May 15, 2016
from CJ
Morning cuties. I’ve got all the links for you but first a few important announcements:
- Did you know that we started releasing our sixth issue, dedicated to the topic of FUTURES this week? Check out all the incredible content we published and stay tuned for more to come!
- If you like what you are reading at GUTS and/or appreciate this little service we bring to you every Sunday, why not consider becoming a patron of the magazine? We launched our Patreon on Friday and if you commit to giving us money we will commit to keep on doing what we’re doing and MORE. Plus we have gifts! Like these beautiful postcards featuring art by our contributors:
3. I proud to say I am now officially a chicken keeper. They are roosting and clucking and laying like chickens will do. We’re all having a great time.
- OOF: “The “perfect body” is a lie. I believed in it for a long time, and I let it shape my life, and shrink it – my real life, populated by my real body. Don’t let fiction tell you what to do.” In an excellent excerpt from her new book Shrill (which I cannot wait to read), Lindy West calls bullshit.
- I love when lectures I meant to go to but somehow missed are posted on the internet: this Daniels Public Lecture by Zoe Todd on fish pluralities, refraction, and decolonization in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) is a thoughtful conversation about unceded and unsurrendered territories and the intersecting histories of law, settlement, city planning, and human-fish relations.
- Woody Allen premiered a new film at Cannes this week and a number of famous people are standing by his side despite his history of sexual abuse (not surprised, but disappointed). Ronan Farrow, Dylan Farrow’s brother, wrote an excellent op-ed on the culture of acquiescence surrounding his father, shedding light on the ways that the media protects famous men who rape.
- I wasn’t going link to that former CBC radio host’s apology because it is some true garbage, but then Scaachi Koul annotated it, illuminating some of the many things the apology is seriously lacking. And if you haven’t done so already, I really encourage you to listen to or read former Q producer Kathryn Borel’s powerful statement. We believe you Kathryn.
- “The art milieu, in particular, has specific conditions that can contribute to, encourage or cloak bias, harassment and assault.” Canadian artists, curators, and writers share their experiences of and views on sexual assault and bias in the art world.
- According to new research analysis from the CCPA: Ontario’s poverty gap for single adults living on welfare has skyrocketed 200 percent in the past twenty years. In 1993, single adults living on welfare could receive up to $663 per month, the equivalent of $995 in today’s dollars. The maximum Ontario Works rate today is $681 a month–60 percent below the poverty line. This is unacceptable.
- For hundreds of temporary foreign workers evacuated from Fort McMurray, the future is uncertain: “[Temporary foreign workers’] work permits are tied to a specific workplace for a specific employer. Even if their workplace doesn’t re-open for months or at all, they can’t work anywhere else in Canada and might ultimately have to leave.”
- Meet Namarig Ahmed: the community health nurse who is bringing palliative care to Toronto’s homeless population
- Filed under grim news for independent digital feminist publishing: we’re so sad to hear that The Toast will be closing up shop this summer. This is one of the few sites I still visit on a regular basis and they have been role models for all of us here at GUTS since our early days. Looking forward to seeing what those toasties get up to next!
- “[Black Lives Matter] gave me a team to work with. I know that I am not sitting in isolation with my pain, frustration, anger; I’m not grieving alone because there is a group of people taking disruptive and educational political action against the institutional and systemic anti-Black racism that exists in this world.” A roundtable with five activists engaged in Black liberation struggles in Canada.
- I’m dying: Claudia Rankine on Adrienne Rich and the role poetry plays in social change.
- A poetic anthology of femme literary brilliance: you’re welcome.
- Hari Nef unpacks feminist respectability politics to make room for femmes in her TEDx talk, #FreeTheFemme
- Performance artists Dark Matter Poets in conversation about the racial history of drag, jokes as survival, and making space for paradox
- I’m growing so much parsley rn but yeah I’m pretty neutral about it too, so hey:
- “Marginalized people are accustomed to their identities being medicalized and pathologized, and to being told that who they are, at their core, is broken, sick, or wrong.” Advice for the marginalized on finding a good therapist.
- “Why I Celebrate the Day I was Diagnosed with Herpes” is a really great piece on the shame attached to this particular STI and how we can push beyond that.
- On the persistent fiction of the biological clock: “The role of the biological clock has been to make it seem only natural – indeed inevitable – that the burdens of reproducing the world fall almost entirely on women. There are moral as well as practical implications to this idea: if you do not plan your life just right, you deserve to end up desperate and alone.”
- BookThug’s new Essais series looks incredible, and it features GUTS contributor and a dear mentor friend of mine Erin Wunker. Go Erin!
- On the Lemonade beat: This black feminist roundtable responding to bell hooks’ piece on pain and Beyonce is excellent. So is this thread by Janet Mock. Also: this thread thinking through capitalism and complicity put forward some important points.
- With regards to I’m Real: I definitely thought J Lo was saying “are you Ellie?” because she and Ja R-U-L-E were having some serious miscommunication. Jia literally blew my mind with this reveal.
- Do you follow GUTS on twitter? If not, you should! We’re making important demands there, like this:
hi @JustinTrudeau in honour of our #FUTURES issue we’d ❤️ $40K/year tax free; all the health care (incl teeth and eyes), & free tuition STAT — GUTS Magazine (@gutsmagazine) May 11, 2016
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