Shah, Sonia, ed. - Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire

This is a collection of essays by Asian-American feminists about Asian-American feminists (with the "American" indicating the US, although there is one that focuses on Canadian healthcare). From my recollection, the range seems fairly large—there were quite a few essays on lower-class women and I think the essays spanned a good range of ages, although I could be remembering wrong. I was especially pleased to see good representation of South and Southeast Asian women. I think there could have been more by and about queer women and differently-abled women, though I really loved the round-table with three punk queer Asian women.

I had read about half of this maybe half a year ago; I reread most of it and dashed through the rest to cope with some RL race-related unfunness. I find I don't read these kinds of collections of fairly personal essays by WOC very often, but when I do, they are so inspiring and so life-saving. Maybe that's why I can't read them often... I have to save them up so I have something to turn to when it feels like everything is working against me. I'm not going to be particularly academic in this write up because my reaction is so emotional. This book inspires me and makes me want to do more and to do better, to keep working at things, to try to give back some of the support that I've found within.

One piece that particularly stood out for me was "Bringing Up Baby: Raising a 'Third World' Daughter in the 'First World'" by the mother-daughter team of Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani Das Dasgupta and how jealous I was that Sayantani Das Dasgupta had her mother when she was growing up, how she had a personal role model for radical politics. I hate envying other people's positions, because I'm sure they have problems I do not, and because I am and will always be grateful to my parents for giving me Taiwan. But my family and almost everyone I grew up with were not particularly radical (or liberal even), and I wish I had had something outside of ink and paper, someone human and alive and breathing and talking to go to when I was growing up.

Other themes that struck me were all the mentions of grassroots organization and community outreach; several groups described in the book are grassroots organizations started by women of color to fight sexual violence in communities of color or lower-class women of color mobilizing to fight racism and classism and sexism. It reminds me of how Andrea Smith starts from Native women in Conquest and works out from there, and how by doing so she finds solutions that help those women and help many other communities as well. But I was thinking of activism and fighting oppression and how important it is to start from the ground up, especially because of how oppression works from top down. I am also not sure I am making sense here; I'm still working through what I can do and how I can do it.

One of the pieces was annoying, with the American woman author talking about a group of women in another country, and it just felt so condescending and "I am the outsider talking about these foreign people." I am pretty sure it was Deila D. Aguilar's "Western Feminism and Asian Women," but I am not entirely sure because I do not have my copy of the book next to me.

That said, overall I very much liked how international the book was, how so many of the pieces recognized that many of us might have been born in the US, but we still have families in other countries, still have stakes there that we cannot give up. I also liked how the book not only pointed out racism in the US, but also global structures that support racism, such as the piece on Canadian healthcare and how much of the cost of national healthcare has been offloaded onto immigrant Filipina nurses.

I found this book so personally necessary and so comforting that I have no idea how useful this write up will be to anyone who's not me. Still, recommended!

Cunningham, Michael, and George Alexander - Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair

Like Cunningham's Crowns (same photographer, different interviewer), this is a a gorgeous book of photography coupled with personal interviews, only this time, it is on... hair! Yes, Actual Black Women (tm) talking about their Actual Hair (tm)! Hopefully those tormented by curiosity about the subject will at least read this instead of springing unwelcome questions on random Black women.

You can see many of the portraits on his webiste, and they really are gorgeous. But as with Crowns, I love the interviews the most. This book has a larger age and geographical range than Crowns, probably because I got the sense in Crowns that church hats were not being picked up as much by the younger generation (is this true?). I also love that he has several Ghanan women from a hair-braiding school included. There are pictures of women in their every-day hair, pictures of women in showcase hair, pictures of women in ceremonial hair. And there are also pictures of the hairdressers themselves, along with interviews.

There's discussion of natural hair and good hair and "nappy" hair and "bad" hair, of jheri curls and afros and straight perms and locs and braids and cornrows and ringlets (and one mohawk, yay), dyeing and cutting and shaving, and the importance of the local hairdresser and barbershop. There are stories from women of all ages, all of whom have decided to do different things to their hair for different reasons.

It's just a lovely collection; go read. Or if you can't find it, definitely visit his site and check out the pictures.