Dear Americana

Note: This episode is in video recording on my YouTube ! Check it out if you want visuals :-) And check out my feature on the Stevie Nicks Stargirl episode! Welcome back! Today, we’re talking about “gallerinas,” this late 90s-early 00s archetype of women who worked in the art scene in NYC. Think Charlotte York and the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation . We go into the history of the tu...

Welcome back! This episode, we enter the world of the Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority, the first Black Greek Life Organization for women. Founded at Howard University in 1908, the sorority has a huge legacy of civic work and professional networking. We discuss the positive and negative associations with AKAs, from their groundbreaking mobilization to their stereotype as elitist. Our base text is...

In our second episode, we talk about pachucas, the Mexican-American girls who ran around wartime Los Angeles in large suits, red lip-liner, rose-adorned bouffants. The sartorial mother to Chicana style, the pachuca also encompassed many of the threats of Mexican-American womanhood, from public sexuality to conspicuous consumption. The episode is a geneology of sorts, touching on everything from th...

Welcome to Dear Americana ! In our inaugural episode, we discuss countercultural womanhood and its manifestations, focusing on the hippie women of the back-to-the-land commune movement. Sources: Dear America book series, Scholastic Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture , Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo Slouching Toward Bethlehem , Joan Didion The Farm , Wikipedia Macrobiotic Diet ,...