56 Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967; repr., AK Press, 1997), p. 34, quoted in ibid.
57 Germaine Greer, quoted in Chu, “On Liking Women.” For the rest of Greer’s statement, and fuller context, see Cleis Abeni, “Feminist Germaine Greer Goes on Anti-Trans Rant over Caitlyn Jenner,” The Advocate, 26 Oct. 2015, www.advocate.com/caitlyn-jenner/2015/10/26/feminist-germaine-greer-goes-anti-trans-rant-over-caitlyn-jenner.
58 Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), p. 5.
59 Ibid., p. 57. The last phrase is attributed to the poet Dana Ward.
60 Ibid., p. 83.
61 Ibid., pp. 91, 42.
62 Ibid., pp. 75, 74.
63 Ibid., p. 112.
CHAPTER 11: RESURGENCE
1 “Audre Lorde,” The Ubuntu Biography Project, 18 Feb. 2017, ubuntubiographyproject.com/2017/02/18/audre-lorde/.
2 Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), directed by Arwen Curry, is discussed by Alison Flood in “Ursula K Le Guin Film Reveals Her Struggle to Write Women into Fantasy,” The Guardian, 30 May 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/ursula-k-le-guin-documentary-reveals-author.
3 See Bobbie Mixon, “Chore Wars: Men, Women and Housework,” National Science Foundation, 28 Apr. 2018, www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?org=NSF&cntn_id=111458&preview=false.
4 Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Dying to Be Competent,” in Thick and Other Essays (New Press, 2019), pp. 73–98, at 86–87.
5 The Guttmacher Institute maintains fact sheets on the incidence of and restrictions on abortion in each state; for example, Georgia and Ohio both severely limit abortions after 20 weeks, even in the case of rape or incest (www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abortion-georgia and /state-facts-about-abortion-ohio), while Alabama, which has similar restrictions, has aimed to ban abortion altogether, in a law blocked by a federal court; see Kate Smith, “Alabama Governor Signs Near-Total Abortion Ban into Law,” CBS News, 16 May 2019, www.cbsnews.com/news/alabama-abortion-law-governor-kay-ivey-signs-near-total-ban-today-live-updates-2019-05-15/.
6 See, as one of many examples of Ann Coulter’s virulent anti-feminism, her interview on SVT/TV 2, 5 Oct. 2018, posted to YouTube by Skavlan as “Feminists Are Angry Man-Hating Lesbians,” 8 Oct. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxTtjGamJtI.
7 Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors-Brignac, “Celebrating MLK Day: Reclaiming Our Movement Legacy,” 18 Jan. 2015, updated 20 Mar. 2015, Huffpost, www.huffpost.com/entry/reclaiming-our-movement-l_b_6498400; Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” The Feminist Wire, 7 Oct. 2014, www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2. Both quotes appear in Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 161, 163.
8 According to the released 911 call, George Zimmerman reported Trayvon Martin to the police because Martin looked “real suspicious”; quoted in Charles M. Blow, “The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” op-ed, New York Times, 17 Mar. 2012.
9 Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (W. W. Norton, 2007), 2:357–59, at 360, 359; this essay was first published in The World Tomorrow (May 1928). Glenn Ligon’s Untitled: Four Etchings—which incorporate Hurston’s sentence—are reproduced in Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), pp. 52, 53; Hurston is quoted on p. 25.
10 Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” 2:357, 358. On her remembering “the very day that I became colored,” see Barbara Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 278–89.
11 Rankine, Citizen, p. 5.
12 Ibid., pp. 5, 10, 7, 12, 45.
13 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ed. Brent Hayes Edwards (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 8.
14 Barack Obama with Keegan-Michael Key, “President Obama at White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” 25 Apr. 2015, Washington, DC,www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=873&v=oi86E5GgawY.
15 Michelle Obama, Becoming (Crown, 2018), p. 265.
16 Rankine, Citizen, pp. 23–24.
17 Ibid., pp. 26, 31, 35, 36.
18 Ibid., pp. 141, 142.
19 See Judith Wilson’s summary of Piper’s career changes in “In Memory of the News and of Our Selves: The Art of Adrian Piper,” Third Text 5, nos. 16/17 (1991): 39–64; she quotes Piper at p. 42. Piper, Toni Morrison, Anna Deavere Smith, and Faith Ringgold are discussed in Susan Gubar, Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 21–44.
