Author Archive
New Website
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
I have a new website, though it is currently in the very early stages of development and there is not much to it at the moment. As usual, I don’t really like the options available to me so am pondering building much of the design myself.
If you know my full name, it is www.firstname-lastname.com, yes that is with a hyphen.
Though there hasn’t been much activity here, I do not intend to stop posting. I’ve just been taking a very long break that has comprised of lots of knitting and fantasy/sci-fi reading. I’ve been trying to motivate myself to post and take a more active interest in current events, but have been mostly unsuccessful so far.
Despite being excited about the new space, I am somewhat sad that this one, which has served me so well for so long, is no longer completely sufficient for all of the things I’d like to do.
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Dear Allure:
Friday, April 17th, 2009
The recent nude photo spread in which you railed against puritanical attitudes and billed the disrobing of women as “empowering” and something that is “good for girls” was a cynical, disingenuous ploy that hijacks feminist language for the purpose of selling the consumer shit and pushing the destructive diets found in your pages.
When you splash those pages with perfect celebrity bodies and their quotes in which they opine about how IMPERFECT their bodies are, and what a GOOD thing for girls this is to see, all I can hear those girls thinking is:
If they are imperfect, what does that make me?
I guess we are lucky that Allure handily provides all the solutions to the insecurities it perpetuates. If I want to see perfect, (*however laughingly you would all like to claim them imperfect) naked women I can just look at the lad mags. I’m tired of the meme that the sum of a woman is her parts.
Yours truly,
Sick of this.
*I can understand that with the pressure women face to live up to a perfect feminine ideal in this society, that even celebrities have insecurities about their bodies and that they are certainly not perfect. But don’t give me airbrushed, oil slicked bodies and expect me to believe that this will subsequently foster healthy attitudes in girls about their bodies.
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I think that after years of making an effort to do so, I’ve finally taken up knitting seriously. My original and main intent is to try to purchase as little sweatshop made clothing as possible. It’s incredibly frustrating to me that my choices are so limited when it comes to considering the human rights of the person making a product. In the world I want to live in, it shouldn’t even be an issue.
Over the years I’ve also developed a contentious relationship with words and have found it difficult to convey what I want to get across. As someone who used to love what I could do with words and had a lot of confidence in my ability with them, it’s been distressing and I haven’t been able to work through it. I feel like I’m wrestling with them all the time. I can’t imagine a day when I’ll feel confident with them again.
Tonight I crafted a light and quick “About Me” (In Relation to Knitting!) for the knitting community I just joined, Ravelry, and felt it captured the easy way with words I used to have. I admit I’m sort of proud of it, and if I can’t showcase a way with words I want to recapture here, then where can I, right?? (And at the moment I’m not even supposed to be on the computer because carpal tunnel is kicking my ass!)
So here it is:
- I adore color. Love love love it. I think this is in part because I’ve done photography for many years in my spare time and capturing and photographing vivid color is one of my preoccupations.
- I can see this love of color aiding and abetting a development of a stash. In learning about and beginning to appreciate yarn over the past few months there have been many times when the color of something has made me go “I MUST have that now!” Luckily I’ve been able to consistently talk myself down from the edge.
- I am always cold. I daydream about the possibility of knitting up comfortable, incredibly warm garments (instead of the several ill fitting, uncomfortable layers that characterize my winter days now) and maybe a few light hoodies to deal with summer AC.
- I like fingerless gloves and find them useful to go about day to day business while never having to take them off. Every fall I buy a cheap, one size fits all pair of stretchy gloves and cut the fingers halfway. This has mostly worked fine for me besides the inevitable holes they suffer by the end, my always losing them, and the hints from people that I look homeless. I’m looking forward to the possibility of knitting up a number of quality, nice looking and warm pairs of fingerless gloves!!!
- I just got into graduate school and may join the ranks of commuting knitters.
- I guess another of my loves that resembles a knitter’s yarn stash is my book “stash”. I have hundreds of unread books and I’m trying to combine knitting and reading. My first try at reading from the screen while knitting was a dismal failure, but my second had limited success. Maybe one day I can graduate to books… lol. (I have a bias against audiobooks – not sure why.)
