This is the global Feminist Blogs aggregator. It collects articles from many smaller community
hubs within the Feminist Blogs network. For stories from particular places, groups,
or other communities within our movement, check out some of these sites.
Feminist Blogs depends on contributions from readers like you to
stay running. We're doing a fundraising drive for the months of February and March.
Donations provide for the costs of running feministblogs.org and
provide direct financial support to active Feminist Blogs contributors. See the donation page for more
details.
She is the Principal Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as well as its music director. She was named the 2008 Conductor of the Year by Musical America, an industry publication.
One of those path breaker types. There are not many women among internationally known conductors, even if we are allowed to count the dead ones, and that scarcity tends to perpetuate itself in an odd way. Just think about a young girl who has managed to figure out that she'd like to be a conductor and is pretty talented. Her next step is to make her family supportive of her dreams and the step after that is to make her teachers supportive of those dreams and so on.
If she doesn't have many female role models in her dream profession, all that persuasion is made more difficult. Adults might gently persuade her to look for a career that is easier for women, because they know how hard it is to be the First Woman in any new field, how that First Woman must possess a platinum spine and the skin of a porcupine, combined with the determination of a bamboo shoot drilling through the asphalt (this happens somewhere right now, by the way, that bamboo business).
As most people (even brilliantly talented ones) don't want to live like porcupines drilling through the asphalt those Firsts are quite rare. Once they are in place, however, the path has been marked out and others can try to walk it with just a little less trouble. The snag is that the First Woman doesn't usually get rewarded for having broken that path for the rest of us.
Jeez. I was trying to write one of those happy and optimistic pieces, celebrating the achievements of women and the way society now is much better than the society of fifty years ago. Let's try again:
I celebrate Marin Alsop's determination, her desire to bring music to more people and her willingness to mentor young conductors. I celebrate her talents and hard work, and I look forward to a time when women conductors are dime a dozen.
Spurred by self interest completely, but still fascinating to watch. It's creative and a little different than what happened south of the border...for a change...
By Bruce Cheadle, The Canadian Press
OTTAWA - A budding coalition between New Democrats, the separatist Bloc Quebecois and Liberals is an exercise in nation building, NDP Leader Jack Layton told his caucus in a conference call covertly recorded by the government.
Layton's national unity musings were secretly recorded Saturday by the Conservatives. They held the tape for a day and then had an official from the Prime Minister's Office deliver it to various media on Sunday.
"The 'Coalition for Canada,' I love the idea - (but it) could be a deal-breaker for the Bloc," Layton is heard saying to laughter.
"'The Coalition for Canada and Quebec?"' he adds, to more laughter.
Layton, however, appears deadly serious when he pitches the coalition as a potentially unifying force in federal politics.
"Nothing could be better for our country than to have the 50 (BQ) members out of 75 who've been elected in Quebec actually helping to make Canada a better place. We just approach it on that basis and say, 'We're willing to make that happen. Here are the things we're going to be investing in and transforming together.'
"If they're willing to work with us, we're willing to accept that offer."
The NDP said Sunday it may pursue criminal charges after the Conservatives covertly listened in, taped and distributed audio of Saturday's closed-door strategy session.
There no wiretap crime under the Criminal Code of Canada if someone is invited to participate in a conference call and then releases the recording publicly.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper said an unnamed Conservative had been "invited" to participate on the call.
"Maybe the invitation was meant for the Bloc, and they accidentally invited us," said Dimitri Soudas.
"We were invited. When you get invited somewhere you have the opportunity to choose to participate or not participate."
Two disparate segments of the recording totalling about 15 minutes were delivered Sunday. The senior PMO official distributing the recordings suggested more will be revealed later this week.
The Conservative take is that Layton's comments show he began conspiring with the Bloc for months to bring down Canada's elected government - long before last week's economic update that precipitated the current crisis of confidence in the Harper minority government.
The recording is more ambiguous.
In a discussion over concerns that the Bloquistes will be "offside" on issues, Layton said that's already been taken into account and strategies have been developed to avoid policy conflict.
"I actually believe they're the least of our problems," he said.
"This whole thing wouldn't have happened if the moves hadn't of been made with the Bloc to lock them in early because you couldn't put three people together in three hours.
"The first part was done a long time ago. I won't go into details."
Layton suggests reluctant Liberals may be a bigger problem, and he exhorts his MPs to organize public rallies this Thursday and not wait for other coalition partners to do the work.
