July 3, 2016
from Brett
Here we are, on the long weekend designated specifically for celebrating white settler colonialism. I hope you’ve managed to avoid spending your weekend waving around the ol’ red and white (or red, white, and blue). I’ve spent my weekend so far reading Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind (highly recommend) and imagining different possibilities for kinship systems—and let me tell you, all of them would put the Canadian nation-state into a tizzy. Now, the links:
- A list of ten episodes from the Red Man Laughing podcast that raise Indigenous voices of resurgence, reclamation & Nationhood.
- Killa Atencio explains why she doesn’t celebrate Canada day.
- The Northern Gateway pipeline is no longer! The court overturned approval of the pipeline because the government failed to properly consult with Indigenous nations.
- Here’s some affirmation from Danielle Henderson, for all the single ladies who are happy being single.
- An interview with Tracy Clayton, one of the hosts from my fave podcasts ever, Another Round.
- Suki Kim thinks through genre as it reflects racism and sexism. She writes, “By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best.”
- Musings on choosing family: “a scene like this one was the closest thing I knew to what I mean by the word ‘family,’ sitting around a kitchen table late at night and believing that there’s nothing in the world from which the people you’ve gathered here can’t keep you safe”
- Toronto venues are forming an alliance to create accountable spaces with the goal of prevent sexual assault.
- Status of Women Canada will now allow groups advocating for women and girls to receive federal project funding.
- Stoya on fixing the porn industry.
- A great resource on consent.
- Diving domestic labour is difficult, even after your feminist consciousness is raised.
- What if I told you there was more than one invisible hand required to making capitalist (dys)function? A book review for Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?
- Other surprises in gender binary and economics: gender-neutral employment policies, in universities, favour cis-men professors.
- Rufi Thorpe on mothering and writing: “I firmly believe that having children has made me smarter and better and more interesting, and fuck you to any women’s mag that doesn’t think so too. And yet, I am profoundly unfree.”
- A judge made history in Canadian courts by acknowledging anti-black racism.
- A story about the Abigail Fisher (Becky with the bad grades) industrial complex, and affirmative action admissions policies.
- Intersections and alliances of Deaf and Queer communities.
- For your viewing pleasures, We’ve Been Around is a series of documentary shorts about trans trailblazers.
- If you’re in Toronto, here’s some queer art you should see.
- Can it get any better than Tavi Gevinson and Hilton Als writing about love??
- We said goodbye to The Toast this week, and Hilary Clinton did too.
- Big news for young women in STEM: a ten-year-old girl has been accepted as one the Paris Summer Innovation Fellows and will program robots to make the streets of Paris happier.
- Improve your summer playlist with these rappers.
- Carvell Wallace’s “The Negro Motorist Green Book and Black America’s Perpetual Search for a Home,” is a must read. He thinks on Black histories of movement, geography, and gentrification alongside contemporary stories.
- Musings on emojis and communication.
- Jamie Wilson experienced years of abuse and harassment at Toronto Fire Services, and her experience reminds us, once more, that institutionalized sexism is still here and still traumatic.
- Austin Clarke passed away this week. As Paul Barrett writes, “Clarke is often described as Canada’s first multicultural writer, or Canada’s first immigrant writer, or Canada’s first black writer. These labels are completely inadequate: Clarke is one of our most important writers in need of no qualification, and his career does not merely predate, but should define what we think of as Canadian Literature.”
- If you live in Ontario, get read to say goodbye to the ‘sex’ category on your health card!
- An interview with Sheila Sampath, editor of Shameless Magazine, on running an independent, anti-capitalist, feminist publication.
- Oh! And Nashwa Khan wrote a powerful piece thinking about self care in the context of neoliberalism, late capitalism, and white supremacy. You should give it a read.