Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl - de Carrie Brownstein (mémorias)

Esta foto minha foi publicada na pagina oficial Our Shared Shelf no Instagram

Este foi o livro escolhido no grupo Our Shared Shelf deste bimestre. Carrie conta sua historia desde à infância até os dias atuais e relata como é fazer parte do grupo de punk rock feminino Sleater-Kinney. Vou deixar abaixo alguns fragmentos do livro. Li na versao e-book Kobo, $18,00 CAN.

Seu pai era um advogado e para ter uma "boa reputaçao" casou-se, teve filhos, passou mais da metade da vida escondendo que era gay e so assumiu depois dos 50 anos. A mae tinha problema de aneroxia e precisou ser internada.

Let our parents be anorexic and gay! That shit is for teenagers. My sister and I would be the adults. We would be conventional, conservative even. Guns, God, country, and my contrarian, reactionary self. (This phase lasted about ten minutes.)

A reaçao da mae dele ao descobrir sua homossexualidade:

When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, “You waited for your father to die, why couldn’t you have waited for me to die?” I knew then that I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden.

Perguntas de jornalistas para uma banda feminina:

Why are you in an all-female band? Why do you not have a bass player? What does it feel like to be a woman in a band? I realized that those questions—that talking about the experience—had become part of the experience itself. More than anything, I feel that this meta-discourse, talking about the talk, is part of how it feels to be a “woman in music” (or a “woman in anything,” for that matter—politics, business, comedy, power). There is the music itself, and then there is the ongoing dialogue about how it feels. The two seem to be intertwined and also inescapable. To this day, because I know no other way of being or feeling, I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in a band—I have nothing else to compare it to. But I will say that I doubt in the history of rock journalism and writing any man has been asked, “Why are you in an all-male band?”

Os seguranças nao sabiam que elas eram a banda que ia se apresentar, achavam que eram groupies tentando invadir o backstage:

One evening we were mistaken by a backstage security guard as groupies and nearly not let into our own dressing room. When we took the stage that night, Corin said, “We’re not here to fuck the band, we are the band.” 

Musica de mulher x musica de homem

Musicians, especially those who are women, are often dogged by the assumption that they are singing from a personal perspective. Perhaps it is a carelessness on the audience’s part, or an entrenched cultural assumption that the female experience can merely encompass the known, the domestic, the ordinary. When a woman sings a nonpersonal narrative, listeners and watchers must acknowledge that she’s not performing as herself, and if she’s not performing as herself, then it’s not her who is wooing us, loving us. We don’t get to have her because we don’t know exactly who she is. An audience doesn’t want female distance, they want female openness and accessibility, familiarity that validates femaleness. Persona for a man is equated with power; persona for a woman makes her less of a woman, more distant and unknowable, and thus threatening. When men sing personal songs, they seem sensitive and evolved; when women sing personal songs, they are inviting and vulnerable, or worse, catty and tiresome.

Preocupaçao da midia com a aparência do grupo:

while engaging in the camaraderie of a music festival in England called the Bowlie Weekender, when we found a note calling us “ladymen” affixed to the bulletin board on our chalet. Or attempting to talk about our music and the process of writing an album in an interview, then to read the article and see that the writer focused on what we were wearing or how we looked, discussed our gender, or made a sexist comment in the story.
This was the same time as the Spice Girls and “Girl Power.” We knew there was a version of feminism that was being dumbed down and marketed, sloganized, and diminished. We wanted to draw deeper, more divisive lines. We wanted to separate ourselves from anything benign or pretty.
We were never trying to deny our femaleness. Instead, we wanted to expand the notion of what it means to be female. The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. 

mulher sozinha x homem sozinho

Here I was again without a family, my only identity a loner. A male loner is a hero of sorts, a rebel, an iconoclast, but the same is not true of a female loner. There is no virility in a woman’s autonomy, there is only pity. 

Claro que me apaixonei pela Carrie e pela banda. Recomendo a leitura e as musicas. O livro é recheado de fotos fofas. Tem uma parte que ela colocou o que criticos de musicas falaram da banda em grandes revistas e jornais, é de assustar como o mundo ainda esta tao despreparado para lidar com a mulher, nao so na musica, mas em todas as areas, elas têm que ouvir cada absurdo... Ela também descreveu como teve que lidar com a crise de ansiedade, depressao e sindrome do pânico. 

Fica aqui o som das meninas.