eyebrows. I closed it still feeling a healthy sense of skepticism towards a specific idea of utopia, but with a better sense of what exactly bothered me about it, and also with a lot of ideas about how “utopia” can be used as a tool in working to reshape our incredibly not-a-utopia of a present day world. The Feminist Utopia Project is an important work from people across the movement; you won’t regret picking it up.