Feminist Weekly: Witches Get Stuff Done
Editor's Note: Every Thursday, I'll be rounding up my favorite Identities pieces from the past week so that PolicyMic Pundits can more easily read and comment on the great content being written about sex, sexuality, gender, and race in politics and culture, in addition to updates from our community and GIFs galore! You can subscribe to get updates delivered straight to your inbox.
Highlights This Week:
Happy Halloween!
Fun fact: Halloween is my favorite holiday — possibly because my parents named me after Samantha from Bewitched.
Luckily for me and my (so far latent) magical nose-wiggling powers, The New Inquiry’s latest issue is all about witches. My favorite piece, so far, is “The Dark Art Of Glamour” by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano. The former copy editor for Glamour magazine links the sorcery of the beauty industry to the artistry of editing, explaining, “Both grammar and glamour function as a set of rules that help people articulate themselves and allow us to understand one another.”
Not all deceptions are welcome ones, as Whitefield-Madrano notes, but perhaps we wish them so: “The codes speak for us and we have to fight all that much harder to have our words heard over the din our appearance creates. But within those codes also lies a potential for relief, for our own construction, for play, for casting our own little spells.”
Others are less enchanted with the possibilities of costuming. At The Nation, Aura Bogado says that this year’s Halloween—featuring teenagers dressed as Trayvon Martin, and a bevy of actors in blackface, whose actions Evette Dionne breaks down here— is already a horror show, an unusual turn of events for a “holiday on which it’s acceptable for people to flex racist imagery a little more than usual.” At PolicyMic, Arielle Newton agrees: “As millennials, we are more educated and better exposed to globalism. Since we have the educational resources, why do we persist with the Native American headbands?”
More on Halloween: Danielle Paradis hates your offensive costume, you jerk, Jayson Flores wonders why feminine gay men aren’t allowed to be fabulously creative, Charles Clymer responds to Kristen Schaal’s viral video with his own suggestions of sexy costumes for sexist men, Daniela Ramirez takes down AskMe.com’s terrible Halloween advice, and Claire Rychlewski is SO. OVER. boring-but-sexy Halloween costumes.
I personally will be dressed up like an internet troll tonight. BOOYAH.
Updates From Our Pundits:
“Will you be my internet friend?” asks Danielle Paradis. “I already am!” responds Elizabeth Nolan Brown.
Read Joya Taft-Dick on girl-centered advocacy.
Listen to PolicyMic contributors Daniela Ramirez and Juliana Britto Schwartz at Feministing’s Coloring Latinidad Google+ hangout!
What did you do last week? I’ll share any outstanding writing achievements in our community, and highlight the great work that all of our Pundits do offline as well. If you have anything you’d like for me to include about yourself or a fellow PM writer, please send it along!
Must Reads From Last Week:
