Debbie says: Sorry we’ve been slow to blog this month. Laurie took a vacation and Debbie was dealing with a death in the family, but we’re both home now and blogging regularly until WisCon, when we traditionally take a week’s break. One of the stories we’ve been meaning to get around to is the inimitable [...]

Debbie says: A couple of months ago, Jessa Crispin at Bookslut was very actively recommending Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich. I’m not prone to depression and I had never heard the phrase “public feeling,” but Crispin’s comments made me curious, and I picked up the book. [the] idea that depression can come from [...]

Laurie says: The Freedom’s Sisters Exhibition is at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.  The website is an exhibition in it’s own right. Much of our national memory of the civil rights movement is embodied by male figureheads whose visibility in boycotts, legal proceedings, and mass demonstrations dominated newspaper and television coverage in the [...]

Laurie says: Cross-posted on Feministe. When Nisi Shawl called me up and asked me to do the cover for her anthology Bloodchildren, I was astonished. Not because she asked me but because I knew I was going to say yes. I’ve never done a cover and my photography is normally unsuited for SF anthology. But [...]

cross-posted on Feministe Laurie says: RISE (Racism Still Exists) is an anonymous artist group putting up powerful posters in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. It’s a very long time black neighborhood and is now rapidly gentrifying. I used to visit a good friend of my grandmother’s there years ago. It sounds like I wouldn’t recognize much of [...]

Lynne Murray says: Thanks to Tante Terri at Fatties United for sharing another fat hero: Lynne Hurdle-Price is amazing. She is a wife, mother, actress, writer, runs her own company (creating honest dialogue on diversity), she has a workshop series helping teens to face fear and achieve their best, she has her own entertainment production [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: If you live in the U.S., and you’re not watching the news extremely carefully, you probably don’t know that a powerful Hungarian politician, Marton Gyongyosi, made a speech in the Hungarian parliament at the end of November, calling for “the authorities to compile a national list of Hungarian Jews, especially those [...]

Debbie says: Today is the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, a painful day. Violence against transgender people is extremely pervasive and, as always, transgender people of color and trans women are the primary victims, which even when it is showcased today is often blurred throughout the rest of the year. erica, ascendant has an excellent [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: It’s great to have Laurie back from her long vacation, and be blogging together again! We’ll start by showcasing this trenchant book review from Tracey Ross for Racialicious. Neither of us has had the chance to read Iconic: Decoding Images of the Revolutionary Black Woman, by Lakesia Johnson, and both of [...]

Laurie says: This blog is a huge fan of the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, as athletes and as world changers. I saw Serena winning the US Open and then found this poem in a post on A Philosopher’s Life. .. .. The Change by Tony Hoagland The season turned like the page of a [...]