Kate Skow: Voice
Kate Skow has a very distinct voice that repeats itself in her pieces. She is a seemingly radical feminist and uses similar structures in her writing over and over again. She glorifies the feminine aspects of the world and is generally negative toward the maculine. She isn’t overly critical but she is radical in her system of beliefs, while simultaneously being understanding.
In the first article I’m looking at, Obscuring the Feminine: BANKS, MØ, Dreezy, Halsey, Grimes, Skow explores the way female musicians are distracting the public from their actual gender by using non-sexual names. She starts out with a sentence in bold: “Mononyms are not a new phenomenon.” She distracts the reader from her topic by introducing her actual, more radical ideas, slowly. By putting her first sentence in bold, she makes her topic seem elusive, exciting, somewhat secretive. She doesn’t give away what she wants to say until the end of the paragraph where she makes a page break, and in large scale italics writes:
“What is a new phenomenon is female artists releasing music under mononyms that have no obvious gender.”
This ^ technique is used throughout her blogs. She emphasizes her points in this way and the thoughts she puts so much focus on are always well worded and have a bite to them. They comment on societal norms in a clipped manner and never fail to pack a punch, some of her other ones are:
“Why can’t we admit that women creators put in the same work that men do — often, painstakingly — but against all odds and with little recognition?”
…and in reference to the show Veep, when the main character has to make a big speech about abortion and her staff tells her to reference the fact that she’s a woman, Skow emphasizes her response in her usual manner:
“I can’t identify myself as a woman. People can’t know that.”
Everything Skow puts up in the middle is there for flash and emphasis and offense. The sentences put up on display are there to incite the reader.
Another tool she uses in this first blog post is the insertion of parenthetical elements into the sentences. For instance, she writes in reference to hiding womanhood, “because, you know, hiding that fact as long as possible is the only way we can be successful.” With phrases that break up the structure of an otherwise normal sentence with wording like ‘you know,’ Skow is trying to make alliances with the reader. She is relating to the reader like they are a buddy, someone who is a confidant.
She always keeps her paragraphs to six sentences or less so the page is easily readable and not too daunting. She speaks non-academically so everything is accessible, but her vocabulary is by no means lacking and her sentence structure is relatively complex. With her ending paragraph, she uses lists (something she does frequently for emphasis), and her final sentence has four different sections to it, separated by three commas. This takes the reader through a bit of a maze before getting to the last thought, but the withholding of information is just enough to make the point sink in:
“Perhaps that is why some artists have chosen to abandon attachment to a female name, to blur their womanhood, to obscure their feminine. Such an identity is often a burden to carry in this world, and it feels easier when, even if just for a moment, we can put it down.”
In her second blog post, Taking Up Space: Busting Ghosts, the Female Experience, and the Unabashed Queerness of Jillian Holtzmann, Skow gives validation to the women of the world who have been taught to be small and insignificant there whole lives. She begins the post by immediately identifying herself with the community she is referring to (women), by using words like ‘we’ and ‘us.’ She describes the raising of women as ‘conditioning’ and says we are taught to ‘curl into ourselves.’ These references have animalistic associations that compare womanhood to puppy-life. Skow captures that idea with only a few well chosen words.
This post again follows the structure of emphasizing major societal criticism by put it front and center. She also uses her list tactic to emphasize the difficulty of the situations. She has a whole section that is structured using ‘First,’ ‘Second,’ and ‘Third.’
A more interesting part of this article is Skow examination of Kate McKinnon’s character, Jillian Holtzmann. She says that “Holtzmann is what women would be like if we were never conditioned to take up little to no space.” The whole piece is based on how the Ghostbusters movie speaks to women’s relation to space in the world, and men. Her voice is critical of the way a male might see the film because he won’t understand what women go through on a daily basis.
Skow uses the same structures again and again because it works for her voice. She uses sarcasm and highlighting to get at the topics she’s covering. She disturbs the normative beliefs that others have boldly but kindly and her use of language displays a specificity in her understanding of the subject matter that the reader can easily connect to her writing.
