Weekly Feminist Reader
I'm caught in the SXSW whirlwind (about to attend a Cupcakes Take the Cake party!), so no WFR this week.
So consider this an open thread.... What have you been reading/writing this week?
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Over at Women's Glib, my response to Daniel Bergner's Times article from January, What Do Women Want?
Also, thoughts on what it means to have a "real" identity. This post got some criticism in a comment, which seemed to skew my intents in writing the post. More feedback would be appreciated.
Great response to that article. Articulate, thoughtful, and just what I've been wanting to hear.
I wrote about fighting with SO over cleaning.
And I've been reading a lot of Katyrena's writing on her blog, Textual Fury.
Hope you're enjoying SXSW, Ann! We're totally jealous.
Here's what the ESC was up to this week:
~We did an International Women's Day link roundup.
~Because we're very mature and we care deeply about bipartisanship, we created a new Bill O'Reilly Can Suck It store to go along with our Rush Limbaugh products.
~We gave a shoutout to our friends at Father Panik, who were kicked out of a designers market hosted in a church because the pastor found some of their religious items offensive and refused to listen to the story behind them, which is actually rooted in church history.
~In light of the new survey showing some disturbing attitudes about rape and domestic violence in the UK, we revived the Joe Biden Feminism Watch to discuss an article about whether VAWA could set an example for other countries.
~And of course we had to weigh in on the whole Meghan McCain/Ann Coulter/Laura Ingraham situation. Twice.
I didn't like Babble's piece on hated mothers, and I said so.
I wrote about bad marriages making women sick.
And I also got really annoyed with people who spit.
This week I wrote about the marketing of Candace Parker, and an annoying poster campaign featuring Michelle Obama.
I also just finished reading Meena: The Heroine of Afghanistan, and now I'm on kind of a RAWA & the women of Afghanistan kick, so if anyone has suggestions for my reading list I'd love to hear them.
I highly recommend Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali-true story, a real feminist and former muslim...she is inspiring...
Uh, well Ayaan, while she does have a compelling story, is now quite hateful towards Islam, Muslims, and Muslim women.
From her wiki page:
"She has described Islam as a "backward religion", incompatible with democracy."
"In an interview in the London Evening Standard,[57] Hirsi Ali characterizes Islam as "the new fascism"."
I doubt Muslim women have very warm feelings for her.
well, having read her story, you can see how she might come to those beliefs, no? I can understand why she might not be a favorite for Muslim women, but reading her story might be a good exercise for anyone. If all someone has heard is her negative view of Islam, reading her story might give them better perspective, and cause them to examine their own faith and how they can work to be stronger within it.
Her terrible experiences and her ability to triumph over them does not excuse a hateful attitude towards other practitioners of Islam. It is not inspiring that she uses incendiary and hateful rhetoric to inflame anti-immigrant and Islamophobic tensions in Holland and the US.
No matter what the context, this is not ok.
Her book is worth reading because her experiences with Islam are real and her own and worth listening too. By the end of the book she asks that Islam be reformed or to enter a period of "enlightenment" so that the religion can endure. She is no longer a muslim but does not degrade the religion in her book. She does call it backwards and incompatible with democracy but because democracy is based in liberty and freedom...Islam, in it's current form is based on following the word of "God" above all else. Again, her "anti-immigrant" views, as written in her book are based on her view of those who do not assimilate into a new culture and are allowed to break laws and whose violent cultures are ignored because they are "immigrants". She wants those who chose to live in democratic societies to evolve thier religion and be subject to the same laws at the rest of us. It is not OK to beat your wife or circumcise your daughter if you chose to live in a society that forbays those practices...this is the story she tells. The book is a great read and very infomative (I would also say inspiring) because no matter how you take the information it is a display of a person becoming informed, taking a stand and making her point known...with the goal of benefitting the lives of all women, especially muslim women...
I recommend Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan.
3 cups of Tea...about building schools and educating the future women of Afghanistan. Not quite the same vein.
This week I wrote Self Love as Activism
Reading:
Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings by Collen Curran
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Allison Bechdel (I finished it, and then I became so sad that I had to say goodbye to that community of women because the characters and their social commentary is just incredible)
The Volunteer Management Handbook (for non-profit admin class)
Writing:
work for my job
My presentation of my paper "The Queers on Campus: Understanding How Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Students Perform Oppositional Identity Work" for the 2009 UNC-Asheville GLBTQ Studies Conference. We leave in a week and two days to travel from Louisiana to Asheville, and I'm so excited!
