WELCOME TO THE SPORTS ISSUE!

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HELLO AGAIN!

I know it’s been a hot minute, but we are back from winter break refreshed and ready to explore all sorts of new feminist territory!

That being said –despite the risk of adhering to stereotypical gender norms by stating my truth—I don’t “do” sports. And when I say I don’t “do” sports, I mean I don’t watch, participate, or even think about them. It’s just not something that I’ve ever been interested in. That’s not to suggest I consciously reject all things athletic—in fact, some of my closest friends, both male and female, are athletes who live for their respective sports—it’s just not a part of my lifestyle. Well, not unless you count watching Basketball Wives as sporty, because I’d get the gold medal in that event.

Being an academic and a fashionist, I’ve managed to float through life relatively oblivious to what’s going on in athletics. However, SPORTS is all anyone can seem to talk about lately and this time it’s hitting close to home. Sarah Lawrence College—our predominately female, gender-integrated academic home base—has recently generated all sorts of controversy for its decision to enter the NCAA. It was a surprising move for a school that has built its tremendous academic caliber on, well, not being competitive outside of the admissions process. The school’s diminishing endowment and its notoriously high tuition have left the student body contemplating whether the $150,000 NCAA entrance fee is really money well spent for an institution that prides itself on scholastics.  Or more confusingly, what does this imply about the type of prospective student the college is hoping to attract?

The logic seems simple to me: NCAA accreditation draws a more specific type of applicant, which in turn increases the college’s famously-low male population, and ends with the desired co-educational experience the school has been seeking since the late-1960s—when it began admitting men.

Because all of the student-athletes were admitted to the school on their scholarly merit, it was hard to imagine the effects of such a transition. One such athlete eloquently echoed the scholarly sentiment of the student body: “I understand that Sarah Lawrence is feeling the pressure to join from most of our academic competition. Bard, Vassar, and NYU all offer NCAA competition as a product of student demand . . . but none of those schools [entered] under the motivations that SLC has made clear to the public: money and applications.”  In actuality, only time will truly tell the outcome of the school’s decision, and it’s way too soon in the game to be making foul calls, right?

The Super Bowl is this month (thanks for letting me know, Beth K.) and despite knowing very little about what that really means (except that Velveeta cheese will be on sale everywhere) I feel it’s due time for the SPORTS ISSUE of Re/Visionist! This month we tackle (pun intended) everything from female marathon runners to the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, with a whole lot of healthy athletic debate in between. So let’s warm up those extraocular muscles and on your mark, get set . . . you know the drill.

Oh, and speaking of drills, CHEERLEADING IS A SPORT, asshole. Obviously.

xx

Caroline

THE RE/VISIONIST SPORTS ISSUE:

The Women Who Endure x Emma Staffaroni

I Love That You Hate Me for Being a Cheerleader x Brianna Leone

Screw You, Tim Tebow x Katy Gehred

Ten Question with Carolyn Miles

Intercontinental Musings x Kelly Banbury

The Only Thing Chuck Bass Has to Say About Sports x Jamie Agnello

LEMME TELL YA /BOUT SPORTS x John Walker

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: Vanity Fair, Anti-Choice Race for the Cure, & Jay-Z’s Political Correctness

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Happy 2012! We’re back after a long winter break. Here’s a little of what has been going on in feminisms around the web.

Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue emphasizes fresh white faces. via Jezebel

  • The Globe and Mail explores the politics of the b-word, imagining Jay-Z’s lyrics without it after his statement that having daughter means he will no longer use the word. Samhita Mukhopadhyay from feministing.com is quoted:

“There’s an idea that being politically correct ruins art. You don’t want something raw like the lyrical mastery of Jay-Z to be diluted by these PC notions – that women are humans too. … But if we think of the basic reality that women are humans as ‘politically correct,’ we’ve got a major problem.”

  • Jeffrey Goldberg tells us how to spot racism in the Republican campaigns. According to him, “This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history.” Here’s a little sample of the kinds of assessments of the black community we can expect from the GOP [trigger warning]:

“[T]he pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.”

Keep your eyes out for the February Issue of re/visionist, coming very soon!

