The Bluestocking, vol 253
not that kind of Body Shop
Happy Friday!
It’s been a busy week at Bluestocking HQ, as I finish up the final interviews for a big project I’m announcing next week (and mentioning every subsequent week thereafter, I imagine, given the amount of work involved).
But there’s always time for a cheeky new prime minister, and this week I welcomed Rishi Sunak in my usual fashion, ie making mean remarks about his $200 self-heating mug. I am genuinely relieved to see the back of Liz Truss because I hate it when I have to write the possessive version of names ending with an S, including my own. I strongly hope never to write “Truss’s” ever again.
Helen
Sacheen Littlefeather was a Native American icon. Her sisters say she was an ethnic fraud (San Francisco Chronicle)
When asked how their sister, who they knew by the nickname “Deb” growing up, came up with her “Indian” name, Orlandi recalled how the sisters all used to make their clothes in 4-H. The spools of thread and ribbon were made by a company called the Sasheen Ribbon Co. They suspect that this may have been the inspiration for Sacheen.
Littlefeather claimed the name was given to her by a member of the Navajo Nation (the largest tribe in the United States, located in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico) at Alcatraz. In 1969, American Indian activists took over the island and, as it was disused federal property, demanded it be given to them, citing treaties. Littlefeather claimed the name meant “Little Bear” in Navajo. It doesn’t. That would be “shush yazh.” It is also not the custom of Diné people, as Navajo call ourselves (I’m an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation) to name people after animals.
This piece surprised me, even as someone who briefly mentioned “pretendians” in my article on Social Munchausen’s.
There is now some dispute about the sisters’ story, and whether the author is “gatekeeping” Native identity. All of which demonstrates that racial categories are unstable and context-dependent.
Rishi Sunak, Scion of Britain’s New Ruling Class (The Atlantic)
In December 2019, nearly 14 million people voted for Boris Johnson to become prime minister of Britain. Last month, 140,000 Tory members voted for Liz Truss to succeed him. And today, the support of 195 Conservative members of Parliament was enough to install Rishi Sunak on Downing Street.
British democracy is shrinking, and the result is Sunak—a politician who lacks a popular mandate but does have incredible wealth and an air of hoodie-wearing dorkiness. Let me be clear about how cringe he can be: The 42-year-old once told a pair of schoolboys that he was a “total coke addict” before clarifying, with a small, snorting laugh, that he was referring to Coca-Cola. He wears his designer slides with white socks. He owns a $200 “smart mug” that heats itself. His victory speech revealed all the charisma of a recorded announcement at a train station. Every time I see him on television, I feel an atavistic urge to give him a wedgie and steal his lunch money.
I am now old to have been the first journalist to interview Rishi Sunak as he clambered the pole of Tory politics (in May 2014, just months before he was selected as the candidate for Richmond). A lot has changed even during my decade covering British politics—but then, other things have stayed the same. As I told our newsletter: “He went to Winchester College, which is one of the smartest and most expensive boarding schools you can attend in Britain, and then Oxford University. That’s the biography of innumerable men called John and David in the Conservative Party. But it can now be the biography of a man called Rishi. He’s a member of our new establishment.”
Quick Links
How HotOrNot destroyed the world (twitter).
My colleague Derek being savage about the structural problems of the British economy (The Atlantic).
The best Rishi meme (twitter).
Matt Levine, whose newsletter I love—mostly for his consistent saltiness about Elon Musk—has written 40,000 words on crypto. If you’ve been meaning to understand crypto but numbers make eyes hurty, this is your chance (Bloomberg).
An academic paper on why narcissists find conspiracy theories so appealing. I want to write about this sometime.
A rare moment of agreement with Dan Hodges: Wes Streeting is Labour’s best media perfomer by a mile.
Here is Lex Fridman, who this week interviewed Kanye West, explaining how great it would have been if he could have interviewed Hitler in 1940 and really got to the bottom of things.
Japanese manga artists are furious with AI image generation (Rest of World).
On that note, i have been messing about with DALL-E, generating images through AI, and I highly recommend you do the same. I give you “a woman writing a newsletter while haunted by the Labour party, in the style of Soviet art”.
See you next time! If anyone can tell me how to get Sam Smith’s Unholy out of my brain, please write in. It’s the soundtrack to every other bloody video on TikTok and it’s haunting my dreams.
Sacheen Littlefeather wanted to belong. To a group of people she admired. She embroidered her life accordingly. So ?
IDK if this helps, but Unholy highlights to me how much of a sell-out Smith has become. They called for the Brits to remove gendered awards in 2021 and the organisers begrudgingly complied this year. All the while, Smith produces the quintessential cis-heteronormative track of the year... Where's the non-binary representation? Heck, why hasn't Smith invoked their identity as a gay man? None of this is surprising, given how ambiguously heterosexual Smith's discography is. Unholy has shown that they're willing to sacrifice their treasured 'marginalised' identity when it suits them. Smith cares more about winning awards and producing chart-topping hits than actually represent their 'community'.