Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to ( Read more... )

I've braved earthquakes and bullets in my hunt for fabulous fabrics.

Okay, yet again the art/craft binarism going on, permission to beat her about the head with a copy of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, accompanied by a recitation of West's wonderful accounts of Balkan women's embroidery?

Plus, how is that wonderful textiles are only ( Read more... )

Commenting to a post by someone else, I brought up this thought that I had at the conference the other week.

One of the papers was on late nineteenth century French literary reinterpretations of late eighteenth French libertine literature. The thing that struck me about it was the speaker mentioned certain late C19th French male literary ( Read more... )

Wow, this gets that really annoying trope absolutely spot-on and bang to rights ('HAI! Mi name iz ANIMA and I will B ur muse for the evening!!'):
[T]he stock character first pinpointed by US film critic Nathan Rabin - the "manic pixie dream girl ( Read more... )

Fashion: Hannah Pool is acerbic about the preconceptions embedded in the cliche concept of 'tribal'.

And interesting piece on clothes shopping for hijabi women (by a woman who wears hijab).

Plus, on women's bodies more generally, the somewhat uneven Tanya Gold is in good form about beauty contests: Miss Great Britain is retro and ironic, they claim ( Read more... )

'This is too [X], and this is too [Y], but this is just right'

Or, the thoughts that arise in me when I have been exposed to a certain amount of invocation of The Other in particular historical frameworks.

Yes, The Other is a useful theoretical construct.

But: I don't think there's just one Other, there are usually at least two, so that We (whoever ( Read more... )