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: All-American Muslim, Victim-Blaming Ad Campaign & “Muscular Empathy”

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via feministryangosling.tumblr.com

  • In an attack on women of color’s reproductive freedoms, anti-choice members of Congress have pushed for a bill called the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act,” which seeks to prevent women of color from attaining abortions in the name of “civil rights.” Clarification: Neither Susan B. Anthony nor Frederick Douglass would have supported this BS.
  • Feministing breaks down the victim-blaming and just downright disturbing “rape prevention” campaign at “ControlTonight.org”, targetting — you guessed it — young women victims. Same old ridiculous narrative: the raped person should control the rapist’s urge to rape by NOT going out and drinking.  The ad’s image itself is a trigger warning, so be prepared to fume with anger.
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to the Forbes article, “If I Were A Poor Black Kid.” It’s entitled, “Muscular Empathy,” and explores one of the greatest challenges an historian faces, let alone a human being: empathy with people from very different circumstances than ourselves. Here’s an excerpt:

This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this–You are not extraordinary. It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t and then ask “Why?”

Harris-Perry is at her strongest when she breaks down the devastating and unseen culture of shame that is put upon and often internalized by black women; it is fed by a dangerous form of misrecognition that harms both individuals and societies. Harris-Perry is nuanced in her understanding of shame not only manifesting as a sort of shrinking-away, but in the compensating “strong black woman” stereotype that seems positive, but leaves little room for the full scope of human vulnerability. Shame, then, serves as a kind of social control.

  • Robin Lim, an American midwife who has served thousands of Indonesian women in their births, is CNN’s Hero of the Year.

Sebelius claims that her reason is that the FDA didn’t show that 11-year-old girls, some 10 percent of whom are fertile, understand how to follow the EC directions….If a sixth grader can’t understand those elementary, crystal-clear instructions, we should just move back to the caves, because civilization is finished.

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: Plan B, Feminist Art, & “Gaslighting”

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Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Hair Cut Off, 1940.

  • Bitch media does a series on feminism in art: they ask, “How did you discover Feminist Art?” Frida Kahlo (<3) and Judy Chicago get shout-outs! Go and post your own feminist artists of choice.
  • The best thing I’ve read this week: social critic and feminist Yashar Ali published his “Message to Women from a Man: You Aren’t ‘Crazy’” at Huffington Post. He recoins the psychological term “gaslighting,” or manipulative behavior that causes others to think they are crazy when they are not– this, he says, is what men do to women when they tell them, “Calm down,” “Relax,” “You’re overreacting.” Brilliant.
  • A study finds that abstinence-only education does NOT work. In case it wasn’t already obvious, here are some statistics of all the damage done by this unhealthy and unscientific mandate. via Slate.
  • At Jezebel, Hugo Schwyzer explores the stereotype that “sisterhood is easier in the winter.” It is all based, he says, on the “myth of male weakness.”
  • Here’s some warped logic for you: right-wing group “Concerned Women for America” has announced that they do not support abortion access for women in the military who have been raped–because– the abortion will just “distract” from the crime. Huh? Here’s a direct quote from the organization: “Women deserve better than simply being given an abortion as a ‘cure-all.’” Read Amanda Marcotte’s analysis.
  • The newest development in the Occupy movement: Occupy Our Homes. Since December 6th, activists across the country have been focusing their protests on the mortgage crisis and foreclosure. From The Nation:

“To occupy a house owned by Bank of America is to occupy Wall Street,” said Ryan Acuff, who has been working with Take Back The Land in Rochester, NY doing these kinds of actions since Sept 2010. “We are literally occupying Wall Street in our own communities.” The reclamation of foreclosed homes and defense of individuals facing unfair eviction helps make arcane economic issues like deregulation and securitization, local and personal.

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: An Anti-Racist Dating Book, NPR’s “Living Large” Series, & Brave Uses of Free Speech

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photo credit: Bitch media

So much feminist news to catch up on! Enjoy.

  • The wonderful Samhita over at Feministing wrote an unconventional and feminist dating advice book. Racialicious applauds her deconstruction of exoticism, anti-interracial dating narratives, and the pressures on cis-gendered men. (There’s a long excerpt in the review, too.)
  • American-Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy courageously shares her story of being sexually and physically assaulted by Egyptian police in Tahrir Square. via The Guardian [trigger warning]:

“I was taking pictures and covering events on the frontline of confrontations between protesters and the police and the military and a group of five or six riot police beat me, and surrounded me and rained their big sticks down on my arms. I was trying to protect myself.

“They also sexually assaulted me. They dragged me to the ministry of the interior. They dragged me by the hair and called me all sorts of insults. And this all happened in about seven to eight minutes.”

  • Another, quite different, brave use of 1st amendment rights: Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old high school student from Kansas, overtly and shamelessly criticized her state’s Republican governor, Sam Brownback, for his homophobic and anti-choice politics. She was sent to the principal’s office for her comment made on Twitter that he “sucks”– but as she says, “I wasn’t sorry for what I said because I meant it.”

