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Tressie McMillan Cottom Profile picture
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25 Feb, 9 tweets, 3 min read
Good Morning, Sunshines. I have written many things about Dolly Parton and you can now read them. If you were an OG Tressie subscriber you got the essay in your inbox last night, along with a free subscription to fomenting the #longform essay with me

tressie.substack.com/p/the-dolly-mo…
If you would like to get similar essays in your inbox, you can subscribe to tressie.substack.com. The community is called essaying and essays like The Dolly Moment are the Big Reads I will be working on over the next year.
Maybe you remember this tweet from October. Reading everything about Dolly Parton was just supposed to be a passion project, a gift to myself. The gift was reading about something I enjoy and with no discernible work project attached.
Somewhere along the line, I had a lot of notes and Many Thoughts. That is always how a Tressie essay begins. The Dolly essay had begun. Over the coming weeks, I will be talking about how that essay was made and what I learned along the way about race, gender, culture & Dolly.
Maybe you're like @Wertwhile and the Dolly essay sparked all these other ideas. If so, you can join the open discussions for subscribers where I'll take on reader feedback much like I would in class.

Thinking about a Big Read, like this one, takes time! But so does reading it. I am not saying you should be like @Lollardfish here and pour some whiskey when you read it, but I'm not NOT saying that either.

If you want to know what the MacArthur does for a thinker, some thank-yous to Team Tressie:

Editing by Kera Bolonik, Fact-checking by Madeleine Baverstam, Research Assistance by Zari Taylor, Librarianship by Joanna Burke, Design by Lauren Garcia, Strategy by Sarah Choi
Support is a game-changer. I will be talking about supporting thinkers who write over the coming weeks, with help from subscribers. But, for now, about The Dolly Moment:

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More from @tressiemcphd

Tressie McMillan Cottom Profile picture
26 Feb
The Dolly essay is a melding of some of my favorite things: theory, methods, discourse, and narrative. Theory was very useful when I was teasing out the diversity canard that informs this sentence: Image
If you keep up with the ASA sociological theory journal (heh), this might remind you of a paper from @victorerikray & @louise_seamster on race and diversity as an Enlightenment teleology Image
We love this idea of ourselves. It is useful to love this idea of ourselves because it is compatible with (and inextricably bound to) what consumption demands: if it is not a commodity then it cannot become an ideology
Read 5 tweets
Tressie McMillan Cottom Profile picture
25 Feb
Did our class just use @SmartBitches "help a bitch out" feature and Jewish "the four children" ritual to talk about information seeking behaviors in the context of @audreywatters Teaching Machine's conclusion??? Yes. Yes we did.
A lot of fun about the social context of information seeking, latent functions of search engines and all kinds of inequality. Not bad for zoom. I am over zoom, just to be clear.
Oh and we read this recent piece on tech surveillance in the pandemic university chronicle.com/article/the-su…
Read 4 tweets
Tressie McMillan Cottom Profile picture
21 Feb
This won’t help most people but I will share, if only to point out how ridiculous it all is.

First, it involves a 6”5 male person. Start there.

That person called ahead to the business Mgr to tell them I am a problem. If they wanted to sell the car, they had one hour.
I test drove the car, chose it and then gave the business manager and only a manager a flash drive with my financial documents. I said that when the car was cleaned & all the papers were in one folder to call me and I would a lot 45 minutes to the process. I always used my title
I was a stone cold -excuse me- bitch the entire time. No smiling, nothing. I leaned into every stereotype. And every time, the male person stood just off to the corner of me. So generally I was unpleasant and sexist and mean. That’s how I bought a car in less than a week.
Read 6 tweets
Tressie McMillan Cottom Profile picture
15 Feb
A lot of *waves hand* things going on right now are about our insistence that rich people have the same emotions that non rich people have. And while they may have the same working set of emotions, they have different meaning.
Shame and embarrassment and belonging -- money and power really shape those differently. It is never a good idea to do a 1:1 emotional map across significant power differences.
You can do it across power and mayyyybe with a lot of work and previous experiences you can map emotions down the power difference but not up.
Read 5 tweets
Tressie McMillan Cottom Profile picture
12 Feb
I am going to take a few steps out from this for a couple of reasons. One, I really hope it is instructive. Truly. Two, I think we haven't done as well with confronting anti-semitism as we should.
The claim, as I understand it, is that a Hollywood actress was fired for making a Facebook post that compared political conservatives in the U.S. to Nazis by virtue of their unfair labeling and persecution. I absolutely concede she was being hyperbolic.
My first instinct, as a general critical reader, is "huh. that seems odd." It seems odd because people are not, empirically, routinely fired for social media posts. They just aren't.
Read 13 tweets
Tressie McMillan Cottom Profile picture
12 Feb
how hasn't a black funeral home family not been an entire genre by now??? everyone knows they have it all: royalty lines, intermarriage, money, status, power, customs, conflict. The Black discourse about which is the good funeral home alone!
If you are of my clan and you are NOT buried at "Floyds" -- no punctuation, no questions about it -- then you are heathen. Do I know why? No. Will I follow the custom? Absolutely.
It's only a hair easier to marry into a Black funeral home legacy than it is to marry into the British monarchy. Fight your momma.
Read 4 tweets

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