"Chances are there are a bunch of Liberals in the other ridings on whom we want pressure placed," he's heard saying.
As far back as 2004, it's known that Layton, Duceppe and Stephen Harper - then the leader of the Opposition - held a "close consultation" on what would happen if they could defeat the Liberal minority of Paul Martin.
The three leaders co-signed a letter to then governor general Adrienne Clarkson asking her to "consider all your options" if the Liberal government fell.
And during last year's raucous parliamentary session, the Bloc and NDP regularly voted non-confidence in the Conservatives while the Liberals abstained or supported the minority government.
NDP MP Thomas Mulcair said the Tories are panicking and desperate to change the channel on their economic management.
The recording, he said, is a breach of parliamentary rules. NDP lawyers are examining if the tapes break the Criminal Code.
As for the substance of the call, Mulcair said the talks with the Bloc were perfectly normal consultations between parties in a minority government. They began only after the government's economic update was delivered last Thursday, he said.
Layton is heard downplaying the policy questions that could plague a coalition of such disparate party interests, saying everyone will have to curb their wish list.
"What we really want is just to get Harper out and get this new group in because it's going to be a hell of a lot better for everything we believe in. Correct? Correct!"
And he warned his caucus not to be defensive because the coalition represents the majority of Canadian voters.
"You can see where Harper's going here," said Layton.
"He's going to say its the socialists and the separatists and the opportunists getting together. Those are their talking points and so we just need to push back."
Layton ridiculed the Conservatives over the issue Sunday night at an Ontario NDP event in Toronto.
"It's entirely possible the Conservative party is recording what I'm saying here right now," Layton told the partisan audience. "Here's what I have to say to the Conservative party tuned in: 'good riddance to you!' "
if what you're reading here grips you, holds you, fascinates you, provokes you, emboldens you, pushes you, galvanizes you, discomfits you, tickles you, enrages you so much that you find yourself returning again and again...then link me.
Not quite up to doing a blogaround yet, still one category yet to peruse. But I'm getting there! This one's for Mom, via Lis: a fascinating site called And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl, all about "Jewish history as told by the records we have loved and lost" by Roger Bennett and Josh Kun. Pretty neat stuff!
if what you're reading here grips you, holds you, fascinates you, provokes you, emboldens you, pushes you, galvanizes you, discomfits you, tickles you, enrages you so much that you find yourself returning again and again...then link me.
There's book going around these days, you might have heard of it, called Three Cups of Tea. It's by a guy named Greg Mortenson, who stumbled off of a failed assault on K2 'round about 1993 and into a small Pakistani village, where he promised to return the hospitality of those who helped him by building a school. He went home, he returned, and he built a bridge, and then a school. And then he made it his life's mission to build lots of schools, in one of the most contentious areas of a very contentious planet, at a fair amount of peril to self and soul.
Usually, do-gooder books by Americans (and other westerners) abroad do not sit well with me. Usually they are entirely too rife with the spoils of moral superiority, and entirely too charged with the self-important notion of one's own role in a moving scene largely too fast and furious for anyone but the self to take note of one blathering foreigner mucking up the landscape. The last foreigner who wrote a good tome about do-gooder'ing abroad was Paul Farmer - the Boston-based doctor who has spent about half his life establishing world-class community-based health care in Haiti - and even he has a few rare moments of such intense self-righteousness it makes the breeze blow backward.
But I digress.
So this Mortenson guy, he ain't all bad. Much of the gist of his book is that poverty is grist for the fundamentalist mill (he kinda glosses over the way that poverty is compounded in that region by the seasonal migration of the trekking crews, which juxtapose some of the planetary heroics of elitism over the sorest hot-spots of deprivation in the world, but hey, everyone's got a blind spot, right?), and that education is the key to opening up equality and quashing fundamentalism - and terrorism - before it even begins. This is pretty heady stuff. It was not a very popular notion right after 9/11; it's all kinds of trendy now, though in a fairly good way. Moreover, he emphasizes again and again the importance of educating girls; he didn't discover or pioneer the data on the effect of educating girls on improving standards of living in a community, but he champions this notion like nobody's business. Educating girls in some of the most conservative, fundamentalist regions of the world: tough stuff. Admirable, even. I kinda dug the book, western do-gooder-isms and all.
