February Girl The Soul Of A Mermaid The Fire Of A Lioness The Heart Of Hippie The Mouth Of A Sailor Vintage T Shirt
This is our best seller for a reason. Relaxed, tailored and ultra-comfortable, you’ll love the way you look in this durable, reliable classic 100% pre-shrunk cotton (heather gray color is 90% cotton/10% polyester, light heather gray is 98% cotton/2% polyester, heather black is 50% cotton/50% polyester) | Fabric Weight: 5.0 oz (mid-weight) Tip: Buying 2 products or more at the same time will save you quite a lot on shipping fees. You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: https://grootshirt.com/product/horses-my-plan-for-today-t-shirt/ When I first met the rising poet Rosie Stockton two summers ago, they began to make me rethink the entire idea of performing gender. Stockton lives within the blurred edges of femininity and masculinity — all tenderness and swagger, acrylic nails and binders, bright-pink mesh and baggy pants. Their anarchic approach to “trolling the gender categories” would help inspire my own free-sliding on the gender spectrum, a way of playfully matching my lack of allegiance to any one gender to how I dressed and behaved.Stockton, who is from New Mexico, is releasing their debut book, Permanent Volta, about gender, sexuality, and love this week. It is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses. The poems are exceedingly relevant to our uneasy time: about hating work and being broke, but also about being in love, and needing sex, luxury, and care.Stockton’s book places them within a scene of young and provocative poets like Rachel Rabbit White (a Stockton fan), Ariana Reines, and Precious Okoyomon who are using poetry to investigate the pleasures and perils of sex, work, and power. Stockton began the book with the intention of writing about labor and revolt, but ended up writing about queer love, friendship, and desire as they realized that relationships are the antidote to the exploitative nature of work.“Capitalism convinces us that we’re individuals, that we’re isolated, that we’re separate from one another, and that personal responsibility is the ultimate good life,” Stockton says. “Love is something that inherently is a threat to that myth of individualism.” One of their poems asks, “What if we kissed/in an Amazon locker,” an intimacy in a world of alienation and depressed wages.Stockton and I spoke this spring, under a pomegranate tree in the backyard of their home in Los Angeles, about love and work. Stockton’s platinum blonde hair was pulled back, and they were wearing a white tank top, denim jacket, black pants — and a tiny string of pearls.You write about the conflict of love and the way capitalism wants us to experience love.Love can be playful and experimental, healing and activating. It can offer possibilities for growth, reflection, and breaking out of lonely modes of being. Capitalism regulates our experience of romantic love into the couple form envisioned by heteropatriarchy, because this is the form of social life most hospitable to capitalist accumulation. The state tries to control our experience of love through laws against deviant modes of sexuality and gender, in order to make us fit into capitalism’s needs. But I believe a politics of care and queer love is in excess of this.How did you get from writing about work to love?I was thinking about conversations around the politics of reproductive labor. There is a slogan that came from the Italian Marxist feminism’s “Wages for Housework” movement: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.’ There are also traditions of thought articulated by Black Marxist feminists that argue against the wage. Like, we don’t want to turn care and love into labor: what else is possible? In one poem I write: “Can we love with inadequate politics?” I wrote poems to people I care for: friends, lovers, and those who are both. I wanted to fuck with the poetic forms associated with romantic love (like the sonnet!) to actually experience the love that animates my life.So what’s your take? Should all care be paid for?Domestic labor and care work are exploited by racial capitalism, and have been a historically difficult sector to organize. For those doing this kind of labor, of course it has to be paid, and all workers need labor protections. That said, the wage isn’t the ultimate demand that I have around compensating reproductive labor, or practices of care and love. In this book I imagined refusing the wage as the path toward love and liberation. Leftist thinkers like Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, and Rosa Luxemburg are influential to me.The book is simmering with radicalness. What are some of the politics that inform your work?These poems are personal, but informed by politics that demand the abolition of police and prisons and the decriminalization of sex work. I’m interested in the intersection of labor organizing and abolitionist mutual aid projects that call for better working conditions while dreaming of autonomous systems that get everyone’s basic needs met.I study radical traditions and organize with groups that center those most vulnerable to state violence and exploitation, and often this means people who are working in criminalized or unvalued economies, or those who can’t or refuse to enter the traditional workforce. Many in the decriminalization movement fight to demand the basic fact that sex work is work, but also emphasize how being recognized as a “worker” is a false promise of safety. This shows up in my poems: “I didn’t mean to ask for money/I meant to ask for a different set of relations”! I’m interested in politics that demand the abolition of work, the end of the racist and transphobic carceral state, and a reorganization of care, healing, and social life. These politics refuse to believe recognition from the state is the only path. I use the sonnet because I want to understand how it regulates love and creativity. Take it back as a poetic means of production of romantic love! Do you see yourself as part of a specific scene of poets working through these themes?Absolutely. I feel in community with poets who allow politics to enter their poems — leftist queer politics and the politics of pleasure and abundance. Poetry as a form is so resonant with queerness. There’s room for play, puns, winks, kink, breaking the rules. These are tropes that I associate with queer community and desire. At the charter school in Harlem where Darlene Okpo first worked full-time as an English teacher, students had to get through 1.5 million words by the end of the year in order to pass. Without the word count, they were required to attend summer school. Formerly a teacher of after-school art programs, entrepreneurship, and theatre, Okpo has been educating since 2009. In a city as culturally rich as New York (where Okpo has lived in all five boroughs, including the honorary sixth, New Jersey) there are stories everywhere—on plaques, statues, park maps, and in bulk at the city’s many libraries and bookstores. But Okpo understands that students—and all people—need to be introduced to the right stories in order to find the pleasure of a great book.“I had this one particular student that had an A+ in reading, but her word count was low. One day I asked her why she wasn’t reading and she told me that the books that they have at the school library were dull, and that she wanted to read more books that focused on African-American characters,” Okpo recalls. An avid reader from an early age, Okpo already had some young adult books in her personal library. The next day, she brought her student Tiffany D. Jackson’s book called Monday’s Not Coming. “She would read it during class and during lunch. In a matter of three days, she completed the book and requested another book to read. She was also a popular student and my other students would see her reading, and come to me for books.” By doing this, students with low word counts caught up within weeks. “Everybody is a reader, you just have to find the right book that speaks to your soul.”At the start of May, Okpo opened a bookstore, Adanne, in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, which offers the same warm approach to learning that Okpo offers the students in her classrooms. It’s named after Okpo’s mother, Pauline, whose nickname is Adanne, meaning “she is her mother’s daughter” in Igbo. “As I was creating the aesthetic for the store, my friends and family would visit and we would always end up talking about our current issues. We talk about education, real estate, financial literacy, and many other topics. The books I chose for the store inspired these conversations.” The store is a celebration of African-American culture, with walls adorned by album covers such as “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” and shelves stocked with “Defend Black Womanhood” t-shirts.It’s not the first time Okpo’s work, and her sense of storytelling, has been inspired by her family. In 2009, when Okpo was 22, she and her sister Lizzie founded the brand William Okpo, named after their father, who “irons his clothes every day—even when he’s cutting the lawn, he’s fashionable.” Both parents are immigrants from Nigeria who work for the city of New York. “Fashion tells a story that we’re able to visually read—it’s that designer’s story,” Okpo notes. “When it comes to written storytelling, you’re reading the story and also looking at the identity of the author.”Adanne will be hosting weekly and monthly workshops focused on catalyzing change. The first one, taking place on June 5th, will be a discussion of issues concerning education during the pandemic. “I feel that the government didn’t do a great job in terms of taking care of our students. Now it’s time to bring that to the forefront,” Okpo says.Okpo is currently building out Adanne’s website, but for now, for those who can’t visit in person, she offers book recommendations to readers of varying ages and interests:My Feet are Laughing, by Lissette NormanNana Akua Goes to School, by Tricia Elam WalkerI Promise, by Lebron JamesA Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart, by Zetta ElliotLook What Brown Can do, by T. Marie HarrisAmerican Street, by Ibi ZoboiMonday’s Not Coming, by Tiffany D. JacksonJuliet Takes a Breath, by Gabby RiveriaFlyy Girl, by Omar TyreeThe Coldest Winter Ever, by Sista SouljahConcrete Rose, by Angie ThomasPowernomics, by Dr. Claude AnersonThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley and Malcolm XThe Kidnapping Club, by Jonathan Daniel WellsAn African American and LatinX History of the United States, by Paul OrtizThe Mis- Education of the Negro, by Carter G WoodsonAn Indigenous People’s History of The United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizHood Feminism, by Mikki KendallAin’t I A Woman, by Bell HooksWhen Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, by Joan MorganWomen Race Class, by Angela Davis For most of literary history, LGBTQ+ parents had to content themselves with being mostly absent from the mainstream canon. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a novel prior to the aughts that featured a queer family at its core. More recently, writers like Maggie Nelson, Harlyn Aizley, and Jia Qing Wilson-Yang have begun to introduce queer familial narratives that aren’t remotely trying to fit the white-picket-fence mold. In With Teeth, a new novel from Mostly Dead Things author Kristen Arnett, the specific intricacies of queer-family making are laid bare for all to see; Arnett is wholly unafraid to spotlight queer parents screwing up, fighting, or even—at times—regretting the worlds they’ve built with one another.The novel’s protagonist, Sammie, is a dissatisfied young wife and mother living in Central Florida, and there are shades of the gothic in her anxious, often alcohol-fueled attempts to connect with her wife, Monika, and son, Samson. Sammie’s marital loneliness and fear over Samson’s development feel three-dimensional, leaving the reader with a portrait of a woman who is, at once, wholly ordinary and not quite like any literary mother who came before. Vogue spoke to Arnett about the release of With Teeth, the constant “viewership” that so often accompanies queer parenting, and the importance of enthusiastic consent in LGBTQ+ spaces. Read the full interview below.How long were you working on the book?Well, Riverhead bought it at auction off of about 70 pages, which…bless their hearts. I was on the phone with Cal, my editor, talking about this book, and he was like, “What do you see the plot being?” and I was like, “Oh, no.” Then I started working on the rest of it, really hard-core, just digging into it from 2018 into 2019 and moving into 2020. I was like, it’s a stressful book, so you’d think it would have been a stressful process.Did you find it stressful to write?Yeah, it was stressful, but I sent in my first draft around February 1, so right before the pandemic hit. I feel very lucky in retrospect, just because if I’d written it later, it might be a completely different book. If I had to send it in after the pandemic, it would have just been, “Well, I couldn’t write, so I just stuck a bunch of Laffy Taffy wrappers together. Hopefully that works for you.” [Laughs]You’re so good at making dark, almost macabre topics feel light and compulsively readable. What was it like trying to strike that balance?Personality-wise, comedy comes to mind for me about basically everything. I come from a background of my family being very conservative and evangelical—a very repressive kind of household—and as a very closeted lesbian in that space, I feel like my coming-out process was just trying to develop a lot of humor about things. It also feels natural to me to lean into the stuff that feels uncomfortable, because that’s what feels the most messily human. People are just, like, weird, and super fucked-up. Everybody lives in a very specific kind of gray area, where it’s like, sometimes you do something, right? And a lot of times you’re doing things wrong, but what does that look like? Especially in context with other people, and especially inside of a household…I think it’s way more fun to deal with people being fucked-up, especially with family fiction where everyone is a bit of an unreliable narrator.There are a few places in the book where Sammie talks about a heavier burden being placed on queer parents. Is that something you’ve noticed in the world around you? I’m specifically thinking a lot about Florida, which is very specifically a red, conservative state. There’s plenty of queer people in Florida—specifically Central Florida—but not really queer spaces. So what does that look like when there’s like a couple of queer bars, maybe one club, and then you’re having a kid? What does that look like when conservative people already want to watch what you’re doing and prejudge you based on the idea that what you’re doing is going to fail? Then the opposite side of that coin is, “Please don’t fuck this up, because I’m a queer person, and I want this for myself.” You’re constantly under some kind of viewership, which I imagine would be really stressful. And then add on top of that, for Sammie: What if maybe you’re just kind of not the best mom, or feel like you’re kind of shitty at it? It becomes very claustrophobic, and your world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.It’s true; even in Brooklyn, I think queer spaces that aren’t nightlife-oriented are hard to come by.Yeah! I mean, my girlfriend and I moved to Miami in October, and we just haven’t met anyone or done anything. Luckily, we really like each other. It just is this feeling of isolation; I can’t imagine what it would be like to be like a queer parent in that situation. Even for me, I miss gay people, and I’d like to come together in a public space. I sincerely miss that very badly.There’s such a sense of foreboding in With Teeth, even when things are technically going okay for its characters. Did you have any other books that served as reference points for that feeling?I definitely am a person who likes horror and suspense and things like that; there’s a book called Baby Teeth that came out a few years ago that I read, and it’s not necessarily about a queer family, but it is about a mom who has medical issues and a bunch of things going on. I am, like, a huge fan of that stuff, and I grew up secretly reading Stephen King. I love like stuff like The Shining, and anything about people who who are really wanting to do their best as parents but ultimately, quite often, failing in ways that are horrific and exemplified by actual monsters. Sometimes we’re our own monsters, inside of a household. I also read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, just for baby terminology—I think it’s deeply funny, because it’s about how we examine the body and how it expands. It tells you, “Now your child is the size of a burrito, or a bag of chips, or a koala.” The question of how a child fits inside a human stomach was very interesting to me.There are so many cool time jumps in With Teeth, and most of Sammie and Monika’s happy memories only occur in flashbacks. Was that intentional?Yes. I’m always interested in nostalgia and the ways that it sabotages us, and I think that that is especially true in relationships. In the beginning, when Samson is in elementary school, Sammie’s very frustrated with her wife, but later on in the book, when he’s in high school and Sammie’s separating from her wife, she has these memories of what it was like with Monika that aren’t necessarily accurate. I think that that’s a deeply human—that we try to compartmentalize the past, because maybe it’s the only way we feel like we can deal with it.I’m so interested in the character of Samson, who is, at times, portrayed as quite monstrous, and at other times just seems like a regular kid trying to process the world. Did you want the reader to feel afraid of him?I kind of wanted it to be a mix of both, to illustrate the very real terror of parenthood. You know, “Is he normal? Is he not?” I really wanted him to be seen from the viewpoint of Sammie—who is quite often wrapped up in her own perception of what’s going on—as a rival who she’s in a power struggle with, which is an insane way to think of like a child. If you’re in Sammie’s head, though, the ways he’s choosing to act could be extremely menacing. I really just wanted people to read about a gay mom being a messy fuckup, because that’s relatable to so many parents. Like, maybe your mom, who happens to be gay, is also just kind of not the greatest mom all the time. Maybe she’s kind of self-involved, and maybe she has other interests that come before yours. Also, maybe everybody in this household refuses to communicate in a way that just can’t be sustained; it’s going to reach a boiling point.This is a very specific question, but I’m so curious about the moment in which Sammie is out at a lesbian bar, drunk and seeking connection, and ends up violating another queer person’s boundaries. Did you plan for that moment to hit as hard as it did?Oh, yes. I feel very serious about that. We so often miss the mark in talking about boundaries and spaces and queer community, because there’s this idea of, “Okay, we’re in a queer space, so it’s essentially a safe space.” And there just aren’t enough conversations about what it looks like when people violate that. I know that I myself, as a queer person, and pretty much every other queer person I know—everybody’s had some kind of instance of, “This was kind of iffy, I feel like this wasn’t right, and I don’t have the language to talk about it.” I really wanted there to be a space where Sammie does that, because I was giving a viewpoint from somebody who thinks one thing, right? Like, she’s thinking, I just want care, and I want someone to acknowledge me. The reality of that, though, is that you’re not thinking about anybody else, and you’re being completely violating. I wanted to pose the question of, how do we have like a conversation about that kind of moment? Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Vist our store at: https://grootshirt.com This product belong to hung3 February Girl The Soul Of A Mermaid The Fire Of A Lioness The Heart Of Hippie The Mouth Of A Sailor Vintage T Shirt This is our best seller for a reason. Relaxed, tailored and ultra-comfortable, you’ll love the way you look in this durable, reliable classic 100% pre-shrunk cotton (heather gray color is 90% cotton/10% polyester, light heather gray is 98% cotton/2% polyester, heather black is 50% cotton/50% polyester) | Fabric Weight: 5.0 oz (mid-weight) Tip: Buying 2 products or more at the same time will save you quite a lot on shipping fees. You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: https://grootshirt.com/product/horses-my-plan-for-today-t-shirt/ When I first met the rising poet Rosie Stockton two summers ago, they began to make me rethink the entire idea of performing gender. Stockton lives within the blurred edges of femininity and masculinity — all tenderness and swagger, acrylic nails and binders, bright-pink mesh and baggy pants. Their anarchic approach to “trolling the gender categories” would help inspire my own free-sliding on the gender spectrum, a way of playfully matching my lack of allegiance to any one gender to how I dressed and behaved.Stockton, who is from New Mexico, is releasing their debut book, Permanent Volta, about gender, sexuality, and love this week. It is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses. The poems are exceedingly relevant to our uneasy time: about hating work and being broke, but also about being in love, and needing sex, luxury, and care.Stockton’s book places them within a scene of young and provocative poets like Rachel Rabbit White (a Stockton fan), Ariana Reines, and Precious Okoyomon who are using poetry to investigate the pleasures and perils of sex, work, and power. Stockton began the book with the intention of writing about labor and revolt, but ended up writing about queer love, friendship, and desire as they realized that relationships are the antidote to the exploitative nature of work.“Capitalism convinces us that we’re individuals, that we’re isolated, that we’re separate from one another, and that personal responsibility is the ultimate good life,” Stockton says. “Love is something that inherently is a threat to that myth of individualism.” One of their poems asks, “What if we kissed/in an Amazon locker,” an intimacy in a world of alienation and depressed wages.Stockton and I spoke this spring, under a pomegranate tree in the backyard of their home in Los Angeles, about love and work. Stockton’s platinum blonde hair was pulled back, and they were wearing a white tank top, denim jacket, black pants — and a tiny string of pearls.You write about the conflict of love and the way capitalism wants us to experience love.Love can be playful and experimental, healing and activating. It can offer possibilities for growth, reflection, and breaking out of lonely modes of being. Capitalism regulates our experience of romantic love into the couple form envisioned by heteropatriarchy, because this is the form of social life most hospitable to capitalist accumulation. The state tries to control our experience of love through laws against deviant modes of sexuality and gender, in order to make us fit into capitalism’s needs. But I believe a politics of care and queer love is in excess of this.How did you get from writing about work to love?I was thinking about conversations around the politics of reproductive labor. There is a slogan that came from the Italian Marxist feminism’s “Wages for Housework” movement: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.’ There are also traditions of thought articulated by Black Marxist feminists that argue against the wage. Like, we don’t want to turn care and love into labor: what else is possible? In one poem I write: “Can we love with inadequate politics?” I wrote poems to people I care for: friends, lovers, and those who are both. I wanted to fuck with the poetic forms associated with romantic love (like the sonnet!) to actually experience the love that animates my life.So what’s your take? Should all care be paid for?Domestic labor and care work are exploited by racial capitalism, and have been a historically difficult sector to organize. For those doing this kind of labor, of course it has to be paid, and all workers need labor protections. That said, the wage isn’t the ultimate demand that I have around compensating reproductive labor, or practices of care and love. In this book I imagined refusing the wage as the path toward love and liberation. Leftist thinkers like Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, and Rosa Luxemburg are influential to me.The book is simmering with radicalness. What are some of the politics that inform your work?These poems are personal, but informed by politics that demand the abolition of police and prisons and the decriminalization of sex work. I’m interested in the intersection of labor organizing and abolitionist mutual aid projects that call for better working conditions while dreaming of autonomous systems that get everyone’s basic needs met.I study radical traditions and organize with groups that center those most vulnerable to state violence and exploitation, and often this means people who are working in criminalized or unvalued economies, or those who can’t or refuse to enter the traditional workforce. Many in the decriminalization movement fight to demand the basic fact that sex work is work, but also emphasize how being recognized as a “worker” is a false promise of safety. This shows up in my poems: “I didn’t mean to ask for money/I meant to ask for a different set of relations”! I’m interested in politics that demand the abolition of work, the end of the racist and transphobic carceral state, and a reorganization of care, healing, and social life. These politics refuse to believe recognition from the state is the only path. I use the sonnet because I want to understand how it regulates love and creativity. Take it back as a poetic means of production of romantic love! Do you see yourself as part of a specific scene of poets working through these themes?Absolutely. I feel in community with poets who allow politics to enter their poems — leftist queer politics and the politics of pleasure and abundance. Poetry as a form is so resonant with queerness. There’s room for play, puns, winks, kink, breaking the rules. These are tropes that I associate with queer community and desire. At the charter school in Harlem where Darlene Okpo first worked full-time as an English teacher, students had to get through 1.5 million words by the end of the year in order to pass. Without the word count, they were required to attend summer school. Formerly a teacher of after-school art programs, entrepreneurship, and theatre, Okpo has been educating since 2009. In a city as culturally rich as New York (where Okpo has lived in all five boroughs, including the honorary sixth, New Jersey) there are stories everywhere—on plaques, statues, park maps, and in bulk at the city’s many libraries and bookstores. But Okpo understands that students—and all people—need to be introduced to the right stories in order to find the pleasure of a great book.“I had this one particular student that had an A+ in reading, but her word count was low. One day I asked her why she wasn’t reading and she told me that the books that they have at the school library were dull, and that she wanted to read more books that focused on African-American characters,” Okpo recalls. An avid reader from an early age, Okpo already had some young adult books in her personal library. The next day, she brought her student Tiffany D. Jackson’s book called Monday’s Not Coming. “She would read it during class and during lunch. In a matter of three days, she completed the book and requested another book to read. She was also a popular student and my other students would see her reading, and come to me for books.” By doing this, students with low word counts caught up within weeks. “Everybody is a reader, you just have to find the right book that speaks to your soul.”At the start of May, Okpo opened a bookstore, Adanne, in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, which offers the same warm approach to learning that Okpo offers the students in her classrooms. It’s named after Okpo’s mother, Pauline, whose nickname is Adanne, meaning “she is her mother’s daughter” in Igbo. “As I was creating the aesthetic for the store, my friends and family would visit and we would always end up talking about our current issues. We talk about education, real estate, financial literacy, and many other topics. The books I chose for the store inspired these conversations.” The store is a celebration of African-American culture, with walls adorned by album covers such as “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” and shelves stocked with “Defend Black Womanhood” t-shirts.It’s not the first time Okpo’s work, and her sense of storytelling, has been inspired by her family. In 2009, when Okpo was 22, she and her sister Lizzie founded the brand William Okpo, named after their father, who “irons his clothes every day—even when he’s cutting the lawn, he’s fashionable.” Both parents are immigrants from Nigeria who work for the city of New York. “Fashion tells a story that we’re able to visually read—it’s that designer’s story,” Okpo notes. “When it comes to written storytelling, you’re reading the story and also looking at the identity of the author.”Adanne will be hosting weekly and monthly workshops focused on catalyzing change. The first one, taking place on June 5th, will be a discussion of issues concerning education during the pandemic. “I feel that the government didn’t do a great job in terms of taking care of our students. Now it’s time to bring that to the forefront,” Okpo says.Okpo is currently building out Adanne’s website, but for now, for those who can’t visit in person, she offers book recommendations to readers of varying ages and interests:My Feet are Laughing, by Lissette NormanNana Akua Goes to School, by Tricia Elam WalkerI Promise, by Lebron JamesA Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart, by Zetta ElliotLook What Brown Can do, by T. Marie HarrisAmerican Street, by Ibi ZoboiMonday’s Not Coming, by Tiffany D. JacksonJuliet Takes a Breath, by Gabby RiveriaFlyy Girl, by Omar TyreeThe Coldest Winter Ever, by Sista SouljahConcrete Rose, by Angie ThomasPowernomics, by Dr. Claude AnersonThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley and Malcolm XThe Kidnapping Club, by Jonathan Daniel WellsAn African American and LatinX History of the United States, by Paul OrtizThe Mis- Education of the Negro, by Carter G WoodsonAn Indigenous People’s History of The United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizHood Feminism, by Mikki KendallAin’t I A Woman, by Bell HooksWhen Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, by Joan MorganWomen Race Class, by Angela Davis For most of literary history, LGBTQ+ parents had to content themselves with being mostly absent from the mainstream canon. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a novel prior to the aughts that featured a queer family at its core. More recently, writers like Maggie Nelson, Harlyn Aizley, and Jia Qing Wilson-Yang have begun to introduce queer familial narratives that aren’t remotely trying to fit the white-picket-fence mold. In With Teeth, a new novel from Mostly Dead Things author Kristen Arnett, the specific intricacies of queer-family making are laid bare for all to see; Arnett is wholly unafraid to spotlight queer parents screwing up, fighting, or even—at times—regretting the worlds they’ve built with one another.The novel’s protagonist, Sammie, is a dissatisfied young wife and mother living in Central Florida, and there are shades of the gothic in her anxious, often alcohol-fueled attempts to connect with her wife, Monika, and son, Samson. Sammie’s marital loneliness and fear over Samson’s development feel three-dimensional, leaving the reader with a portrait of a woman who is, at once, wholly ordinary and not quite like any literary mother who came before. Vogue spoke to Arnett about the release of With Teeth, the constant “viewership” that so often accompanies queer parenting, and the importance of enthusiastic consent in LGBTQ+ spaces. Read the full interview below.How long were you working on the book?Well, Riverhead bought it at auction off of about 70 pages, which…bless their hearts. I was on the phone with Cal, my editor, talking about this book, and he was like, “What do you see the plot being?” and I was like, “Oh, no.” Then I started working on the rest of it, really hard-core, just digging into it from 2018 into 2019 and moving into 2020. I was like, it’s a stressful book, so you’d think it would have been a stressful process.Did you find it stressful to write?Yeah, it was stressful, but I sent in my first draft around February 1, so right before the pandemic hit. I feel very lucky in retrospect, just because if I’d written it later, it might be a completely different book. If I had to send it in after the pandemic, it would have just been, “Well, I couldn’t write, so I just stuck a bunch of Laffy Taffy wrappers together. Hopefully that works for you.” [Laughs]You’re so good at making dark, almost macabre topics feel light and compulsively readable. What was it like trying to strike that balance?Personality-wise, comedy comes to mind for me about basically everything. I come from a background of my family being very conservative and evangelical—a very repressive kind of household—and as a very closeted lesbian in that space, I feel like my coming-out process was just trying to develop a lot of humor about things. It also feels natural to me to lean into the stuff that feels uncomfortable, because that’s what feels the most messily human. People are just, like, weird, and super fucked-up. Everybody lives in a very specific kind of gray area, where it’s like, sometimes you do something, right? And a lot of times you’re doing things wrong, but what does that look like? Especially in context with other people, and especially inside of a household…I think it’s way more fun to deal with people being fucked-up, especially with family fiction where everyone is a bit of an unreliable narrator.There are a few places in the book where Sammie talks about a heavier burden being placed on queer parents. Is that something you’ve noticed in the world around you? I’m specifically thinking a lot about Florida, which is very specifically a red, conservative state. There’s plenty of queer people in Florida—specifically Central Florida—but not really queer spaces. So what does that look like when there’s like a couple of queer bars, maybe one club, and then you’re having a kid? What does that look like when conservative people already want to watch what you’re doing and prejudge you based on the idea that what you’re doing is going to fail? Then the opposite side of that coin is, “Please don’t fuck this up, because I’m a queer person, and I want this for myself.” You’re constantly under some kind of viewership, which I imagine would be really stressful. And then add on top of that, for Sammie: What if maybe you’re just kind of not the best mom, or feel like you’re kind of shitty at it? It becomes very claustrophobic, and your world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.It’s true; even in Brooklyn, I think queer spaces that aren’t nightlife-oriented are hard to come by.Yeah! I mean, my girlfriend and I moved to Miami in October, and we just haven’t met anyone or done anything. Luckily, we really like each other. It just is this feeling of isolation; I can’t imagine what it would be like to be like a queer parent in that situation. Even for me, I miss gay people, and I’d like to come together in a public space. I sincerely miss that very badly.There’s such a sense of foreboding in With Teeth, even when things are technically going okay for its characters. Did you have any other books that served as reference points for that feeling?I definitely am a person who likes horror and suspense and things like that; there’s a book called Baby Teeth that came out a few years ago that I read, and it’s not necessarily about a queer family, but it is about a mom who has medical issues and a bunch of things going on. I am, like, a huge fan of that stuff, and I grew up secretly reading Stephen King. I love like stuff like The Shining, and anything about people who who are really wanting to do their best as parents but ultimately, quite often, failing in ways that are horrific and exemplified by actual monsters. Sometimes we’re our own monsters, inside of a household. I also read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, just for baby terminology—I think it’s deeply funny, because it’s about how we examine the body and how it expands. It tells you, “Now your child is the size of a burrito, or a bag of chips, or a koala.” The question of how a child fits inside a human stomach was very interesting to me.There are so many cool time jumps in With Teeth, and most of Sammie and Monika’s happy memories only occur in flashbacks. Was that intentional?Yes. I’m always interested in nostalgia and the ways that it sabotages us, and I think that that is especially true in relationships. In the beginning, when Samson is in elementary school, Sammie’s very frustrated with her wife, but later on in the book, when he’s in high school and Sammie’s separating from her wife, she has these memories of what it was like with Monika that aren’t necessarily accurate. I think that that’s a deeply human—that we try to compartmentalize the past, because maybe it’s the only way we feel like we can deal with it.I’m so interested in the character of Samson, who is, at times, portrayed as quite monstrous, and at other times just seems like a regular kid trying to process the world. Did you want the reader to feel afraid of him?I kind of wanted it to be a mix of both, to illustrate the very real terror of parenthood. You know, “Is he normal? Is he not?” I really wanted him to be seen from the viewpoint of Sammie—who is quite often wrapped up in her own perception of what’s going on—as a rival who she’s in a power struggle with, which is an insane way to think of like a child. If you’re in Sammie’s head, though, the ways he’s choosing to act could be extremely menacing. I really just wanted people to read about a gay mom being a messy fuckup, because that’s relatable to so many parents. Like, maybe your mom, who happens to be gay, is also just kind of not the greatest mom all the time. Maybe she’s kind of self-involved, and maybe she has other interests that come before yours. Also, maybe everybody in this household refuses to communicate in a way that just can’t be sustained; it’s going to reach a boiling point.This is a very specific question, but I’m so curious about the moment in which Sammie is out at a lesbian bar, drunk and seeking connection, and ends up violating another queer person’s boundaries. Did you plan for that moment to hit as hard as it did?Oh, yes. I feel very serious about that. We so often miss the mark in talking about boundaries and spaces and queer community, because there’s this idea of, “Okay, we’re in a queer space, so it’s essentially a safe space.” And there just aren’t enough conversations about what it looks like when people violate that. I know that I myself, as a queer person, and pretty much every other queer person I know—everybody’s had some kind of instance of, “This was kind of iffy, I feel like this wasn’t right, and I don’t have the language to talk about it.” I really wanted there to be a space where Sammie does that, because I was giving a viewpoint from somebody who thinks one thing, right? Like, she’s thinking, I just want care, and I want someone to acknowledge me. The reality of that, though, is that you’re not thinking about anybody else, and you’re being completely violating. I wanted to pose the question of, how do we have like a conversation about that kind of moment? Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Vist our store at: https://grootshirt.com This product belong to hung3