20 Toni Morrison, “Recitatif” (1983), in Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 2:996–1008.
21 Toni Morrison, quoted in Paul Gray, “Paradise Found: The Nobel Prize Changed Toni Morrison’s Life But Not Her Art, as Her New Novel Proves,” Time, 19 Jan. 1998, pp. 62–68, at 67.
22 Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 16.
23 Anna Deavere Smith, introduction to Fires in the Mirror (Anchor Books, 1993), pp. xxiii–xlii, at xxix.
24 Anna Deavere Smith, in Richard Schechner, “There’s a Lot of Work to Do to Turn This Thing Around: An Interview with Anna Deavere Smith,” Drama Review 62, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 35–50, at 47, 49.
25 Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), Museum of Modern Art, New York, www.moma.org/collection/works/110565. Some of the material in this section, as well as Faith Ringgold’s more hopeful work Dancing at the Louvre, is discussed in Gubar’s Critical Condition, pp. 26–37.
26 See “Look Closer: Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus,” The Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kara-walker-2674/kara-walkers-fons-americanus.
27 Ari Shapiro, “At the End of the Year, N. K. Jemisin Ponders the End of the World,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 26 Dec. 2018, www.npr.org/2018/12/26/680201486/at-the-end-of-the-year-n-k-jemisin-ponders-the-end-of-the-world.
28 See N. K. Jemisin’s foreword to the new edition of Octavia Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Sower (Grand Central Publishing, 2019).
29 N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (Orbit, 2015).
30 Annette Kolodny’s many books and Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Continuum, 1990), were followed by a number of touchstone texts on ecofeminism: Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (Zed Books, 1993); Greta Gaard, Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Green (Temple University Press, 1998); and Karen J. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
31 For an overview of Joy Harjo, see her entry at the Academy of American Poets website, “Joy Harjo,” Poets.org, poets.org/poet/joy-harjo.
32 In 2016, for instance, the trans musician Anohni produced the album Hopelessness (Secretly Canadian, 2016) to protest imminent climate catastrophe. For excerpts from the album, see Anohni’s Bandcamp page, anohni.bandcamp.com/album/hopelessness. And in 2019, Linda Cheung founded the nonprofit initiative Before It’s Too Late to create an augmented reality mural in south Florida. Passersby can aim their smartphones at paintings of the animals to see videos about the extinction they will soon face because of heedless human activities. See Meg O’Connor, “New Wynwood Mural Uses Augmented Reality to Spark Conversation on Climate Change,” Miami New Times, 15 Jan. 2019.
33 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, 2014), p. 261. For the quotation from Rachel Carson, see Silent Spring, 40th anniversary ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. 296.
34 Rebecca Solnit, “Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart” (2014), in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Haymarket Books, 2016), pp. 126–36, at 136. She quotes Le Guin’s “S
peech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,” 19 Nov. 2014, www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal.
35 From Rosemary Radford Ruether and Mary Daly (Catholicism) to E. N. Broner and Judith Plaskow (Judaism), Lila Abu-Lughod and Leila Ahmed (Islam), and Phyllis Trible (Protestantism), feminists in religious studies have questioned the masculinism of virtually every major religion.
36 The first critic is Solane Crosley, “What to Read Right Now: Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible, Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy, and Secret Recipes from the Chiltern Firehouse,” Vanity Fair, 16 May 2017, www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/05/what-to-read-right-now-elizabeth-strout-patricia-lockwoods; the second is Paul Laity, “Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood Review—A Dazzling Comic Memoir,” The Guardian, 27 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/priestdaddy-by-patricia-lockwood-review.
37 @TriciaLockwood, “A ghost teasingly takes off his sheet. Underneath he is so sexy that everyone screams out loud,” Twitter, 7 June 2011, 1:59 p.m., twitter.com/TriciaLockwood/status/78159153884958720; Patricia Lockwood, “Rape Joke,” The Awl, 25 July 2013, www.theawl.com/2013/07/patricia-lockwood-rape-joke/.
38 Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy (Riverhead, 2017), p. 11.
39 Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” in Ariel (Harper, 1965), pp. 49–51, at 51.
40 Lockwood, Priestdaddy, pp. 214, 216.
41 Plath, “Daddy,” p. 51.
42 Lockwood, Priestdaddy, pp. 287, 288.
43 Ibid., p. 8.
44 Ibid., pp. 332, 331.
45 N. K. Jemisin, “Three Sisters, an Island and an Apocalyptic Tale of Survival,” New York Times Book Review, 8 Jan. 2019.