- I like to watch documentaries while I knit and call it “radical knits.” (That’s me making fun of myself about taking myself too seriously!)
- I am waiting impatiently for carpal tunnel symptoms to clear up so I can finish my first project for my beginner’s class and rush headlong into one I’ve chosen. Typing certainly isn’t helping.
Now back to regularly scheduled broadcast. (I think Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are up next.)
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Katha Pollitt puts into words my frustrations with the (book) world in a way I haven’t managed yet with her review of Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers. I need to smirk for a moment that the New York Times recruited a self identified feminist to review it who then subsequently dismissed it as something for the age of “bellbottoms” and “conscious-raising” for using such tired words as patriarchy.
Showalter sees women’s writing as a story of progress toward self-definition: from feminine (imitation of prevailing modes) to feminist (protest) to female (self-discovery), and, finally, free. “American women writers in the twenty-first century can take on any subject they want, in any form they choose.” We have indeed come a long way, but I’m not so sure we’ve reached nirvana yet. The marketplace, with its many gendered strictures and codes, has not disappeared. Thus, it matters that girls and women will buy fiction by and about both sexes, but boys and men—the relative few who buy fiction at all—stick to their own gender. (There was a reason that J.K. Rowling used her initials instead of her name, and that her student magician hero was not Harriet Potter.) It matters that the Great American Novel for which critics are always hunting is imagined as a modern Moby-Dick, not The House of Mirth. It means there’s a certain kind of critical receptivity, a hope of greatness for certain kinds of books by men that hardly ever comes into play with books by women, no matter how wonderful they are. Moreover, in literature as in life, men have much more license to display their whole unlovely selves and be admired for it, as the career of Norman Mailer shows.
Many women writers have complained that fiction by women is undervalued because we undervalue the domestic and the personal as opposed to big manly subjects like war and whaling. It’s an important point, but I think there’s something deeper going on. In fact, there are men who write about intimate life and women who take on big public subjects. More different than the books themselves is the gendered framing of how we read them. Nobody says Henry James is a less ambitious writer because he wrote The Portrait of a Lady and not The Portrait of a Sea Captain. If The Corrections had been written by Janet Franzen, would it have been seen not as a bid for the Great American Novel trophy, but as a very good domestic novel with some futuristic flourishes that didn’t quite come off? If the most prolific serious American writer was John Carroll Oates, would critics be so disturbed by the violence in his fiction? Perhaps we emphasize different elements in similar books and only notice the evidence that confirms our gender biases—and give men more benefits of more doubts, too. Gertrude Stein is a difficult and frustrating writer, but so is the Ezra Pound of The Cantos and the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and nobody serious calls them (as Showalter does Stein) basically frauds.
Try it yourself with the novels and poems on your bookshelf. Jane Updike? John Smiley? And while you’re at it, picture a literary America in which women were not just the major purchasers and readers of imaginative writing but also controlled the world of reviewing, prizes, awards, fellowships, relevant academic jobs, important panels, readings, international festivals, and those infernal best-book-of-the-year/decade/century lists. That this would be a highly speculative exercise suggests that Showalter is a bit overoptimistic. Women writers have come a very long way since Anne Bradstreet, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary Austin, but the jury of their peers has yet to be empaneled.
For those who don’t know, Norman Mailer (man, masculine, strong, innovative, thinker, honest) nearly murdered his wife at a party by stabbing her. I have heard his works are towering displays of misogyny, just what’s wrong with women but you know, he’s one of literature’s greats. I’d like to see Valerie Solanas (woman, feminine, crazy, emotional, pmsing, psychotic, man hater) honored in the same fashion! It’s endlessly fascinating to me how we’re taught to think and the subtle shadings that occur based on all the different social cues we pick up. I just wish I had the words to describe it.
As for the book I’m reading now, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty I barely have the words to describe that either. I just feel like I need to hand every single person a copy and say READ IT, because I can’t even begin to ponder how to contain all of the important things in a single blog post. (Perhaps this is one of my biggest problems with writing. Who knows.) Yeah, “lazy black welfare queens” my ASS! They work(ed) harder than any of us so the next time you want to parrot that myth, STFU, sit back and really think if you have any sort of clue or just picked that up in our racist/sexist cultural milieu by OSMOSIS. (And oh my goodness, I guess the new one in vogue is the lazy Mexicans. Yeah, out picking crops you wouldn’t ever deign to touch for cents a day. MMMHMMM. Gotta love the fucked up mythologies we create so we can be ok with the way both we as a society and we as individuals subjugate people.)
