I’m joined on this episode by Johanna Koljonen, who not only was a girl but has thought, read and written extensively about girlhood, and who’s recently collaborated with artist Nina von Rudiger on the school-set manga Oblivion High. We consider some of the ideas and fantasies girlhood has become a vehicle for, looking at male culturemakers’ Pygmalionesque love affairs with girls they’ve fictionalised, discussing Amy’s comment piece on kids’ sexualities and delving into the weird, weird world of Henry Darger - the likely highly autistic amateur author/artist who spent a good chunk of the last century working on an account of a troupe of Christian girl-warriors ridding the universe of slavery against the backdrop of an intergalactic civil war.
As always we play and discuss some thematically germane music too. Are female vox in UK 2-step in any way functionally equivalent to duck calls? Will La Roux’s Elly Jackson ever forgive us for disregarding the chorus to ‘I’m Not Your Toy’ in order to fawn over and tattle about her? All this and more, in an episode so referentially dense I seriously considered writing a bibliography for it.
Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]
- Blonde Redhead – Misery Is a Butterfly
- Richard Hell & the Voidoids – The Plan
- Burial – Unite
- M83 – Graveyard Girl
- La Roux – I’m Not your Toy
- Kate Bush – L’Amour Looks Something Like You
- Belle & Sebastian – String Bean Jean
- The Magnetic Fields – A Pretty Girl Is Like
