About the Harpies
“I’m no angel.” answered Miss BeckySharper. And, to say the truth, she certainly was not.
She was small and slight in person; pale, sandy-haired, and with eyes habitually cast down: when they looked up they were very large, odd, and attractive.
By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies in the establishment, Rebecca Sharp looked like a child. But she sate commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard the talk of many of his wild companions—often but ill-suited for a girl to hear. But she never had been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old.
– William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
PhDork is your typical cartoon of a feminist: a cat-lovin’, often-hairy-legged vegetarian atheist dinosaur who is usually mad about something. She’s okay with that. An academic by nature if not always by profession, she usually takes a sociological-materialist view on things, even—or especially—if they don’t seem to warrant such scrutiny (blame Barthes, Bourdieu, and the Birmingham School). She lives with a pretty righteous dude. Many thanks to Natalie Dee, who captured her true essence in avatar form.
Pilgrim Soul toils in indentured servitude in midtown Manhattan in hopes of one day receiving a green card so she can be a permanent resident radical feminist. (She is Canadian, but her love for New York knows no limits.) She would ideally like to be an essayist of the Joan Didion school – the actual reason she came to New York in the first place – but for the moment must settle for obscure blogger. She harbours affinities for such diverse subjects as Wallace Stevens, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. She dislikes people who hold strong but ultimately arbitrary opinions.
SarahMC dreams of one day living on a farm, rescuing vagrant dogs. Until then, she lives in Northern Virginia with a persnickety beagle, and is slowly working towards earning a masters degree in economics. She enjoys watching Mad Men, listening to This American Life, and reading far too many blogs. She is also fond of deconstructing gender and fighting on the front line in the “War on Christmas.”
sarah.of.a.lesser.god is a twenty-something New York City native whose childhood ambition was to play professional baseball. But seeing as she has neither sports skills nor a penis, she has settled working towards earning a BA in writing. She enjoys making bad puns, cuddling with dogs, and consuming toxic quantities of coffee. If all else fails, she will pursue a completely non-lucrative career in writing Star Wars fanfic.