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After allowing myself a week’s time to indulge in a heavy addiction to Civilization IV my time was up and I poked my head out to reacquaint myself with the world. Ahhh, the avalanche of misogyny and horrific stuff, it was a bit much. I think I’m in a slight state of shock. And here I was mildly irritated that women don’t seem to exist in the Civ world. Men make history bitches, women are conquests!
Aside from a sprinkling of leaders and 1 or 2 “great people” – who are male bodies anyway – and despite being 50% of the population I should be happy we just got that, I’m told. Well, I’ve been advocating flipping the ratios of government offices so that we have a majority of women instead of men for a long time – nothing wrong with that, right? My overall point being that women constantly get that we should be happy with whatever bone someone throws us, but to reverse the situation would be utterly ridiculous and inconceivable. And I suppose you can say that politics is such a different thing in comparison to representation in a game, but that’s the problem – women are so rarely represented in an equal manner ANYWHERE. And we’re expected to just be happy with what we’ve got. We live in the man channel baby! (Chick flick = film with more than two women. Chick books = books about women. Some sort of equal representation of experiences might dilute testosterone or something.)
I’m cutting the angry part. Read at your own risk.
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I just think this so cool that I have to share it, despite the fact that I still consider myself “on break.” I have pretty low tolerance for art world speak and analysis and there are many, many times when I just look at something and go … “wow…. I could do that myself…… that’s… dumb.” You know, the white sheet of paper on the wall or the scribble that an art critic could write an analytical paper on.
Cara at The Curvature did a feminist analysis of Yoko Ono that was pretty good. I had never known much about her other than she’s blamed for The Beatles having broken up and that I didn’t really like her music, but it prompted me to read all I could about her.
One of the things she’s known for is her conceptual art. I was not aware there was such a thing until I read about her, to be honest. I guess part of it is that a lot of her art is very much about engaging the audience and the way they contribute to a piece. An example of this is Cut Piece, in which she sits on the stage in her best clothing and invites the audience to come up and cut off a piece for themselves. She says one of the purposes of the piece is in part to promote peace and to challenge racism and sexism. I haven’t really been able to find much analysis on it, but it was fascinating to me to hear that audiences reacted differently around the world.
But I created this post to showcase the white chess set. It is called “Play it by Trust” and people viewing the exhibition can actually play chess with it. I’ll admit that with my cynical attitude towards certain types of art the implications of a white chess set took a bit of time to sink in. I am putting Yoko’s explanation of it under the cut as I think it’s better to think about it on your own first.
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Burned Out
Thursday, November 27th, 2008
I’m burned out after months of nonstop reading blogs/news/nonfiction books/etc and need a break. No mystery that this also comes with the last bit of warm weather, bringing on perpetual crankiness, an understanding of animals that hibernate, and no desire to censor myself at the moment. I can’t resist a few parting shots with the things I’ve been kicking around before the blog goes silent for a bit. So I guess this is kind of messy and unpolished, but whatever. And who knows, maybe tomorrow I will be miraculously motivated again.
I feel remiss that I did not acknowledge the historical significance of Obama’s presidency at all, despite having a number of fundamental problems with him.
I am bitterly amused that continued outrage is being leveled towards Michael Vick for his torture of dogs, yet we continuously honor men who are rapists and abusers. If I had a dime for every time someone blew off a man’s abuse of a woman to wax poetic about him I’d be rich. (And no, I don’t condone what he did, I think it’s abhorrent. I just wish there was some parity here.)
The conversations going on around me about the auto industry all have to do with those “greedy” auto workers who get paid “too much” for such an “easy” job and how unions need to be weakened. It strikes me as incredibly odd that our remaining factory workers, lionized as models of class mobility and the American Dream, are now bearing the brunt of the blame for reaping the benefits that make those things possible. I feel more like an alien than I thought I could.