This is our best seller for a reason. Relaxed, tailored and ultra-comfortable, you’ll love the way you look in this durable, reliable classic 100% pre-shrunk cotton (heather gray color is 90% cotton/10% polyester, light heather gray is 98% cotton/2% polyester, heather black is 50% cotton/50% polyester) | Fabric Weight: 5.0 oz (mid-weight) Tip: Buying 2 products or more at the same time will save you quite a lot on shipping fees. You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: https://grootshirt.com/product/horses-my-plan-for-today-t-shirt/ When I first met the rising poet Rosie Stockton two summers ago, they began to make me rethink the entire idea of performing gender. Stockton lives within the blurred edges of femininity and masculinity — all tenderness and swagger, acrylic nails and binders, bright-pink mesh and baggy pants. Their anarchic approach to “trolling the gender categories” would help inspire my own free-sliding on the gender spectrum, a way of playfully matching my lack of allegiance to any one gender to how I dressed and behaved.Stockton, who is from New Mexico, is releasing their debut book, Permanent Volta, about gender, sexuality, and love this week. It is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses. The poems are exceedingly relevant to our uneasy time: about hating work and being broke, but also about being in love, and needing sex, luxury, and care.Stockton’s book places them within a scene of young and provocative poets like Rachel Rabbit White (a Stockton fan), Ariana Reines, and Precious Okoyomon who are using poetry to investigate the pleasures and perils of sex, work, and power. Stockton began the book with the intention of writing about labor and revolt, but ended up writing about queer love, friendship, and desire as they realized that relationships are the antidote to the exploitative nature of work.“Capitalism convinces us that we’re individuals, that we’re isolated, that we’re separate from one another, and that personal responsibility is the ultimate good life,” Stockton says. “Love is something that inherently is a threat to that myth of individualism.” One of their poems asks, “What if we kissed/in an Amazon locker,” an intimacy in a world of alienation and depressed wages.Stockton and I spoke this spring, under a pomegranate tree in the backyard of their home in Los Angeles, about love and work. Stockton’s platinum blonde hair was pulled back, and they were wearing a white tank top, denim jacket, black pants — and a tiny string of pearls.You write about the conflict of love and the way capitalism wants us to experience love.Love can be playful and experimental, healing and activating. It can offer possibilities for growth, reflection, and breaking out of lonely modes of being. Capitalism regulates our experience of romantic love into the couple form envisioned by heteropatriarchy, because this is the form of social life most hospitable to capitalist accumulation. The state tries to control our experience of love through laws against deviant modes of sexuality and gender, in order to make us fit into capitalism’s needs. But I believe a politics of care and queer love is in excess of this.How did you get from writing about work to love?I was thinking about conversations around the politics of reproductive labor. There is a slogan that came from the Italian Marxist feminism’s “Wages for Housework” movement: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.’ There are also traditions of thought articulated by Black Marxist feminists that argue against the wage. Like, we don’t want to turn care and love into labor: what else is possible? In one poem I write: “Can we love with inadequate politics?” I wrote poems to people I care for: friends, lovers, and those who are both. I wanted to fuck with the poetic forms associated with romantic love (like the sonnet!) to actually experience the love that animates my life.So what’s your take? Should all care be paid for?Domestic labor and care work are exploited by racial capitalism, and have been a historically difficult sector to organize. For those doing this kind of labor, of course it has to be paid, and all workers need labor protections. That said, the wage isn’t the ultimate demand that I have around compensating reproductive labor, or practices of care and love. In this book I imagined refusing the wage as the path toward love and liberation. Leftist thinkers like Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, and Rosa Luxemburg are influential to me.The book is simmering with radicalness. What are some of the politics that inform your work?These poems are personal, but informed by politics that demand the abolition of police and prisons and the decriminalization of sex work. I’m interested in the intersection of labor organizing and abolitionist mutual aid projects that call for better working conditions while dreaming of autonomous systems that get everyone’s basic needs met.I study radical traditions and organize with groups that center those most vulnerable to state violence and exploitation, and often this means people who are working in criminalized or unvalued economies, or those who can’t or refuse to enter the traditional workforce. Many in the decriminalization movement fight to demand the basic fact that sex work is work, but also emphasize how being recognized as a “worker” is a false promise of safety. This shows up in my poems: “I didn’t mean to ask for money/I meant to ask for a different set of relations”! I’m interested in politics that demand the abolition of work, the end of the racist and transphobic carceral state, and a reorganization of care, healing, and social life. These politics refuse to believe recognition from the state is the only path. I use the sonnet because I want to understand how it regulates love and creativity. Take it back as a poetic means of production of romantic love! Do you see yourself as part of a specific scene of poets working through these themes?Absolutely. I feel in community with poets who allow politics to enter their poems — leftist queer politics and the politics of pleasure and abundance. Poetry as a form is so resonant with queerness. There’s room for play, puns, winks, kink, breaking the rules. These are tropes that I associate with queer community and desire. At the charter school in Harlem where Darlene Okpo first worked full-time as an English teacher, students had to get through 1.5 million words by the end of the year in order to pass. Without the word count, they were required to attend summer school. Formerly a teacher of after-school art programs, entrepreneurship, and theatre, Okpo has been educating since 2009. In a city as culturally rich as New York (where Okpo has lived in all five boroughs, including the honorary sixth, New Jersey) there are stories everywhere—on plaques, statues, park maps, and in bulk at the city’s many libraries and bookstores. But Okpo understands that students—and all people—need to be introduced to the right stories in order to find the pleasure of a great book.“I had this one particular student that had an A+ in reading, but her word count was low. One day I asked her why she wasn’t reading and she told me that the books that they have at the school library were dull, and that she wanted to read more books that focused on African-American characters,” Okpo recalls. An avid reader from an early age, Okpo already had some young adult books in her personal library. The next day, she brought her student Tiffany D. Jackson’s book called Monday’s Not Coming. “She would read it during class and during lunch. In a matter of three days, she completed the book and requested another book to read. She was also a popular student and my other students would see her reading, and come to me for books.” By doing this, students with low word counts caught up within weeks. “Everybody is a reader, you just have to find the right book that speaks to your soul.”At the start of May, Okpo opened a bookstore, Adanne, in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, which offers the same warm approach to learning that Okpo offers the students in her classrooms. It’s named after Okpo’s mother, Pauline, whose nickname is Adanne, meaning “she is her mother’s daughter” in Igbo. “As I was creating the aesthetic for the store, my friends and family would visit and we would always end up talking about our current issues. We talk about education, real estate, financial literacy, and many other topics. The books I chose for the store inspired these conversations.” The store is a celebration of African-American culture, with walls adorned by album covers such as “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” and shelves stocked with “Defend Black Womanhood” t-shirts.It’s not the first time Okpo’s work, and her sense of storytelling, has been inspired by her family. In 2009, when Okpo was 22, she and her sister Lizzie founded the brand William Okpo, named after their father, who “irons his clothes every day—even when he’s cutting the lawn, he’s fashionable.” Both parents are immigrants from Nigeria who work for the city of New York. “Fashion tells a story that we’re able to visually read—it’s that designer’s story,” Okpo notes. “When it comes to written storytelling, you’re reading the story and also looking at the identity of the author.”Adanne will be hosting weekly and monthly workshops focused on catalyzing change. The first one, taking place on June 5th, will be a discussion of issues concerning education during the pandemic. “I feel that the government didn’t do a great job in terms of taking care of our students. Now it’s time to bring that to the forefront,” Okpo says.Okpo is currently building out Adanne’s website, but for now, for those who can’t visit in person, she offers book recommendations to readers of varying ages and interests:My Feet are Laughing, by Lissette NormanNana Akua Goes to School, by Tricia Elam WalkerI Promise, by Lebron JamesA Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart, by Zetta ElliotLook What Brown Can do, by T. Marie HarrisAmerican Street, by Ibi ZoboiMonday’s Not Coming, by Tiffany D. JacksonJuliet Takes a Breath, by Gabby RiveriaFlyy Girl, by Omar TyreeThe Coldest Winter Ever, by Sista SouljahConcrete Rose, by Angie ThomasPowernomics, by Dr. Claude AnersonThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley and Malcolm XThe Kidnapping Club, by Jonathan Daniel WellsAn African American and LatinX History of the United States, by Paul OrtizThe Mis- Education of the Negro, by Carter G WoodsonAn Indigenous People’s History of The United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizHood Feminism, by Mikki KendallAin’t I A Woman, by Bell HooksWhen Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, by Joan MorganWomen Race Class, by Angela Davis For most of literary history, LGBTQ+ parents had to content themselves with being mostly absent from the mainstream canon. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a novel prior to the aughts that featured a queer family at its core. More recently, writers like Maggie Nelson, Harlyn Aizley, and Jia Qing Wilson-Yang have begun to introduce queer familial narratives that aren’t remotely trying to fit the white-picket-fence mold. In With Teeth, a new novel from Mostly Dead Things author Kristen Arnett, the specific intricacies of queer-family making are laid bare for all to see; Arnett is wholly unafraid to spotlight queer parents screwing up, fighting, or even—at times—regretting the worlds they’ve built with one another.The novel’s protagonist, Sammie, is a dissatisfied young wife and mother living in Central Florida, and there are shades of the gothic in her anxious, often alcohol-fueled attempts to connect with her wife, Monika, and son, Samson. Sammie’s marital loneliness and fear over Samson’s development feel three-dimensional, leaving the reader with a portrait of a woman who is, at once, wholly ordinary and not quite like any literary mother who came before. Vogue spoke to Arnett about the release of With Teeth, the constant “viewership” that so often accompanies queer parenting, and the importance of enthusiastic consent in LGBTQ+ spaces. Read the full interview below.How long were you working on the book?Well, Riverhead bought it at auction off of about 70 pages, which…bless their hearts. I was on the phone with Cal, my editor, talking about this book, and he was like, “What do you see the plot being?” and I was like, “Oh, no.” Then I started working on the rest of it, really hard-core, just digging into it from 2018 into 2019 and moving into 2020. I was like, it’s a stressful book, so you’d think it would have been a stressful process.Did you find it stressful to write?Yeah, it was stressful, but I sent in my first draft around February 1, so right before the pandemic hit. I feel very lucky in retrospect, just because if I’d written it later, it might be a completely different book. If I had to send it in after the pandemic, it would have just been, “Well, I couldn’t write, so I just stuck a bunch of Laffy Taffy wrappers together. Hopefully that works for you.” [Laughs]You’re so good at making dark, almost macabre topics feel light and compulsively readable. What was it like trying to strike that balance?Personality-wise, comedy comes to mind for me about basically everything. I come from a background of my family being very conservative and evangelical—a very repressive kind of household—and as a very closeted lesbian in that space, I feel like my coming-out process was just trying to develop a lot of humor about things. It also feels natural to me to lean into the stuff that feels uncomfortable, because that’s what feels the most messily human. People are just, like, weird, and super fucked-up. Everybody lives in a very specific kind of gray area, where it’s like, sometimes you do something, right? And a lot of times you’re doing things wrong, but what does that look like? Especially in context with other people, and especially inside of a household…I think it’s way more fun to deal with people being fucked-up, especially with family fiction where everyone is a bit of an unreliable narrator.There are a few places in the book where Sammie talks about a heavier burden being placed on queer parents. Is that something you’ve noticed in the world around you? I’m specifically thinking a lot about Florida, which is very specifically a red, conservative state. There’s plenty of queer people in Florida—specifically Central Florida—but not really queer spaces. So what does that look like when there’s like a couple of queer bars, maybe one club, and then you’re having a kid? What does that look like when conservative people already want to watch what you’re doing and prejudge you based on the idea that what you’re doing is going to fail? Then the opposite side of that coin is, “Please don’t fuck this up, because I’m a queer person, and I want this for myself.” You’re constantly under some kind of viewership, which I imagine would be really stressful. And then add on top of that, for Sammie: What if maybe you’re just kind of not the best mom, or feel like you’re kind of shitty at it? It becomes very claustrophobic, and your world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.It’s true; even in Brooklyn, I think queer spaces that aren’t nightlife-oriented are hard to come by.Yeah! I mean, my girlfriend and I moved to Miami in October, and we just haven’t met anyone or done anything. Luckily, we really like each other. It just is this feeling of isolation; I can’t imagine what it would be like to be like a queer parent in that situation. Even for me, I miss gay people, and I’d like to come together in a public space. I sincerely miss that very badly.There’s such a sense of foreboding in With Teeth, even when things are technically going okay for its characters. Did you have any other books that served as reference points for that feeling?I definitely am a person who likes horror and suspense and things like that; there’s a book called Baby Teeth that came out a few years ago that I read, and it’s not necessarily about a queer family, but it is about a mom who has medical issues and a bunch of things going on. I am, like, a huge fan of that stuff, and I grew up secretly reading Stephen King. I love like stuff like The Shining, and anything about people who who are really wanting to do their best as parents but ultimately, quite often, failing in ways that are horrific and exemplified by actual monsters. Sometimes we’re our own monsters, inside of a household. I also read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, just for baby terminology—I think it’s deeply funny, because it’s about how we examine the body and how it expands. It tells you, “Now your child is the size of a burrito, or a bag of chips, or a koala.” The question of how a child fits inside a human stomach was very interesting to me.There are so many cool time jumps in With Teeth, and most of Sammie and Monika’s happy memories only occur in flashbacks. Was that intentional?Yes. I’m always interested in nostalgia and the ways that it sabotages us, and I think that that is especially true in relationships. In the beginning, when Samson is in elementary school, Sammie’s very frustrated with her wife, but later on in the book, when he’s in high school and Sammie’s separating from her wife, she has these memories of what it was like with Monika that aren’t necessarily accurate. I think that that’s a deeply human—that we try to compartmentalize the past, because maybe it’s the only way we feel like we can deal with it.I’m so interested in the character of Samson, who is, at times, portrayed as quite monstrous, and at other times just seems like a regular kid trying to process the world. Did you want the reader to feel afraid of him?I kind of wanted it to be a mix of both, to illustrate the very real terror of parenthood. You know, “Is he normal? Is he not?” I really wanted him to be seen from the viewpoint of Sammie—who is quite often wrapped up in her own perception of what’s going on—as a rival who she’s in a power struggle with, which is an insane way to think of like a child. If you’re in Sammie’s head, though, the ways he’s choosing to act could be extremely menacing. I really just wanted people to read about a gay mom being a messy fuckup, because that’s relatable to so many parents. Like, maybe your mom, who happens to be gay, is also just kind of not the greatest mom all the time. Maybe she’s kind of self-involved, and maybe she has other interests that come before yours. Also, maybe everybody in this household refuses to communicate in a way that just can’t be sustained; it’s going to reach a boiling point.This is a very specific question, but I’m so curious about the moment in which Sammie is out at a lesbian bar, drunk and seeking connection, and ends up violating another queer person’s boundaries. Did you plan for that moment to hit as hard as it did?Oh, yes. I feel very serious about that. We so often miss the mark in talking about boundaries and spaces and queer community, because there’s this idea of, “Okay, we’re in a queer space, so it’s essentially a safe space.” And there just aren’t enough conversations about what it looks like when people violate that. I know that I myself, as a queer person, and pretty much every other queer person I know—everybody’s had some kind of instance of, “This was kind of iffy, I feel like this wasn’t right, and I don’t have the language to talk about it.” I really wanted there to be a space where Sammie does that, because I was giving a viewpoint from somebody who thinks one thing, right? Like, she’s thinking, I just want care, and I want someone to acknowledge me. The reality of that, though, is that you’re not thinking about anybody else, and you’re being completely violating. I wanted to pose the question of, how do we have like a conversation about that kind of moment? Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Vist our store at: https://grootshirt.com This product belong to hung3 February Girl The Soul Of A Mermaid The Fire Of A Lioness The Heart Of Hippie The Mouth Of A Sailor Vintage T Shirt This is our best seller for a reason. Relaxed, tailored and ultra-comfortable, you’ll love the way you look in this durable, reliable classic 100% pre-shrunk cotton (heather gray color is 90% cotton/10% polyester, light heather gray is 98% cotton/2% polyester, heather black is 50% cotton/50% polyester) | Fabric Weight: 5.0 oz (mid-weight) Tip: Buying 2 products or more at the same time will save you quite a lot on shipping fees. You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: https://grootshirt.com/product/horses-my-plan-for-today-t-shirt/ When I first met the rising poet Rosie Stockton two summers ago, they began to make me rethink the entire idea of performing gender. Stockton lives within the blurred edges of femininity and masculinity — all tenderness and swagger, acrylic nails and binders, bright-pink mesh and baggy pants. Their anarchic approach to “trolling the gender categories” would help inspire my own free-sliding on the gender spectrum, a way of playfully matching my lack of allegiance to any one gender to how I dressed and behaved.Stockton, who is from New Mexico, is releasing their debut book, Permanent Volta, about gender, sexuality, and love this week. It is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses. The poems are exceedingly relevant to our uneasy time: about hating work and being broke, but also about being in love, and needing sex, luxury, and care.Stockton’s book places them within a scene of young and provocative poets like Rachel Rabbit White (a Stockton fan), Ariana Reines, and Precious Okoyomon who are using poetry to investigate the pleasures and perils of sex, work, and power. Stockton began the book with the intention of writing about labor and revolt, but ended up writing about queer love, friendship, and desire as they realized that relationships are the antidote to the exploitative nature of work.“Capitalism convinces us that we’re individuals, that we’re isolated, that we’re separate from one another, and that personal responsibility is the ultimate good life,” Stockton says. “Love is something that inherently is a threat to that myth of individualism.” One of their poems asks, “What if we kissed/in an Amazon locker,” an intimacy in a world of alienation and depressed wages.Stockton and I spoke this spring, under a pomegranate tree in the backyard of their home in Los Angeles, about love and work. Stockton’s platinum blonde hair was pulled back, and they were wearing a white tank top, denim jacket, black pants — and a tiny string of pearls.You write about the conflict of love and the way capitalism wants us to experience love.Love can be playful and experimental, healing and activating. It can offer possibilities for growth, reflection, and breaking out of lonely modes of being. Capitalism regulates our experience of romantic love into the couple form envisioned by heteropatriarchy, because this is the form of social life most hospitable to capitalist accumulation. The state tries to control our experience of love through laws against deviant modes of sexuality and gender, in order to make us fit into capitalism’s needs. But I believe a politics of care and queer love is in excess of this.How did you get from writing about work to love?I was thinking about conversations around the politics of reproductive labor. There is a slogan that came from the Italian Marxist feminism’s “Wages for Housework” movement: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.’ There are also traditions of thought articulated by Black Marxist feminists that argue against the wage. Like, we don’t want to turn care and love into labor: what else is possible? In one poem I write: “Can we love with inadequate politics?” I wrote poems to people I care for: friends, lovers, and those who are both. I wanted to fuck with the poetic forms associated with romantic love (like the sonnet!) to actually experience the love that animates my life.So what’s your take? Should all care be paid for?Domestic labor and care work are exploited by racial capitalism, and have been a historically difficult sector to organize. For those doing this kind of labor, of course it has to be paid, and all workers need labor protections. That said, the wage isn’t the ultimate demand that I have around compensating reproductive labor, or practices of care and love. In this book I imagined refusing the wage as the path toward love and liberation. Leftist thinkers like Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, and Rosa Luxemburg are influential to me.The book is simmering with radicalness. What are some of the politics that inform your work?These poems are personal, but informed by politics that demand the abolition of police and prisons and the decriminalization of sex work. I’m interested in the intersection of labor organizing and abolitionist mutual aid projects that call for better working conditions while dreaming of autonomous systems that get everyone’s basic needs met.I study radical traditions and organize with groups that center those most vulnerable to state violence and exploitation, and often this means people who are working in criminalized or unvalued economies, or those who can’t or refuse to enter the traditional workforce. Many in the decriminalization movement fight to demand the basic fact that sex work is work, but also emphasize how being recognized as a “worker” is a false promise of safety. This shows up in my poems: “I didn’t mean to ask for money/I meant to ask for a different set of relations”! I’m interested in politics that demand the abolition of work, the end of the racist and transphobic carceral state, and a reorganization of care, healing, and social life. These politics refuse to believe recognition from the state is the only path. I use the sonnet because I want to understand how it regulates love and creativity. Take it back as a poetic means of production of romantic love! Do you see yourself as part of a specific scene of poets working through these themes?Absolutely. I feel in community with poets who allow politics to enter their poems — leftist queer politics and the politics of pleasure and abundance. Poetry as a form is so resonant with queerness. There’s room for play, puns, winks, kink, breaking the rules. These are tropes that I associate with queer community and desire. At the charter school in Harlem where Darlene Okpo first worked full-time as an English teacher, students had to get through 1.5 million words by the end of the year in order to pass. Without the word count, they were required to attend summer school. Formerly a teacher of after-school art programs, entrepreneurship, and theatre, Okpo has been educating since 2009. In a city as culturally rich as New York (where Okpo has lived in all five boroughs, including the honorary sixth, New Jersey) there are stories everywhere—on plaques, statues, park maps, and in bulk at the city’s many libraries and bookstores. But Okpo understands that students—and all people—need to be introduced to the right stories in order to find the pleasure of a great book.“I had this one particular student that had an A+ in reading, but her word count was low. One day I asked her why she wasn’t reading and she told me that the books that they have at the school library were dull, and that she wanted to read more books that focused on African-American characters,” Okpo recalls. An avid reader from an early age, Okpo already had some young adult books in her personal library. The next day, she brought her student Tiffany D. Jackson’s book called Monday’s Not Coming. “She would read it during class and during lunch. In a matter of three days, she completed the book and requested another book to read. She was also a popular student and my other students would see her reading, and come to me for books.” By doing this, students with low word counts caught up within weeks. “Everybody is a reader, you just have to find the right book that speaks to your soul.”At the start of May, Okpo opened a bookstore, Adanne, in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, which offers the same warm approach to learning that Okpo offers the students in her classrooms. It’s named after Okpo’s mother, Pauline, whose nickname is Adanne, meaning “she is her mother’s daughter” in Igbo. “As I was creating the aesthetic for the store, my friends and family would visit and we would always end up talking about our current issues. We talk about education, real estate, financial literacy, and many other topics. The books I chose for the store inspired these conversations.” The store is a celebration of African-American culture, with walls adorned by album covers such as “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” and shelves stocked with “Defend Black Womanhood” t-shirts.It’s not the first time Okpo’s work, and her sense of storytelling, has been inspired by her family. In 2009, when Okpo was 22, she and her sister Lizzie founded the brand William Okpo, named after their father, who “irons his clothes every day—even when he’s cutting the lawn, he’s fashionable.” Both parents are immigrants from Nigeria who work for the city of New York. “Fashion tells a story that we’re able to visually read—it’s that designer’s story,” Okpo notes. “When it comes to written storytelling, you’re reading the story and also looking at the identity of the author.”Adanne will be hosting weekly and monthly workshops focused on catalyzing change. The first one, taking place on June 5th, will be a discussion of issues concerning education during the pandemic. “I feel that the government didn’t do a great job in terms of taking care of our students. Now it’s time to bring that to the forefront,” Okpo says.Okpo is currently building out Adanne’s website, but for now, for those who can’t visit in person, she offers book recommendations to readers of varying ages and interests:My Feet are Laughing, by Lissette NormanNana Akua Goes to School, by Tricia Elam WalkerI Promise, by Lebron JamesA Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart, by Zetta ElliotLook What Brown Can do, by T. Marie HarrisAmerican Street, by Ibi ZoboiMonday’s Not Coming, by Tiffany D. JacksonJuliet Takes a Breath, by Gabby RiveriaFlyy Girl, by Omar TyreeThe Coldest Winter Ever, by Sista SouljahConcrete Rose, by Angie ThomasPowernomics, by Dr. Claude AnersonThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley and Malcolm XThe Kidnapping Club, by Jonathan Daniel WellsAn African American and LatinX History of the United States, by Paul OrtizThe Mis- Education of the Negro, by Carter G WoodsonAn Indigenous People’s History of The United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizHood Feminism, by Mikki KendallAin’t I A Woman, by Bell HooksWhen Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, by Joan MorganWomen Race Class, by Angela Davis For most of literary history, LGBTQ+ parents had to content themselves with being mostly absent from the mainstream canon. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a novel prior to the aughts that featured a queer family at its core. More recently, writers like Maggie Nelson, Harlyn Aizley, and Jia Qing Wilson-Yang have begun to introduce queer familial narratives that aren’t remotely trying to fit the white-picket-fence mold. In With Teeth, a new novel from Mostly Dead Things author Kristen Arnett, the specific intricacies of queer-family making are laid bare for all to see; Arnett is wholly unafraid to spotlight queer parents screwing up, fighting, or even—at times—regretting the worlds they’ve built with one another.The novel’s protagonist, Sammie, is a dissatisfied young wife and mother living in Central Florida, and there are shades of the gothic in her anxious, often alcohol-fueled attempts to connect with her wife, Monika, and son, Samson. Sammie’s marital loneliness and fear over Samson’s development feel three-dimensional, leaving the reader with a portrait of a woman who is, at once, wholly ordinary and not quite like any literary mother who came before. Vogue spoke to Arnett about the release of With Teeth, the constant “viewership” that so often accompanies queer parenting, and the importance of enthusiastic consent in LGBTQ+ spaces. Read the full interview below.How long were you working on the book?Well, Riverhead bought it at auction off of about 70 pages, which…bless their hearts. I was on the phone with Cal, my editor, talking about this book, and he was like, “What do you see the plot being?” and I was like, “Oh, no.” Then I started working on the rest of it, really hard-core, just digging into it from 2018 into 2019 and moving into 2020. I was like, it’s a stressful book, so you’d think it would have been a stressful process.Did you find it stressful to write?Yeah, it was stressful, but I sent in my first draft around February 1, so right before the pandemic hit. I feel very lucky in retrospect, just because if I’d written it later, it might be a completely different book. If I had to send it in after the pandemic, it would have just been, “Well, I couldn’t write, so I just stuck a bunch of Laffy Taffy wrappers together. Hopefully that works for you.” [Laughs]You’re so good at making dark, almost macabre topics feel light and compulsively readable. What was it like trying to strike that balance?Personality-wise, comedy comes to mind for me about basically everything. I come from a background of my family being very conservative and evangelical—a very repressive kind of household—and as a very closeted lesbian in that space, I feel like my coming-out process was just trying to develop a lot of humor about things. It also feels natural to me to lean into the stuff that feels uncomfortable, because that’s what feels the most messily human. People are just, like, weird, and super fucked-up. Everybody lives in a very specific kind of gray area, where it’s like, sometimes you do something, right? And a lot of times you’re doing things wrong, but what does that look like? Especially in context with other people, and especially inside of a household…I think it’s way more fun to deal with people being fucked-up, especially with family fiction where everyone is a bit of an unreliable narrator.There are a few places in the book where Sammie talks about a heavier burden being placed on queer parents. Is that something you’ve noticed in the world around you? I’m specifically thinking a lot about Florida, which is very specifically a red, conservative state. There’s plenty of queer people in Florida—specifically Central Florida—but not really queer spaces. So what does that look like when there’s like a couple of queer bars, maybe one club, and then you’re having a kid? What does that look like when conservative people already want to watch what you’re doing and prejudge you based on the idea that what you’re doing is going to fail? Then the opposite side of that coin is, “Please don’t fuck this up, because I’m a queer person, and I want this for myself.” You’re constantly under some kind of viewership, which I imagine would be really stressful. And then add on top of that, for Sammie: What if maybe you’re just kind of not the best mom, or feel like you’re kind of shitty at it? It becomes very claustrophobic, and your world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.It’s true; even in Brooklyn, I think queer spaces that aren’t nightlife-oriented are hard to come by.Yeah! I mean, my girlfriend and I moved to Miami in October, and we just haven’t met anyone or done anything. Luckily, we really like each other. It just is this feeling of isolation; I can’t imagine what it would be like to be like a queer parent in that situation. Even for me, I miss gay people, and I’d like to come together in a public space. I sincerely miss that very badly.There’s such a sense of foreboding in With Teeth, even when things are technically going okay for its characters. Did you have any other books that served as reference points for that feeling?I definitely am a person who likes horror and suspense and things like that; there’s a book called Baby Teeth that came out a few years ago that I read, and it’s not necessarily about a queer family, but it is about a mom who has medical issues and a bunch of things going on. I am, like, a huge fan of that stuff, and I grew up secretly reading Stephen King. I love like stuff like The Shining, and anything about people who who are really wanting to do their best as parents but ultimately, quite often, failing in ways that are horrific and exemplified by actual monsters. Sometimes we’re our own monsters, inside of a household. I also read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, just for baby terminology—I think it’s deeply funny, because it’s about how we examine the body and how it expands. It tells you, “Now your child is the size of a burrito, or a bag of chips, or a koala.” The question of how a child fits inside a human stomach was very interesting to me.There are so many cool time jumps in With Teeth, and most of Sammie and Monika’s happy memories only occur in flashbacks. Was that intentional?Yes. I’m always interested in nostalgia and the ways that it sabotages us, and I think that that is especially true in relationships. In the beginning, when Samson is in elementary school, Sammie’s very frustrated with her wife, but later on in the book, when he’s in high school and Sammie’s separating from her wife, she has these memories of what it was like with Monika that aren’t necessarily accurate. I think that that’s a deeply human—that we try to compartmentalize the past, because maybe it’s the only way we feel like we can deal with it.I’m so interested in the character of Samson, who is, at times, portrayed as quite monstrous, and at other times just seems like a regular kid trying to process the world. Did you want the reader to feel afraid of him?I kind of wanted it to be a mix of both, to illustrate the very real terror of parenthood. You know, “Is he normal? Is he not?” I really wanted him to be seen from the viewpoint of Sammie—who is quite often wrapped up in her own perception of what’s going on—as a rival who she’s in a power struggle with, which is an insane way to think of like a child. If you’re in Sammie’s head, though, the ways he’s choosing to act could be extremely menacing. I really just wanted people to read about a gay mom being a messy fuckup, because that’s relatable to so many parents. Like, maybe your mom, who happens to be gay, is also just kind of not the greatest mom all the time. Maybe she’s kind of self-involved, and maybe she has other interests that come before yours. Also, maybe everybody in this household refuses to communicate in a way that just can’t be sustained; it’s going to reach a boiling point.This is a very specific question, but I’m so curious about the moment in which Sammie is out at a lesbian bar, drunk and seeking connection, and ends up violating another queer person’s boundaries. Did you plan for that moment to hit as hard as it did?Oh, yes. I feel very serious about that. We so often miss the mark in talking about boundaries and spaces and queer community, because there’s this idea of, “Okay, we’re in a queer space, so it’s essentially a safe space.” And there just aren’t enough conversations about what it looks like when people violate that. I know that I myself, as a queer person, and pretty much every other queer person I know—everybody’s had some kind of instance of, “This was kind of iffy, I feel like this wasn’t right, and I don’t have the language to talk about it.” I really wanted there to be a space where Sammie does that, because I was giving a viewpoint from somebody who thinks one thing, right? Like, she’s thinking, I just want care, and I want someone to acknowledge me. The reality of that, though, is that you’re not thinking about anybody else, and you’re being completely violating. I wanted to pose the question of, how do we have like a conversation about that kind of moment? Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Vist our store at: https://grootshirt.com This product belong to hung3
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