feminist blogs

There's been an interesting conversation going on in the blogosphere as of late. Folks are debating whether or not Stephen Johnson's _Everything Bad is Good For You_ is actually any good. I don't want to go into much detail about what I think of the text as of yet because I am thinking that it will make an appearance in my Spring 605 course. Nope, I still don't tell students what I think about books until after they've figured it out for themselves. :-P

I've got to say that I'm a huge fan of reading popular press stuff in the graduate classroom. We've got to move past the notion that technology integration happens in a vacuum. We are seriously deluding ourselves if we think that what the real world thinks about technology has no effect on what we do in the classroom, what we get funded to research, or what magically appears in our campus labs.

In the past we've read Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities and Smart Mobs along side Stephen Doheny Farina's Wired Neighborhood. While Rheingold is definitely more popular, what folks think about and expect from technology is definitely affected by what he says because you can walk into Barnes and Noble and pick his books up, but finding Doheny Farina there is highly unlikely.

We've got to start taking the outside community into consideration for a number of reasons. We can't talk about the effect that technology has on the community without consulting the community as well. Come on ya'll it's time to shake the Ivory Tower a bit!

Kairosnews link

Institute for the Future of the Book thread (with Johnson)

Feeling tired and sentimental, so I almost shed a tear over The Happy Feminist's paen of praise to her mother. (Excellent blog on many topics, BTW.) Her mother made one huge, enormously brave step, then otherwise fulfilled all of the gender norms.

And of course it left me thinking of my Mum, and how different she was.

Mum, when I was a small child kept the house spotless - and even ironed our underpants, something I finally talked her out of doing when I was in my early teens - but absolutely hated doing it. She did it because she thought she had too.

And she was a dreadful cook, a job she also hated. In my memory - although I'm sure this wasn't actually true - every meal consisted of cheap steak fried to the consistency of leather, lumpy mashed potatoes and frozen corn and peas. It is no wonder Kraft macaroni cheese was my favourite meal.)

What Mum would really have liked to do - at least in my early youth - was drive racing cars. She once, famously, beat a famous Australian racing driver in a hill climb, and I suspect given the opportunity she could have been very good. Of course, however, that wasn't going to happen - indeed I can't even think of a female racing driver today.

And what she gave me, above all, were two things:

1. A determination to do my own thing. She hadn't been able to escape to independence, but she wanted to ensure I had every opportunity to do so. (She was probably five years too young. The middle Sixties in Australian suburbia were still "the Fifties" in cultural terms, and a young woman with little education striking out on her own would have been almost unimaginable - and economicly probably extremely difficult, if not impossible.)

2. She refused to put any burdens on me; to make any claims on me. She consciously and explicitly didn't demand payment for the sacrifices that she'd made for me. Mum thought emotional blackmail was a hideous thing. (An awareness of this issue makes me wonder about these career women who "give it all up for the children" - so beloved by the media. What will they ask of their kids in return?)

P.S. I was reminded in writing this post of a lovely blog I found via Tim Worstall's Britblog roundup this week. Super Woman's Super Blog is written by a manager of a newsagency in "in a desolate seaside town" in the UK. And, reading between the lines, she was the total driving force in it raising more than £1,000 for charity.

It reminds me too of Mum's work in various school Mothers' Clubs. Their members did all the work for fetes, tuckshop rotas and similar, but when it came to visiting dignitaries etc, the males who headed the Parents & Citizens Association would be trotted out to collect the glory.

Nothing like a frightening Halloween.

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Technorati tags: human rights abortion birth control politics religion reproductive rights Samuel Alito Supreme Court

I know that today's like Satan's big day and all, but I thought that was the good Satan, the one who likes anal sex, pirate costumes, rock music and the movie Heathers. I didn't think it was for the bad Satan, the one that helps racist, sexist, classist, homophobic polticians in office and then tells them to disingenously position themselves as their opposite, fooling no one but a handful of really gullible supporters and causing the rest of us pop veins in our foreheads.

It's the former Satan's big day, but the latter Satan decided to throw caution to the wind and be as grubby and ghoulish as possible by marching the new Supreme Court nominee--someone known for his unapologetically sexist and racist rulings--by the coffin of the first woman and second black person ever to lie in state in the Capitol.

They don't have the basic decency to respect the venerated Rosa Parks. No, to them, her corpse is nothing but a prop to make the racist fucks in their base feel a little less racist. How is it that we expect BushCo to do anything but just piss over everything else that's decent about this country again? Anyway, here's Steve's pissed-off rant, far better than anything I could say on this. I just have a headache. Sorry if my blogging is kind of weak today--the Alito nomination depressed me. So much effort the right expends in this country and for what? To keep other people down? Who the fuck gets up in the morning and thinks if they can just oppress people a little more, the world is going to be a better place?

Updates with link dumping:

Ezra makes an astute observation.

Digby lashes out, with the help of Loretta Lynn, at the immense amout of woman hatred that's behind the "conservative revolution" that is finally showing its true face.

And here's a quote for Strip Search Sammy on why it's okay for some women to get beat when they are forced to tell their abusive husbands they're pregnant and want an abortion--because some may sneak off without getting a beating.

Of the potentially affected women who could not invoke an exception, it seems safe to assume that some percentage, despite an initial inclination not to tell their husbands, would notify their husbands without suffering substantial ill effects.

I write about this shit day in and day out and still it's so hard for me to understand sometimes how the conservative dickwad pundits and politicians don't grasp that women are human, but instead live in some fantasy world where women are actually deceitful cunt-monsters, god's accident, vile sperm-sucking Eves who need to be forced by law to tell our husbands that we are "in trouble", if you will, because we can't be trusted not to sneak around out of sure feminine wiliness. It's just insane, it really is. I guarantee you that 99% of women who've ever been pregnant or just were afraid they were, went immediately to the man they figure got them there and told him first. The other 1% have their reasons for not, reasons that are surely out of the reach of any stupid conservative asswipe who thinks god was testing men by making women willful.