In light of that, I liked this post at Socialist Resistance >> America Changing for Real?? and particularly this portion of it:
The ongoing fight over auto is not about saving jobs and communities, or converting the industry to sustainable mass transit. It’s about whether the bankruptcy of the Big Three would be one of those moments of “creative destruction” so dearly beloved by free-market ideologues, whose own lives of course aren’t at stake. It’s about whether the companies will go bankrupt anyway – so why postpone the inevitable? – or whether the impact of their precipitous collapse on the system as a whole is too enormous to risk.
I am frustrated and disgusted at a culture of learned callousness. Going into the city and seeing homeless, the performances they need to put on to solicit people’s kindness, the way people ignore them anyway. If the victim isn’t perfect we knee jerk and withdraw our support. I see this in my own thought patterns when I give them money and hear their stories.
The “it’s my paycheck” bullshit. I abhor this. Your paycheck is earned on the backs of others. You are not a monolith, a person all by yourself that you earn your paycheck in a vacuum, that it is not linked to a local and global community of people. And I do believe that this is one of America’s greatest failings – this teaching of such extreme individualism that so many couldn’t care less about others outside of “their circle”, having no understanding of community and the way one’s actions ripple outward.
I did not drop from the womb with a desire to wear makeup. As someone who was born with a vagina it is not a biological imperative that I put on lipstick. This is not intended to shame women who do so, it is directed towards people who seem to think they can tell me I should do this because I am a woman.
I just finished Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks and well, damn if she isn’t brilliant when it comes to discussions of the way power works.
I have finally put an actual name to that ethereal thing I’ve wanted to study for years and this makes me kind of excited. (Sounds much better than “I am interested in economic tyranny and the way development is a vehicle for neocolonialism.” – which is NEVER this concise when I get asked to describe my primary interest. I feel a little dense that it took me this long to actually find a discipline that has the potential to explore this.)
And a link I meant to quote but never did. I thought there were more, but oh well:
The Sanctuary >> Hate Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum – A post that details the rhetoric and the hate crimes towards immigrants that have been occurring in the Long Island area. I’m shocked that it’s this extensive in my area and had no idea. I like the way the post emphasizes the importance of the way we speak about issues and how this can create an environment where these things occur – too often we devalue language and its impact.
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Sleep and I are no longer acquainted (Started pulling this together at 3:30am yesterday. Ugh!). And so continues my prolific quoting of other people. Entries pertaining to the election which I really enjoyed:
Black Looks >> Cynthia McKinney & Rosa Clemente represent the kind of politics we all need to see in our own countries
I read the other day that Toni Morrison will be voting for Obama. A couple of weeks ago it was Alice Walker writing what I described as “driveling bullshit.” and one more example of the mainstreaming of the progressives – Rosa Clemente has a more definitive list here. Obama talks about bringing “fundamental change” but the only fundamental change is his colour and when one looks more closely even his colour is not that fundamental afterall. Obama is intrinsically tied to the mainstream, pro-Zionist war mongering American superstructure. Though disappointing it is not so surprising that so many millions all over the world have been drawn in by Obama who panders to black and white notions of a “post racial” America and world. An imaginary world of convenience particularly for the millions of white people who will vote him into the White House.
These are not truths. Nor do I think it is an accident that the first Black president of the USA will be a Black man who is not historically tied to slavery and the Black American experience. Facts like these are what makes the Obama’s presidency so dangerous because the establishment will use his Blackness to press the notion of a post racial society, of a fairer society, a more just society – all of which are big white lies. He will be held up as a pure example of the lie that is called the American dream along with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell at the expense of the people in most need. This is already happening as we watch the so called progressives launch a double edged sword of complicity by jumping on the cultist bandwagon of unquestioning worship along with the likes of Powell and Hitchins. Whilst on the other hand silencing the voices of two women of colour who represent the real fundamental change.
A couple of days ago I wrote about the need to put people, all people before profit – Obama will not even come near to meeting that need. What will Obama do for the DRC – will he be calling for the prosecution of corporations buying the “blood soaked” minerals? Obama supported the bail out of the Wall Street gamblers and thieves. He like all the other candidates and Western politicians conveniently avoid making any connection between the financial crisis, increasing global hunger and the trillions of dollars being spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dark Daughta >> You do realize that by defending him or any single candidate however “perfect”
You are defending an outmoded, ineffectual, nonrepresentational system of government that rose to prominence during times when there were far fewer people on the planet?
