IT HAPPENED

Posted on May 21, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged abortion, abortion ban, alabama, assault, blood, body, body policing, choice, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DW, emotion, featured, Georgia, julius nicholson, killing, legitimate rape, miscarriage, Missouri, norma desmond, personal, pregnancy, rape, shame, sunset boulevard, thick of it, Todd Akin, twilight zone, visceral, wickwire, women's rights.

by Mollie Leveque

CW: miscarriage, bleeding, rape

Hard as I try, it’s difficult to rewatch David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor without smelling blood.

It’s not his fault. But in a bid to restore a sense of normalcy to the fact that I was miscarrying and just realized I’d been pregnant because of the miscarriage itself, I threw on The Doctor for familiar noise. It happened to be Ten’s era.

Close contenders for comfort media were The Thick of It, The Twilight Zone, and Sunset Boulevard. I like seeing Julius Nicholson squirm. Wickwire providing unwitting astronauts with “eternifying fluid” intrigues me. And Norma Desmond is always a good distraction.Continue Reading

UNTITLED

Posted on April 27, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged #italianwomenintranslation, #readwomen, body, creative writing, distance, hope, hopeful, horizon, italian women in translation, journey, lips, Nadia Campana, poem, poetry, read women, verso la mente, women writers.

by Alex Valente

Original Italian by Nadia Campana (1954-1985), untitled from Verso la Mente

more of the living during the journey
many horizons for hours and hours
submerged in distanceContinue Reading

ONE-PARTY STATE

Posted on November 13, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged blood, body, childhood, Christ, creation, creative writing, heaven, humanity, Icarus, innocence, jesus, loneliness, man, mortality, poem, poetry, religion, Virgin Mary, whitewash, writers of colour, writing.

by Julian Canlas

She beheads
herself for independence

Patron saint of privileged beggars
she petrifies old edifices to fix
dying traditions

She bleaches the open fields
and the streets

She ceases to bleed

The body curses its own
mortalityContinue Reading

REVIEW: BURNT ROTIS, WITH LOVE, BY PRERNA BAKSHI

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged #readwomen, artivism, body, burnt rotis with love, cancer, death, dream, empowerment, expectations, feminism, Foxconn, gender roles, gender violence, girlhood, grief, Hindu, India, intersectionality, language, neoliberal, poem, poet, poetry, politics, Prerna Bakshi, review, rhyme, rhythm, Sheryl Sandberg, slurs, South Asia, Urdu, white feminism, womanhood, women, women writers, writing, Xu Lizhi.

by Carmina Masoliver

Prerna Bakshi’s debut collection Burnt rotis, with love was published in 2016 by Le Zaporogue via Lulu.com. Poems featured in the collection have appeared in many literary journals, magazines and anthologies across the world. Hailing from India, Bakshi offers a refreshing perspective on feminism and the wider would, enlightening readers with its undeniable South Asian roots.Continue Reading

SHOCK, AWE, BOREDOM – PUBIC HAIR IN ART AND FASHION

Posted on July 26, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged art, body, body hair, Closed Contact, contemporary art, fashion, female bodies, Glen Luchford, gross, hair, Huffington Post, hygiene, Jenny Saville, lady gaga, Los Angeles, meat dress, NSFW, photography, pubic hair, Sarah Louise Bryan, scandal, shock, skittles, women's bodies.

by Jess Howard

(Note: Some links NSFW.)

I’ve written articles focusing on body hair before, with my previous article specifically discussing pubic hair. I was questioning why we, as a twentyfirst century audience, have such a problem with modern day depictions of perfectly natural hair growth in a way that, historically, viewers haven’t always had a problem with. Since then, Sarah Louise Bryan has gone a step further, and designed and produced an outfit consisting of a bra and floor length skirt, both made entirely out of pubic hair.

Bryan created the dress after spending six months collecting pubic hair, in a bid to create an item of clothing more shocking and scandalous than the infamous meat dress that singer and performer Lady Gaga wore to the MTV video music awards in 2010. “I really wanted the world’s most unique and disgusting design” said Bryan “so when someone sees a design they know it was me instantly”. But should we consider the creation an act of attention grabbing media fodder, or address and analyse what the creation, and the media’s reaction, says about our attitudes to body hair as a whole?Continue Reading

PASSWORD

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged #readwomen, body, Carmina Masoliver, creative writing, fantasy, love, love poem, memories, memory, name, nature, password, poem, poetry, romance, salt, seawater, taste, women writers, writing.

by Carmina Masoliver

He types my name in for a password
but it isn’t long enough
so he uses seawater instead.Continue Reading

BLAST FROM THE PAST – CHRISTINA AGUILERA: STRIPPED

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged album, Beautiful, bell hooks, binaries, body, Christina Aguilera, Dirrty, empowerment, equality, feminism, feminist, Genie in a Bottle, hip hop, love, music, pop, rap, relationships, review, revisit, sex positive, sexuality, slut shaming, stereotypes, Stripped, tbt, teenage, Terry Young Jr, The Hampton Institute, Top of the Pops, vulnerabilty, Xtina.

by Carmina Masoliver

I have a strange memory of Christina Aguilera performing Genie in a Bottle on Top of the Pops and my dad asking if I liked her songs. Strange, because it’s so unremarkable to be kept inside my head. At this stage I her career, she had made her big break, and soon enough I was listening to her album, with hits such as What a Girls Wants and Come On Over (All I Want Is You). Yet, it was three years later, when she released what I will always think of as her best album: Stripped.

