Article passages to jump-start your club discussion
I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead
“The more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power,” she writes. “What we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: ‘Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.”
5 Black women tell the stories of their lives, in their own words
"By my late teens at college, surrounded by four other Black women on my course, I recognized myself in them and soon after claimed my Black identity. I should be able to claim a White identity, of course, but the part of me that the world sees is from my dad’s genes. Most of us now know that there is no scientific basis for what we call race. Yet we are racialized, and I own it. I write my novels from a Black British perspective, focusing on the African diaspora: past, present, real, imagined. When people suggest this is limiting, I ask them if they think that White people writing White narratives is limiting. My Blackness is the wellspring of my creativity and it represents infinite possibilities and riches."
"I'm a woman. I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged woman. And I'm on welfare. In this country, if you're any one of those thingsæpoor, black, fat, female, middle-aged, on welfareæyou count less as a human being. If you're all those things, you don't count at all. Except as a statistic."
The system was never designed for working moms
"Show up to work to prove you can do it all, or don’t, and face the backlash that comes with not being able to do it all."