Category Archives: Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: Inclusive Populism, Domestic Violence Awareness, & Hyde Turns 35

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http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

To quote Rinku Sen’s headline on Colorlines today, there is “people power exploding around us.” It’s a good time to be a feminist, for the tools we use to understand power relations and structures in the world are coming in very handy as we predict and influence the direction of the #Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, everything–racial justice, gender and sexual justice–is related to our economic reality here in the US.

  • Here is Sen’s piece, which reminds us why inclusivity of interests strengthens, not divides, populist movements:

…[A]ddressing other systems of oppression, and the people those systems affect, isn’t about elevating one group’s suffering over that of white men. It’s about understanding how the mechanisms of control actually operate. When we understand, we can craft solutions that truly help everybody. Building movements that include groups that explicitly address the racial, gender and sexual dimensions of our economic system is key to that process.

  • Racialicious publishes An Open Letter from Two White Men, affirming that OWS must recognize that the oppression white men are feeling in this economic recession is a condition people of color have lived with for centuries:

This unintended marginalization is occurring daily at #OWS. We know this may be hard for some people to understand. Of course, who could expect us to understand what it is like to be reminded of your skin color every time you leave your home? Who could expect white people to understand that the spaces we feel so comfortable in may feel exclusive or even hostile to people of color? After all, we are never told; we are not forced to learn that our skin color is related to our social status; and we are not taught black and brown history, so many of us do not know how we got here–and cannot imagine it any other way.

  • October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Check out the Domestic Violence Awareness Project’s website for lots of resources and information. You can also sign the petition to support education in your community at the Love Is Not Abuse coalition. The National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-SAFE [7233]) is available to callers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in all 50 states & Puerto Rico.
  • Jezebel reports that British marathoner Paula Radcliffe’s world record will no longer be considered as such because she ran alongside male pace setters. Whaaa?
  • The Hyde Amendment turns 35 years old this week. RH Reality Check has a couple of great articles about where we stand. The anti-choice movement is not backing down, and so neither should we. As one writer/activist puts it:

False claims that abortion is linked to breast cancer and causes women to suffer from post-abortion syndrome are intended to show that the anti-abortion movement cares as much about women as it does about fetuses. However, the theme of contempt and distrust for women, so clearly articulated during the original debate on the Hyde Amendment, recurs.  A recent attempt by Republicans to restrict government funding of abortion to cases of “forced” rape echoes the earlier debate where opponents claimed that “any woman who wants an abortion under Medicaid could go in and say” she has been raped, in order to get Medicaid to pay for her abortion.

  • This piece was written pre-SlutWalk NYC, but it does an excellent job of exploring the complexities of the SlutWalk marches/movement. Yet another example of how inclusivity promotes strength.

What have you been reading this week?

Don’t forget to check out October re/visionist, The Legal Issue, below!

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: SlutWalk NYC, Wall Street, & Immigration

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Stuck in a homogenized, tightly controlled and dehumanizing “total institution,” in sociology speak, wherein everyone wears the same thing, eats the same thing, and sleeps and showers in the same paltry conditions, the only means to autonomy is through hardened hypermasculinity.

  • Colorlines reports on the new, horrifying anti-immigration legislation that just made Alabama the most xenophobic state in the U.S. Now it’s a waiting game: will the Supreme Court uphold a state’s right to create its own immigration regime?

“Today is a dark day for Alabama,” Mary Bauer, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s legal director, said Wednesday in a statement. “This decision not only places Alabama on the wrong side of history but also demonstrates that the rights and freedoms so fundamental to our nation and its history can be manipulated by hate and political agendas – at least for a time.”

Keep your eye out for the October Issue of re/visionist, coming soon! In the mean time, “Like” us on Facebook. Takes 4-10 seconds, depending on the speed of your internet connection.

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: Troy Davis, End of DADT, & Testosterone

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The week of September 18th demands us to rethink our nation’s concepts of justice and democracy. Is it really a democracy if 630,000 people’s voices are ignored; if the national and international communities’ demands fall on deaf ears; if the Supreme Court finds no reason to change its mind when 7 out of 9 witnesses for the crime recant their evidence?– The answer’s for us all to decide.

Troy Davis, likely an innocent man, was killed by the state of Georgia at 11:08 pm on September 21, 2011. Is this the kind of democracy in which we want to live? Troy, the feminist community mourns your death. Take a look at Crunk Feminist Collective’s historical reading of Troy’s execution, placing it in the tradition of lynchings:

These days conservative (white) Americans fancy themselves more civilized than their bloodthirsty ancestors, but I submit that the state sanctioned murder of Black men based on dubious, trumped up, and coerced evidence is just lynching remixed for a new generation. …Let me be clear. Mark MacPhail’s family deserves justice. But no one deserves justice at the expense of a potentially innocent man.

  • But, let’s not overlook the good news in LGBT rights: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is officially OVER! About. Freakin’. Time.

There is horror in seeing how dismissively many men treated women back then, but also a kind of pleasure in revisiting — with hindsight — a noble cause played out in a simpler time. Sexism hasn’t been vanquished, obviously, but it has splintered into more subtle, ambiguous channels. Back then it was overt, coarse and overdue for assault.

As it turns out, the claim that women are “just built to be more nurturing” (so we might as well let them do the bulk of the nurturing and let guys off the hook) is baseless. The real truth is that we are hardwired to be adaptable, built to have seasons in our lives of both public ambition and domestic tenderness.

Have a great weekend.

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord

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Where re/visionist helps you to sample some feminist food-for-thought from around the blogosphere!

Heinous t-shirt slogans for girls. via sfgate.com

  • Colorlines’ Akiba Solomon reveals how anti-choice “Personhood Mississippi” is telling their own–wrong–version of the Dred Scott decision of 1857 in order to further their racist and misogynist cause. Somebody needs a serious history class.
  • Bilerico has compiled the Top 50 developments in trans law this year–including anti-bullying legislation, marriage equality in NY!, and more comprehensive health care services.
  • The always-brilliant Katha Pollitt at The Nation reminds us that we need to be talking about the poor and revisiting the failures of welfare reform in the 90s. She radically proposes:

Could it be that the chief outcome of welfare reform was to take poor women off the table completely? Now that they are less often seen as monstrous stereotypes—welfare queens, mothers of eight, teenagers having a baby to get a free apartment—they are of no interest at all.

Bachmann has made a point of lavishly describing how innocent the little girls are who are being subjected to the big scary sex shots that are being forced—forced, I tell you!—into their delicate, youthful bodies. You thought you were just taking your daughter in to get another vaccination, you know, but as soon as you walk in the office, the doors lock behind you, the “bump chicka bow wow” music begins, and Humbert Humbert appears from around the corner, leering at your innocent child and brandishing that “government shot.”

What are you reading this week?