46 Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (Haymarket Books, 2017), p. 171.
47 Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me,” in Men Explain Things to Me (Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 1–18, at 13–14.
48 See “Manspreading,” Know Your Meme, [2019], knowyourmeme.com/memes/manspreading.
49 Roxane Gay criticizes what she calls “essential feminism” in “Bad Feminist: Take One,” in Bad Feminist: Essays (Harper Perennial, 1914), pp. 303–14, at 304–6.
50 “Mission Statement,” Crunk Feminist Collective, www.crunkfeministcollective.com/about/; Diana Weymar, Tiny Pricks Project, www.tinypricksproject.com/; and see Katherine Cross, “The Oscar Wilde of YouTube Fights the Alt-Right with Decadence and Seduction,” The Verge, 24 Aug. 2018, www.theverge.com/tech/2018/8/24/17689090/contrapoints-youtube-natalie-wynn, as well as Andrew Marantz, “The Stylish Socialist Who Is Trying to Save YouTube from Alt-Right Domination,” New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2018, www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-stylish-socialist-who-is-trying-to-save-youtube-from-alt-right-domination.
51 Margaret Atwood, The Testaments (Doubleday, 2019), p. 149.
52 Michelle Goldberg, “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, and Ours,” op-ed, New York Times, 15 Sept. 2019.
53 Homecoming’s epigraph quotes the final words of Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977; repr., Vintage International, 2004), p. 337.
54 The quotation, slightly altered, comes from Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979), in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 110–13, at 112.
55 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (Anchor Books, 2012), pp. 27–28.
56 Eavan Boland, “Our Future Will Become the Past of Other Women” (2018), in The Historians: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2020), pp. 63–67.
57 Moira Donegan, “What Comes After the Media Men List? ‘A Lot of Hard Work,’ ” video interview by Ainara Tiefenthäler, New York Times, 18 Jan. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/business/media/men-media-spreadsheet.html; ellipsis hers.
58 Anita Hill, quoted in Dana Goodyear, “Exposure: In the Wake of Scandal, Can Hollywood Change Its Ways?,” New Yorker, 8 Jan. 2018, pp. 20–26, at 26. (Published online as “Can Hollywood Change Its Ways? In the Wake of Scandal, the Movie Industry Reckons with Its Past and Its Future,” 1 Jan. 2018.)
59 “Word of the Year 2017: ‘Feminism’ Is Our Word of the Year,” Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/woty2017-top-looked-up-words-feminism# (announced 12 Dec.); Time, cover of 18 Dec. 2017 issue (announced 6 Dec.).
60 Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (Atria, 2018), p. xvi.
61 The story, written by Julie Bosman, Kate Taylor, and Tim Arango, was published 10 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/us/mass-shootings-misogyny-dayton.html.
62 Thomas B. Edsall, “We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is,” op-ed, New York Times, 28 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/opinion/trump-white-voters.html; Josh Hafner, “Donald Trump Loves the ‘Poorly Educated’—and They Love Him,” 24 Feb. 2016, usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpoliics/2016/02/24/Donald-trump-nevada-poorly-educated/80860078.
63 Recalling that one of her friends in the class of 1962 believed that “our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never led,” Nora Ephron told the class of 1996: “Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.” “Nora Ephron ’62 Addressed the Graduates in 1996,” Wellesley College, www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1996commencement.
64 Michelle Obama, “Commencement Address by First Lady Michelle Obama,” City College of New York, 2016, www.ccny.cuny.edu/commencement/commencement-address-first-lady-michelle-obama.
65 Katie Rogers and Nicholas Fandos, “Fanning Flames, Trump Unleashes a Taunt: ‘Go Back,’ ” New York Times, 15 July 2019.
66 Nicholas Wu, “ ‘I Am Someone’s Daughter Too’: Read Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Full Speech Responding to Rep. Ted Yoho,” USA Today, 24 July 2020, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/24/aoc-response-ted-yoho-read-text-rep-ocasio-cortezs-speech/5500633002/. For Yoho’s “apology,” see Luke Broadwater, “Ocasio-Cortez Upbraids Republican After He Denies Vulgarly Insulting Her,” New York Times, 22 July 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/us/politics/aoc-yoho.html.
