Got it down to 15 categories! #SocSciComm #InfoLit #FanLIS
Me, today: Drinking coffee and getting work done. LIKE A BADASS.
Got it down to 17 categories. I don’t think I can do much better than that. When you’re stuck, go analog. #SocSciComm #InfoLit #FanLIS
I interviewed 10 cosplayers; together they used over 60 different terms to describe the resources they go to when they need cosplay-related information. I’ve been working on categorizing these terms for weeks. Today, I’m getting tactile. #SocSciComm #InfoLit #FanLIS
📚 4/31 TO THE BONE by Angela Narciso Torres. Excerpt from “Self-portrait as Water”: “most forgiving of/substances, I resolve/to live like you—to fill/and be filled,/to take the shape/of my vessel/dispensing heat/displacing matter/lighter than air" #TheSealeyChallenge
No YOU’RE considering pivoting after graduation to a career that focuses on supporting mothers in academia.
From Parul Sehgal: In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle
In this piece that is mostly a review of Jacqueline Rose’s book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Parul Sehgal offers more titles to add to the motherhood reading list.
“Mothers “are not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human,” Rose writes. She quotes Julia Kristeva: “To be a mother, to give birth, is to welcome a foreigner, which makes mothering simply ‘the most intense form of contact with the strangeness of the one close to us and of ourselves.’”
Isn’t it pretty to think so? Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.
Sehgal names some of these walls: pay gaps and maternal health outcomes, both hinging on race. She points out:
…so many of these books (almost all of them are by white, middle-class women) seem wary of, if not outright disinterested in, more deeply engaging with how race and class inflect the experience of motherhood.
The books listed in this article and in Elkin’s are a beginning. As a canon, the list has glaring gaps, most noticeably around race and queerness. The following articles seek to fill those gaps, and I’ll be discussing them in depth in the coming days:
- Why Are We Only Talking About ‘Mom Books’ by White Women? by Angela Garbes for The Cut
- We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs by Nancy Reddy for Electric Literature
- As A Queer Woman, I Can’t Afford To Be Ambivalent About Motherhood by Katie Heaney for Buzzfeed
Currently reading: ‘Making It’ as a Contract Researcher: A Pragmatic Look at Precarious Work by Nerida Spina, Jess Harris, Simon Bailey, Mhorag Goff 📚
Finished reading: Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing 📚
📚 3/31 ELECTRIC ARCHES by Eve L. Ewing. Excerpt from “to the notebook kid”: “it’s that flows and flows and flows/and lines like that rip-roaring/bits you got/bars til the end of time/you could rap like/helium bout to spring” ♥️ this collection, so joyful #TheSealeyChallenge
