DCC 32: Crystal Kotow “Fat Feminist Killjoy”

Crystal is a fat activist who moved from fashion blogging to tackling more contested spaces in fat feminist thought: cultural hatred of fat bodies; and how fatphobia can manifest as violence in intimate partner relationships. She’s in her second year of a PhD gender, feminist and women’s studies. “I’m told to look good as a fat woman I’m supposed to dress a certain way, I’m supposed shrink my…

DCC Episode 30: Vivek Shraya “What I’m doing is not about performance”

Vivek Shraya is a multimedia artist living in Toronto with strong ties to prairie malls. She’s produced 10 albums, written 3 books (with 2 more set for release next year) and created 4 short films, all to great acclaim. She talked to me about the production of art, and how performance grounds her, “I feel like I’m at peak VIvek, which is scary because, what happens after?“ Her debut novel, She of…

DCC 28: Mimi Thi Nguyen “New Wave Party Girl…or Monster High Doll”

I was so excited to talk to Mimi Thi Nguyen this week on the show! She’s an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois. Her research interests are war, empire and…zines! “If I’m teaching, I imagine myself as a new wave party girl who’s been forced to teach.” I loved that she told me that she prefers to interview with zine/podcast…

DCC 27: Zoe Dodd “You’re cool, stay weird, don’t change”

Zöe Dodd is a harm reduction and hep C worker, an antipoverty + social justice activist….and an anarcho-feminist with a hippie side.  She’s also a longterm participant/contributor to Toronto’s hardcore music scene. And apparently a bird watcher? She’s definitely a bird magnet…lent a very Snow White vibe to her femme punk look. “I definitely have a hippie side…peace, liberation, anti war, destroy…

I can.  Grungy, witchy floral mess’

Merritt Kopas is a multimedia artist, video game designer and writer whose focus of interest is digital play as an access point for exploring care relationships.  Her first book came out in April 2015, Videogames for Humans, published by Instar Books; and she contributed to another recent book, the State of Play.

She curates the online project Forest Ambassador where her focus is on free, accessible and innovative games.

While my dog licked her arm, we talked about her ‘Patti Smith cyber waif meets Amy Winehouse/goth jock’ style influences. Everything she learned about fashion came from tumblr, and her best makeup advice is:  “Everything looks good! Just do whatever you want!”

   “I dress like a weirdo dirtbag and, like, it’s super comfortable,

and it works ok for me.”

She had interesting things to say about dressing to stick out and also blend in — to deflect the wrong type of attention from herself; and also for security and ease of movement. For example, she reasoned that having blue hair, facial piercings and visible tattoos will get you ignored by 90% of the population, whom you probably doesn’t want to interact with anyway.

We talked about clothes acquisition and ethics —

‘I don’t believe you can opt out of global capitalism, or that by buying the right things you can make a meaningful difference…. it reduces activism and it reduces your choices to consumptive choices’

….and her deep ambivalence about the mall —

“It’s buried behind so many layers of ironic reflexivity that it’s hard to figure out what my feelings are, but that’s true about everything….so yeah, I have a weird relationship to the mall”

I asked her if people could tell her interests by seeing her–

 ‘I hope they can’t tell I’m into games or computers…when I go to game conferences I aspire to look like I don’t belong there.’

eyeliner game extremely tight

Her influences:

Patti Smith- this may not actually be an influence but more of a frequently named doppelganger

Amy Winehouse-

actually i don’t know why everyone doesn’t just do this look all the time forever

and she mentioned her friend, Neeah Ching as a big influence for snap backs and the genesis of the goth jock.

 Recommendations:

Books: Simone Weil Waiting for God; and Mat Johnson’s Pym;

Podcast: Stop Podcasting Yourself

Music: Speedy Ortiz

Look for her:

on twitter @m_kopas and you can find her work online at mkopas.net.

Did I mention she’s a friend to all cats?

Thanks Merritt! til next time~

DCC Episode 22: Amy Medvick of Os Tropies “Late ’60s Brazilian Tropicalia, Liz Taylor as Cleopatra and Carmen Miranda”

Featured photo by Karri North.

Amy Medvick is the vocalist and flautist with Os Tropies, and an ethnomusicology grad student studying the Brazilian diaspora and its musical legacy. Amy talked to me about Tropicalia and exotica from the 1950s through the 1970s.

I loved how she talked about fashion and style using the metaphor (and literal practice) of cooking–studying spices to analyze composite…

DCC Episode 19: Virgie Tovar “Miss Piggy meets RuPaul” #losehatenotweight

“Fashion is a way of fighting; of being political around visibility”

I was introduced to the work of VIrgie Tovar by way of reading about body politics a few years back. I picked up her book “Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on LIfe, Love and Fashion” and I loved how she and the essayists in the book connected fat fashion to political activism.

She’s one of North America’s leading voices on fat…