None of our governmental systems are actually equipped to deal with the reality of over 6 billion people on this planet, many of whom have interests that can’t possibly be represented by nationalistic, zenophobic, hierarchical, elitist governments run by powerful cabals headed by figureheads so distanced from the true needs of the people that all they can do is craft lying, manipulative, surface speeches that present them as able to deal effectively with the needs of the many, when in actuality all they are capable of doing in controlling the masses by telling them that voting this charlatan candidate or that charlatan candidate into power will make them happy or sad, bring back the good ole times or stave off the reality of an unavoidable future.
Toban Black >> Is Obama a radical superhero?
Pulling out my favorites from here but there are a number of them accompanied with links to their articles and an awesome political cartoon.
Andrew Gebhardt:
“But ’support’ until now has not translated into organizing, into changing the institutions we currently tolerate, or starting new ones.”
“Waking up to the possibilities of real hope and change means challenging leaders, and daily, difficult local work that some, but not yet enough of us do. The most hopeful aspect of Obama’s “hope and change” message might be that people see those words for what they are, and demand that whoever assumes office, some real policies justify those fragile, necessary emotions so many of us cling to.”
Joshua Frank:
“What will happen to the movements that have been sidelined in order to help get the Democrats elected? What will become of the environmental movement after January 20? Will it step up to oppose Obama’s quest for nuclear power and clean coal? Will the antiwar movement work to force Obama to take a softer approach toward Iran? Will they stop the troop increase in Afghanistan?”
“[Some 'progressives' seem] to believe he’ll magically move left once inaugurated and is only running to the right in order to win the election. That position is a non sequitur and not worthy of real discussion as it’s based on wishful thinking.”
“We deserve more than lofty rhetoric about ‘action’ and ‘hope.’ ”
Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »
Yesterday on the radio Steve Malzberg was talking about how they’re no longer educating students about Veteran’s Day in schools – I guess it’s some “liberal plot”, as usual. Great idea Steve. Let’s talk about Veteran’s Day. Let’s talk particularly about the issues that women veterans face. Will you be talking about that?
Helen Benedict cites these statistics in her recent article Why Soldiers Rape: Culture of misogyny, illegal occupation, fuel sexual violence in military. A note at the bottom states: [Editor’s note: This article is adapted from The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, to be published by Beacon Press in April 2009.]
Yes, you should read the whole article.
• A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, conducted by psychotherapist Maureen Murdoch and published in the journal Military Medicine, found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.
• In 2003, a survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War by psychologist Anne Sadler and her colleagues, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military.
• And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, also conducted by Murdoch and published in Archives of Family Medicine, reported that 90 percent had been sexually harassed, which means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.
• A 2007 survey by the Department of Veterans Affairs found that homelessness among female veterans is rapidly increasing as women soldiers come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Forty percent of these homeless female veterans say they were sexually abused while in the service.
Defense Department numbers are much lower. In Fiscal Year 2007, the Pentagon reported 2,085 sexual assaults among military women, which given that there are about 200,000 active-duty women in the armed forces, is a mere fraction of what the veterans studies indicate. The discrepancy can be explained by the fact that the Pentagon counts only those rapes that soldiers have officially reported.
Having the courage to report a rape is hard enough for civilians, where unsympathetic police, victim-blaming myths, and the fear of reprisal prevent some 60 percent of rapes from being brought to light, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study.
But within the military, reporting is much riskier. Platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a sexual assault has little chance of remaining anonymous. She will probably have to face her assailant day after day and put up with resentment and blame from other soldiers who see her as a snitch. She risks being persecuted by her assailant if he is her superior, and punished by any commanders who consider her a troublemaker. And because military culture demands that all soldiers keep their pain and distress to themselves, reporting an assault will make her look weak and cowardly.
For all these reasons, some 80 percent of military rapes are never reported, as the Pentagon itself acknowledges.
And another good article from the summer: Homelessness a Problem for Women Veterans
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