Hard Bound

"When I started making those weird voices, a lot of people told me how whack it was. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ they’d say. ‘Why do you sound like that? That doesn’t sound sexy to me.’ And then I started saying, Oh, that’s not sexy to you? Good. I’m going to do it more. Maybe I don’t want to be sexy to you today."

Nicki Minaj

Interesting discussion of the commodification of sexualized female images at Ironing Board Collective. I like the sense that Nicki Minaj’s hyper-femininity borders on the grotesque.

(via fuckyeahfemmes)

(via fuckyeahfemmes)

Kanye West once infamously said, “I would never want a book’s autograph.” In light of this, we wonder how he feels about Annabelle Quezada and La Shea Delaney’s bookish parody of his and Jay-Z’s song “N*ggas in Paris.”

Dubbed “B*itches in Bookshops,” the girls cover countless book geek references:Goodreads, Friday Reads, Foucault, Proust, Barthes…we could go on and on.

With lines like, “Read so hard librarians tryin’ ta FINE me­ /They can’t identify me/ Checked in with a pseudonym, so I guess you can say I’m Mark Twaining,” we’re hoping that these ladies make a follow up.

Check out the video below, or click here to go the Annabelle’s blog:

From HuffPost…

ladiesmakingcomics:

It’s about a young woman who is abandoned in a cemetery, pushed out of a car. And when she comes to she has no idea who she is or where she came from. She just knows she’s in terrible danger and that someone tried to kill her. She starts living in the cemetery, which of course we would all do naturally. And she opens a crypt and starts living in the crypt and gradually gets to know the neighborhood around the cemetery. She’s not mute but she really doesn’t talk much.

Sounds like a bit like Rachel Rising and iZombie, but less supernatural.  I’ll have to check it out!

Into this.  I saw Charlaine Harris speak a few years ago and someone asked her why such terrible things happen to her heroines (the long suffering Sookie, Lily Bard whose back story is so traumatic, &c) and I forget what her answer was—something about lots of women having trauma, her own personal history, and the importance of speaking up about assault.  I googled interviews with her trying to find a similar quote, and thought this one was interesting:

Charlaine Harris Interviewed at Bouchercon

“Violence Against Women as a Recurring Theme

In the second video Charlaine speaks at length about how her own experience of sexual violence finds expression in her work. The importance of women being able to speak up about what has happened to them as part of the healing process has been a theme in many of her stories beginning with her first novel, A Secret Rage.

Given the truly bizarre handling of this subject in Season 4 of True Blood – from Sookie’s seriously misguided belief that she needed Bill’s forgiveness (battered wife syndrome, anyone?) to Jason’s consequence-free gang rape – Harris’ comment on the impact of these experiences on women and society seem especially timely.”

I’m a little exhausted by the Sookie Stackhouse books—my friend loaned me the most recent one for the trip home from LA and I couldn’t even finish it.  I got Jillian Lauren’s new book at an airport kiosk instead—but I’m excited about the new story, medium and um habitat.

(Source: ladiesmakingcomics)