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Selena/Kathleen

There is, in my haphazardly arranged wire desk organizer, a small sheet of paper that’s sat untouched since last October. It is untouched, but even worse, it is uncolored; this is a sheet that emerged from a coloring book, all thin black curved lines buffering a large peace sign, overlaid with the words “confidence,” “collaboration,” “creativity.” This sheet is my souvenir from my first volunteering gig with Girls Rock NC, a nonprofit organization that may best be described by its adherence to the three nouns listed above. Girls Rock NC—with sister orgs in several states—“empowers girls and women—through creative expression—to become confident and engaged members of our communities.” Its staff and volunteers, many of whom are local artists and musicians, facilitate summer camps, workshops, and other development opportunities for young women and women-identified community members.

I’m thinking about those three nouns this week, as I sat dumbstruck and disgusted by the news on campus this week, and as I came in to work on Thursday, noting in passing the Duke Chronicle’s front-page headline: “We are not afraid. We stand together.” It so happens that this week also marks the 20-year anniversary of Tejana musician Selena’s death. Reading about Selena—about whose work I am minimally familiar and limited to Spanish language-class curricula—led me to a 2009 video interview (conducted by Duke Press) with poet and performance scholar Deborah Paredez. Paredez is talking about her then-just-published text Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory, and specifically about the creation of the term “Selenidad.” She explains how her use of the Spanish suffix -idad, which makes a non-noun word into a noun, “evoke[s] something that was of Selena but not just her.” Selenidad is at once specific and general, a holding pattern for the various types of emotional production surrounding Selena’s fame, music, and afterlife. Selenidad is different, but not separate from, other –idads: creatividad (creativity) and comunidad (community).

I don’t know much about Selena, but I want to—I want to know how her legacy speaks to Latin@ culture in the United States today, about how her status as a woman musician shaped women in music today. About how young women—Tejana, Latina, or otherwise—look to her for inspiration or affirmation. I want to draw a line between her work and that of Kathleen Hanna, and her band Bikini Hill, the subject of our final film (The Punk Singer) in this year’s Ethics Film Series. Hanna is another unapologetic frontwoman of a pioneering musical group—one about whom academic texts and non-academic texts alike could, and have, been written. Prior to Bikini Kill’s emergence as a band, the title was used for a “zine”—a self-published documentary compendium of texts, illustrations, and other materials celebrating and advocating for feminist art and music.

As it turns out, these zines included coloring books, with sheets perhaps not unlike the one that continues to sit at my desk. They circulated (and continue to circulate) in order to widen the circle of affirmation and community especially among women. Likewise, my decision to screen The Punk Singer is both curatorial and personal: it is a move to both further widen this circle and to contribute to its documentation—to see how ideas and emotions overlap, how identities take shape both on-screen and in the movie theater (and in the concert crowd, and so on). By deciding to engage with the cultural production of Selena, or of Kathleen Hanna, in the present-tense, we are bringing their work into a new space of existence—in other words, a space, like Selenidad, that is both them and not-them.

—MD