-Losing Weight: A Battle Against Fat and Biology
-One Woman’s Struggle to Shed Weight, and Shame
-Why Doctors and Patients Talk Around Growing Waistlines
-For Obese, Intimate Lives Often Suffer
-Corporations Offer Help in Trimming the Waist

  • Notice any patterns? Shame, lose weight, trim your waist, waistline, suffer, shame, shame, bad, bad. Might as well read Cosmo. Read Tiger Beatdown’s excellent analysis of the lack of critical treatment of body size in this series.

credit: feministryangosling.tumblr.com

  • Can’t believe I haven’t posted this here yet. Feminist Ryan Gosling, created by a PhD candidate in Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin. It’s FLASH CARDS of dense feminist theory, in a cute package! Here’s an interview with the creator, who responds to the question, Why do you think this is so popular?

Feminists are apparently not supposed to have a sense of humor.  I think people are really liking the fact that this site is intelligent while simultaneously silly, and obviously self-referential. A lot of my followers are women’s studies majors, or people who have taken women’s studies classes, and love seeing inside jokes presented in this way. For example, if you’re a women’s studies major, you’ve probably read “The Yellow Wallpaper” at least 18 times. Now matter how much you like that story, it gets a little ridiculous.

  • A little politics-of-the-c-word action for ya! Comedian Sarah Mathews writes about her mixed (but ultimately positive) feelings in Guernica magazine.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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The OWS kitchen group at Zuccotti Park will be serving over 3000 Thanksgiving dinners tomorrow.

Although the smorgasbord is on break this week, here are a couple of articles for Thanksgiving preparation: how to talk to your relatives about feminism, anti-racism, and other related subjects.

Planned Parenthood has some tips on how to have a conversation, not a shouting match, with your anti-choice family member(s).

Colorlines aptly notes that it is certain folks’ privilege that allows them to “avoid” certain topics at the family dinner table:

If you identity with the ubiquitous 99 percent, you’ve probably come to realize that you’re not well served by all the silence. In fact, this Thanksgiving, you may actually want to ruffle a few feathers. Or at least, not let anyone ruffle yours and get away with it.

Read their guide to rewriting the etiquette on discussing race this Thanksgiving.

I know I personally am grateful for feminism this holiday; thanks to our foremothers, the women AND men in my family will be contributing to our big Thanksgiving meal–and they’ll both be doing the dishes. Woot!

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: Shame-Free Sex, Katie Roiphe (Eye-Roll), and Twilight

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  • To paraphrase Rachel Maddow, this is the Best New Thing this week. Maddow introduces us to the OWS “bat signal”:

At no point does she address how not fun and amazing sexual harassment is for people whose intersecting identities make them a target for harassers who want to exploit their lack of institutional power. The workplace Roiphe is commenting on is some fake workplace, in which sexual harassment never goes too far, never impedes anyone’s ability to do their job, and never creates collateral damage for those employees least able to fight back. She does not see fit to address the cost levied against the targets of sexual harassment, who are likely to see their creativity, productivity, and standing within the company deteriorate.

I said, “Considering the fact that my son is hungry, and he’s sick, and the fact that it’s not illegal, I don’t find it inappropriate … And the judge said something to the effect of ‘It’s my court, it’s my decision and I do find it inappropriate.’”

  • Raise your hand if Bella, the protagonist of the Twilight book and movie series, makes your feminist soul writhe in pain! GOOD magazine offers fans of young adult fantasy fiction a list of “what to read instead of Twilight.”

GOOD magazine's awesome "no charts" serve this topic well.

  • But Sarah Blackwood at The Hairpin has another view on the series in her piece “Our Bella, Ourselves.” She argues that Bella’s passivity and the “gothic” depiction of her pregnancy in the series “has the potential to revitalize a number of our larger conversations about feminism, especially those related to sex, pregnancy, desire, and autonomy.” She writes:

Gestation, birth, and motherhood are gothic emotional and physical states in which many of one’s most carefully considered intellectual stances and commitment to autonomy are challenged and often dismantled. Even more importantly, these are topics not much talked about in young adult fiction aimed at teenaged girls, which means that, perhaps in the name of empowerment and feminism, we have omitted a major aspect of women’s lives from the very narratives through which girls come to deepen their understanding of how to live in the world.

  • Here’s your new desktop background: Benneton’s new “UNHATE” campaign. Check it out.
  • Victory for a Roma woman who was forcibly sterilized in Slovakia and has been awarded €43,000 as a result of her human rights appeal. This is a huge step forward for global reproductive justice, as it is the first time Strasbourg’s European Court of Human Rights has taken up a case of forced sterilization.