A post on a sexist ESPN discussion
http://mzbitca.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/no-matter-how-you-view-it-its-all-the-womans-fault/
my two cents on "shaming" punishments
http://mzbitca.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/were-not-just-shaming-the-men/
A post on Buffy Season 1
http://mzbitca.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/buffy-season-1/
I wrote about (and wrote to my elected officials about) the AP report analyzing the current imprisonment of 32,000 immigrants (both documented and undocumented), most of whom have never been convicted of any crime, not even illegal entry. 950 of these folks have been held for longer than the 6 months allowed by a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, and some of them have been held for even longer than that. Because, you know, we really need to bloat our prison system with people who haven't even caused any offense...
Write to Obama and your congresspeople about it please.
I have been working on my blog at http://stuffqueerpeopleneedtoknow.wordpress.com/ I actually just added this blog to the blog roll after my Women's Studies teacher showed us something from it in class.
FR is hosting a contest to win a copy of Thembisa Mshaka's Put Your Dreams First.
Reviews of the week:
Creating a World Without Poverty: Yunus’ analysis, which captures the severity of the current conditions and holds corporations accountable, is well-founded. However, his solution is contradictory. While he argues that it is conflicting for businesses to pursue profit maximization and social benefits, he admits that his model of social business encourages the pursuit of profit in order to repay investors and expand social efforts.
Houston, We Have a Problema was obviously intended to be Jessica Luna’s coming-of-age tale, but if falls very, very flat. It also only furthers certain negative stereotypes associated with Latinas; that all of us love drama, that we want men who are bad for us, that we’re meek, apologetic, and indecisive.
Our City Dreams is a combination love letter to overtly feminist artists and the city—New York City—in which they reside. Representing a range of women artists whose age and work span nearly six decades, the film’s scope never becomes too wide or convoluted.
I Am Not Afraid of Winter: Her descriptions of experiences are singularly intense, and had the ability to draw me into a sense of familiarity. The imagery hit me with a spark of recognition.
I am a little concerned by some of the T-shirts that Cafe Press features. "HILLARY IRON MY SHIRT"? Seriously? In addition to the T-shirts about Obama that are have clear racial tones to them? (http://shop.cafepress.com/barack-hussein-obama?page=3) I am increbily dismayed by the stereotypes your company appraent think are approapriate and do not think that you have any right to post a link on this blog - you, know that is supposed to be combating sexism and racism - to your store that apparently does the same.
This was in response to EvilSlutClique
Yeah, that Hillary shirt, and those Obama shirts, sound terrible!
There's some good stuff on Cafepress, and a lot of crap. You do realize that Cafepress just a basic service for printing images onto various surfaces (t-shirts, mugs, bags etc.) that anybody can use, right?
Anybody can set up a cafepress store. All you have to do is create an account and submit some images, and maybe give them some money. Then people select the design they want, and some of the money goes to Cafepress while the rest goes to the person who set up the store. I don't actually know what the business model is but my point is that there are hundreds of thousands of people selling merchandize at Cafepress.com and that Evilslutclique is only responsible for the merchandise being sold in their individual store.
Just wanted to clear that up.
Thank you!
As Sabriel already explained, cafepress isn't "our" company. Anyone can create their own store on cafepress, so you'll see a wide range of opinions represented. We're not affiliated with stores like 'Hillary Iron My Shirt' or stores with racist Obama imagery in any way. If you'd like to complain directly to cafepress about some of the stores that you were offended by, you can email their Content Usage Team at cup@cafepress.com. They do remove stores that violate their terms of service.
Just for the record, the only cafepress stores that the members of the Evil Slut Clique are responsible for can be found on our shopping page.
Hello! I'm new here at Feministing. Right now, I just finished Jessica's book Full Frontal Feminism, and have moved on to The Girls Who Went Away: the Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler. I didn't really know a lot about reproductive rights pre-Roe v. Wade (besides the dangerous illegal abortions), so it is very interesting for me to be finding out what it was like for the women who lived before me.
Anyway, if any of you have suggestions on adding to my reading list, I'd be more than happy to hear them!
Along the lines of the second book you mention, I'm reading Wake Up Little Susie by Rickie Solinger, which explores the different experiences of middle class white unmarried pregnant girls in that era (the ones who went away and surrendered their babies for adoption) with the experiences of their lower-class black counterparts. The vast majority of black girls in this situation kept their babies, and entered the social support system that constructed them as hyper-sexual being who were uncontrollable and just wanted to make a buck off the system by having children out of wedlock. This was almost always the end of their education. So it's interesting to see the ways in which race and class changed the way girls were "handled" by the system, and the different kinds of disenfracnhised grief it resulted in.
Cupcakes are an abomination. Cakes are pure, unless they're Cake Wrecks
This week: What the fallout of the conscience rule will be, when all is said and done.
I started blogging over at sex.justice.change!
http://sexualjustice.blogspot.com/2009/03/affordable-birth-control-on-college.html
enjoy :-)