“I feel that in a society where there is institutionalized oppression, the thing is to catch government and business in the grass—actually humping, you know. Forming a picket line or organizing a demonstration is not going to change the whole society, but there are cases in which it’s the sort of thing one ought to do. Every so often one just has to put one’s bucket down where one is…
“ ‘Revolutionary’ doesn’t always mean that you’re cocking a gun. Revolutionary means that you go precisely the opposite of the way the establishment had you programmed. Those of us who are unimaginative, unskilled, untutored must do routine things as putting our lives on the line. That’s not real revolution. That’s masochism. True revolutionary activity, in my opinion, is that which hurts the establishment without undue damage to the person who does the revolutionary act.” — Florynce “Flo” Kennedy*
*Quote in Richard Avedon, The Sixties, interviews by Doon Arbus (New York: Random House, 1999).
avedonfoundation.org/the-sixties
SHERIE M. RANDOLPH
FLORYNCE “FLO” KENNEDY: THE LIFE OF A BLACK FEMINIST RADICAL
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018 paperback edition).
Tag Archives: Gloria Steinem
DEE REES’ MUDBOUND
Dee Rees’ finely crafted third feature MUDBOUND—the Opening Night selection at this year’s AFI Fest—illustrates the perils of the too-faithful adaptation. In a series of sketches of post-Second World War life in the Mississippi delta—based on the source novel by Hillary Jordan—a group of very compelling characters is left stranded, perhaps casualties of the demands of the two-hour narrative.
Of particular interest is the truncated friendship between veterans Ronsel (Jason Mitchell)—the eldest son of a sharecropper—and Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), the younger brother of the owner of the farm.
Expectations are high for Rees’ recently announced fourth feature, now in pre-production: the Gloria Steinem biopic An Uncivil War, starring MUDBOUND lead Carey Mulligan.
Now playing.
Monica Film Center
1332 2nd Street, Santa Monica.
Laemmle Noho
5240 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood.
10850 Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles.
Also on Netflix.
Above: Dee Rees at the Variety Portrait Studio during the opening night gala screening of Mudbound, AFI Fest, Thursday, November 9, 2017. Image credit: AFI.
Jason Mitchell (left) and Garrett Hedlund in Mudbound. Image credit: Netflix.
GLORIA STEINEM AT FESTIVAL ALBERTINE
Gloria Steinem and Christiane Taubira will open FESTIVAL ALBERTINE 2017 this week with “From the Voting Booth to Your Living Room,” a discussion about the fight for more diverse and inclusive political representation.
GLORIA STEINEM and CHRISTIANE TAUBIRA, Wednesday, November 1, at 7 pm.
ALBERTINE, 972 Fifth Avenue, at 79th Street, New York City.
The festival—curated this year by Steinem and Robin Morgan—will run from Wednesday, November 1, through Sunday, November 5, and speakers and moderators include Roxane Gay, Cecile Richards, Laure Adler, Soraya Chemaly, Nassira El Moaddem, Elaine Welteroth, Lauren Wolfe, Mona Chollet, Camille Morineau, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Marie Darrieussecq, Anne Garréta, Robin Coste Lewis, Wassyla Tamzali, Delphine Horvilleur, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Daisy Khan, Clemence Boulouque, Staceyann Chin, Marie de Cenival, Houda Benyamina, Tania Bruguera, Elizabeth Sackler, Caroline de Haas, Elizabeth Diller, Heidi Steltzer, and Carol Jenkins.
FESTIVAL ALBERTINE 2017 , Wednesday through Sunday, November 2–5.
ALBERTINE, 972 Fifth Avenue, at 79th Street, New York City.
KATE MILLETT
Kate Millett—the author of Sexual Politics and “a defining architect of second-wave feminism”—died in Paris this week while on vacation with her spouse Sophie Keir.*
“Kate was brilliant, deep, and uncompromising. She wrote about the politics of male dominance, of owning women’s bodies as the means of reproduction, and made readers see this as basic to hierarchies of race and class. She was not just talking about equal pay, but about woman-hatred in the highest places and among the most admired intellectuals.” — Gloria Steinem*
See Maggie Doherty, “What Kate Did,” The New Republic, March 23, 2016:
newrepublic.com/article/131897/kate-millett-sexual-politics
*Parul Sehgal and Neil Genzlinger, “Kate Millett, Whose Sexual Politics Became a Bible of Feminism, Dies at 82,” New York Times, September 8, 2017.
Image credits: Doubleday and The Lesbian Tide.