67 Stacey Abrams, “Stacey Abrams Talks the Shared Values of Her Political Campaign and Writing Romance,” interview by Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 5 Sept. 2018, ew.com/books/2018/09/05/stacey-abrams-interview/.
68 Michelle Obama, Becoming (Crown, 2018), pp. 408, 409, 411.
69 Alexandra Pelosi, interview by John Berman, New Day, CNN, 2 Jan. 2019, transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1901/02/nday.05.html; Ellen McCarthy, “ ‘Makes going to work look easy’: Decades Before She Was House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi Had an Even Harder Job,” Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/makes-going-to-work-look-easy-how-being-a-full-time-mom-prepared-nancy-pelosi-for-this-moment/2019/02/12/416cd85e-28bc-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html.
70 Nancy Pelosi, video at @ABCPolitics, Twitter, 11 Jan. 2019, 5:27 p.m., twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/1083852879922847744.
71 John Bresnahan, Heather Caygle, and Kyle Cheney, “Pelosi Faces Growing Doubts among Dems after Georgia Loss,” Politico, 21 June 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/06/21/nancy-pelosi-fallout-georgia-special-election-239804. By the date of this article, Pelosi had “rais[ed] more than $560 million for the House Democrats since she became leader in 2003.”
72 The Brookings Institution scholar Thomas Mann, quoted in Andy Kroll and National Journal, “The Staying Power of Nancy Pelosi,” The Atlantic, 11 Sept. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-staying-power-of-nancy-pelosi/440022/.
73 Epithets quoted in Ronald M. Peters, Jr., and Cindy Simon Rosenthal, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 215–16.
74 Nancy Pelosi, quoted in ibid., pp. 233, 193.
75 M. Elizabeth Sheldon, “Nancy Pelosi Traces Her Food Heritage to Risotto, Eats Dark Chocolate Ice Cream for Breakfast Every Day,” Food & Wine, 23 May 2017, www.foodandwine.com/news/nancy-pelosi-traces-her-food-heritage-risotto-eats-dark-chocolate-ice-cream-breakfast-every-day.
76 Glenn Kessler
, Salvador Rizzo, and Sarah Cahlan list thirty-one stretched and dubious claims in “Fact-Checking President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union Address,” Washington Post, 4 Feb. 2020, washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/04/fact-checking-president-trumps-2020-state-union-address.
EPILOGUE: THE WHITE SUIT
1 Mitch McConnell, quoted in Amy Gardner, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Emma Brown, “Top Republicans Back Trump’s Efforts to Challenge Election Results,” Washington Post, 9 Nov. 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-republicans-election-challenges/2020/11/09/49e2c238-22c4-11eb-952e-0c475972cfc0_story.html.
2 Matt Stevens, “Read Kamala Harris’s Vice President–Elect Acceptance Speech,” New York Times, 8 Nov. 2020, www.nytimes.com/article/watch-kamala-harris-speech-video-transcript.html.
3 See Vanessa Friedman, “Message about the Past and the Future of Politics in a Fashion Statement,” New York Times, 9 Nov. 2020.
4 @AOC, Twitter, 3 Jan. 2019, 10:39 p.m., twitter.com/aoc/status/1081032307262345216?lang=en.
5 The Suffragist, 6 Dec. 1913.
6 See Ellen Barry, “How Kamala Harris’s Immigrant Parents Found a Home, and Each Other, in a Black Study Group,” New York Times, 13 Sept. 2020, updated 6 Oct. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/us/kamala-harris-parents.html.
7 For more about Kamala Harris’s experience growing up in Berkeley’s Black community, see her memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019; repr., Penguin Books, 2020); for her early memories of demonstrations, see pp. 7–8.
8 On her Jamaican background, see Donald J. Harris, “Reflections of a Jamaican Father,” Jamaica Global, updated 18 Aug. 2020, www.jamaicaglobalonline.com/kamala-harris-jamaican-heritage/.
9 “Transcript: Michelle Obama’s DNC Speech,” CNN Politics, 18 Aug. 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/08/17/politics/michelle-obama-speech-transcript/index.html.
10 Michelle Obama, quoted in Yada Yuan and Annie Linskey, “Jill Biden Is Finally Ready to Be First Lady: Can She Help Her Husband Beat Trump?,” Washington Post, 18 Aug. 2020. They are drawing on an “exit interview” of Obama and Biden conducted by Jess Cagle, the editor in chief of People magazine; see www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZDfztfau9A.
Still Mad Page 41