I was having a hard time at school, and listening to this album was the very definition of empowering. I had been pushed out of a friendship group during a time where looking back, I honestly believe I was depressed, and this escalated to the extent where I felt I was a target for lots of different groups at school. I did make some new friends, and remember connecting with one of them through a shared love of this album. This was before we had learnt to talk about why it is that Beautiful holds so much resonance with us, but fourteen years later and we are still friends, now sharing a love of bell hooks.Continue Reading

DEBRIS STEVENSON — PIGEON PARTY

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged apple and snakes, beauty, body, collection, creative writing, culture, Deborah Stevenson, Debris Stevenson, female poet, flipped eye publishing, gender, heritage, Jamaica, love, misogyny, Nottingham, performance, pigeon party, poem, poetry collection, poetry review, poets, race, review, The Mouthy Poets, women, women writers, words.

by Carmina Masoliver

Deborah ‘Debris’ Stevenson is founder of The Mouthy Poets, based in Nottingham, who are a collective of 50 young poets. A poet herself, with a blurb of incredible achievements, I can’t help but envy her success as someone so near my age (she’s actually younger). Watching from the outside, I can see how much she has grafted to get where she is today, and her enthusiasm for what she does shines through at workshops, performance events, and is inside every well-chosen word on the pages of the Pigeon Party (2014) collection with flipped eye publishing.

Poems are enclosed in two-part poem After The Blackstone Rangers, which sets the scene for the collection. They describe a childhood growing up in cities, where “everyone was learning”, whether rolling cigarettes, or dancing. The words are both familiar and unexpected; a place where love and friendships are based on fun that is “still disposable and warm” — referring to the “can of Scrumpy Jacks”— but also holding a wider resonance, like most of Stevenson’s work.Continue Reading

KYLIE JENNER’S WHEELCHAIR PHOTOSHOOT

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged accessory, art, art gallery, art history, artist, BDSM, body, Daniella Sheypuk, disability, discrimination, fashion, female body, fetish, Kylie Jenner, media, medium, nudity, photography, representation, sex, Steven Klein, wheelchair, women.

by Jess Howard

The Kardashian/Jenner family are rarely far from the press. From Caitlyn Jenner’s sensational Vanity Fair cover early this year, to the recent birth of Saint West, they are seldom out of the news. Recently, it has been model and the youngest of the Kardashian sisters, Kylie Jenner, who has been in the limelight.

Causing controversy by taking part in a photoshoot in which she posed passive and sexually in a gold wheelchair, Jenner’s photoshoot, directed by photographer Steven Klein, and accompanying interview, were part of a feature in Interview magazine, and it is explicitly clear why the internet has reacted in such a passionate and infuriated way. Continue Reading

REVIEW: THE WORLD GOES POP

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged Andy Warhol, art, art history, body, Eulalia Grau, Evelyne Axell, exhibition, female body, feminism, Mari Chordá, modern art, pop art, review, Richard Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg, Tate Modern, Ulrike Ottinger, vagina, Valentina Tereshkova, visual art, womanhood, women artists, women bodies, World Goes Pop.

by Carmina Masoliver

I was moved to go to this exhibit with its promise that it would move beyond the mainstream artists we think of when we think of pop art, such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Hamilton, working in the 1960s and 70s. I enjoy the work of these artists, but having seen them all before, I was intrigued to see more women exhibited, as well as those across the globe.

The literature on the exhibition states it ‘expands the notion of pop art into a far wider geographical context, showing how different cultures and countries contributed to the movement.’ With Warhol’s famous Campbell soup cans we had a critique of consumerism, yet the images shown at The World Goes Pop aim to challenge social imbalances, including the role of women and civil rights. Here, I will discuss some of my highlights from the exhibition.Continue Reading

body

IT HAPPENED

UNTITLED

ONE-PARTY STATE

REVIEW: BURNT ROTIS, WITH LOVE, BY PRERNA BAKSHI

SHOCK, AWE, BOREDOM – PUBIC HAIR IN ART AND FASHION

PASSWORD

BLAST FROM THE PAST – CHRISTINA AGUILERA: STRIPPED

DEBRIS STEVENSON — PIGEON PARTY

KYLIE JENNER’S WHEELCHAIR PHOTOSHOOT

REVIEW: THE WORLD GOES POP

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