So I was fascinated to see the guy talk when he came through my town on his recent book tour. His talk didn't entirely disappoint; he does hammer some politics home, especially in his insistence that whatever Obama might get right, he's dead-on wrong if he thinks that what Afghanistan needs is another tens of thousands of American troops on its soils wreaking even more havoc than we've already wreaked over the last seven (count 'em, seven) years that we have already spent there.
But his talk is a lot more off-the-cuff than his book, and it's always a little disconcerting to see the disconnect between a controlled descent into a topic and a conversational parsing of opinion. First and foremost, he loses the gravity his own quest by delving into the sort of We Are the World feel-good rhetoric that is equal parts smarm and unadulterated schlock. Yeah, for anyone whose seen his talk, I know: his pre-teen kid helped write that cheeseball song (I'd link to it, but it's hard to find online...best I can do is the amazon page for the CD), it's not meant to appeal to adults. Problem is, once you stick it in your stock Power Point presentation, it becomes impolite for the adult audience not to cough a few times over it. Kids have the right to feel that they are doing great things by throwing pennies at poor people - that's part of being a kid who eventually grows into a compassionate maturity; adults who feel that way (gatherings of eighties pop stars entirely withstanding) generally are not nice people to be around, especially if you happen to be on the receiving end of those charitable pennies (and even moreso if you don't happen to show properly gracious humility for being the beneficiary of such enormous generosity as unwanted pennies thrown your way). I always find it awkward, then, to be asked to oooh and aaaah over what I largely consider to be an insult to people experiencing a whole lot of trouble in the world.
That personal bit aside though, he emphasizes the power of individuals to do great things, most often by using the stories of the Pennies for Peace campaign that engages children to gather up spare change for his school-building missions. That's all nice and good and all - I'm all for indoctrinating the young'uns as soon as you can get 'em - but in propping up that effort as a solution, it privileges charity over justice in that peculiar way that people do who want the world to look nicer while not giving up any of the privilege that caused the world to look sorta ugly in the first place. As if somehow wealthy white kids in Waldorf schools in Minnesota doing their holiday do-gooder project can ameliorate oppression...ya know, that kind of oppression that you can really only achieve from being batted around for thirty years between the Cold War super-powers and sundry warlording marauders gunning for control of the world's finest opium crop. Ya know, that kind of oppression. The kind that Mortenson demures from really delving into, because it really is more fun to talk about how the pennies in your pocket can save the world, when really, world save-age (to steal an apt phrase from the Whedonverse) is a whole lot more complicated than that. It doesn't take charity to save the world; it takes realizing that one nation using a quarter of the world's oil spells desolation for others that need those resources, or just don't need to lose a war whose main purpose is to see a pipeline run across a contested territory to feed the oil thirst of the west. It doesn't take pennies to save the world; it takes a mass down-ratcheting of our expectations of what kind of lifestyle some 300 millions Americans can reasonably sustain - how many SUVs we can drive, how many McMansions we can dwell in - to reasonably expect to house and maintain the world at large in a reasonable standard of living. It'll take a lot more than schools to save the world if those schools are routinely caught in the crossfire of trade made profitable purely on the prohibition of drugs in the western nations, a prohibition suspiciously profitable to large number of US corporations - especially those who sell high-tech police gadgetry and man high-tech prisons. To steal straight from Isabel Allende, it doesn't take charity, it takes justice. Justice for Afghanistanis, justice for every petty pot smoker picked up in a rather unjustified drug war. There's a lot of justice unmet out there, and pennies for schools in Pakistan are a small drop in a very large ocean of need - need that will be largely unmet as long as long as we rely on individual charity instead of systematic justice to prop up our sense of right and wrong.
Ninety percent of the US once supported George Bush during the era of his rush into Afghanistan; I wasn't among those people (if nothing else, I had too much to lose: immediate family in the line-up to the front), but you can't tell me that everyone who cheers on Greg Mortenson today when he yammers about pennies and peace was among the rarified ten percent that wasn't hooting and hollering for violence when the mood struck fancy. It's popular now to feel good about feeling good about the Muslim world; it hasn't yet become popular to do something besides throw the cast-offs of children at it.
Someday, maybe we'll get there. I'm not counting on the Greg Mortensons of the world to light our way.
HBO usually has a variety of great documentaries every month, and this month the one that caught my eye just happened to take place in Anderson, Indiana, a very blue collar area within an hour of my home. Anderson, like many manufacturing towns in the Midwest, is steadily heading towards the likes of Flint, Michigan: struggling, dying, devastated. But like many Midwestern areas, if you ask Anderson’s residents, they’re struggling but on the up-and-up, aiming to be positive despite the loss of jobs, staying afloat by focusing on family and other interests.
“Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana” is about the struggling Midwestern middle class and the hobbies that take the place of work and career when industry dies, in this case the individual innovation that is a forefront in Indiana’s racing culture. When the auto manufacturing plants that pumped small towns full of money up and left, they also left behind the driving culture that so infects the workers that once populated their lines. In “Dirty Driving,” laid-off workers and their car-fanatic families remove all their ambitions from job and career and put all their knowledge and passion for the industry into their junk cars to race at the Anderson Speedway, talking shit and fighting over their victories and losses as the cameras roll.
If you read audience commentary on the film, a lot of locals do what they can to remove themselves from the images presented in the film. To your average white-collar folks, these are some rough people that in many ways amp up the Larry the Cable Guy stereotype. This is a slice of a particular regional class culture. There’s no shame in it, I know it and in some ways am of it, and it is what it is. Some of the quotes I might take from the movie are outright ridiculous, yet the director doesn’t take on the mocking eye of, say, Michael Moore. He genuinely respects the subjects’ need for escapist entertainment, and moreover, respects the kind of time and innovation the subjects put into their cars.
Family overwhelmingly takes the forefront in this picture, even before the problematic economic and industrial issues presented. Each hero in the film is part of a larger familial unit that stands behind and supports them. From Alice Riall, the “oldest grandmother in the Thundercar division” who has a chance at winning first place this season, to Wild Willie Coffman, whose arm was mangled in a motorcycle accident and drives one-handed in vehicles modified for him to maximize the use of his mobile arm, the backdrop is the family unit whose time and economic resources are fully invested in the dream of the Winner’s Circle.
…which is exactly what struck me as a lifelong resident with a love-hate relationship with Indiana. When people can’t make their success by paycheck, they make it elsewhere, sinking their wide array of trade knowledge into another avenue that is often exclusive to white, able, heterosexual men. But not always. The redneck pride, the sexism, the racism, exists alongside respect for women and people of color who are active within the subculture. The men in the documentary, for example, despite calling one another pussies who can’t drive, have no compunctions about their daughters, wives, and mothers learning the trade and actively encourage their participation. Sometimes it’s a mindfuck to participate in this kind of local subculture, to be accepted and reviled at the same time. But by God, they’re Family, people say, and where we come from these are big steps in small measures. Last month, for example, we celebrated a huge, by our measurements, GLBTQ festival in town that brought over 3,000 people. We know this is small fries by metropolitan measures, but liberal progress in rural areas is measured by those on the racetrack, in the office, the kitchen, and the factory, who see people of whatever color, gender, and ability as people who have your back in the workplace, the bar, and the home.
On a personal note, the one social measure that hit home for me was one that hit the pocketbook. One of the major sponsors for the race cars featured on the Anderson Raceway was my employer, a small regional company that was taken over by a major national corporation earlier this year. Just this Friday, twenty of my fellow employees were laid off, people whose names were represented on the windshields of these cars as recent as 2007, when the movie was filmed. The new company that takes its place is unlikely to show the kind of regional pride that led to the sponsorship of these racers and contributed to their ability to stay on the racetrack.
This is a look at what happens when your opportunity fades and you’re left with what you know, even if that’s just a hobby, and a six-foot, plastic trophy takes the place of your medical insurance because that’s all you’ve got. So yes, this is a sports documentary without any direct link to mainstream feminist issues, but if you are interested in worker’s rights, micro-level examinations of the economy, or obviously NASCAR-style racing, this one’s for you.
if what you're reading here grips you, holds you, fascinates you, provokes you, emboldens you, pushes you, galvanizes you, discomfits you, tickles you, enrages you so much that you find yourself returning again and again...then link me.
if what you're reading here grips you, holds you, fascinates you, provokes you, emboldens you, pushes you, galvanizes you, discomfits you, tickles you, enrages you so much that you find yourself returning again and again...then link me.
if what you're reading here grips you, holds you, fascinates you, provokes you, emboldens you, pushes you, galvanizes you, discomfits you, tickles you, enrages you so much that you find yourself returning again and again...then link me.
The Associated Press reports on a survey by the Josephson Institute on lying, cheating and stealing among U.S. high school students.
Boys came out looking worse. By statistically significant margins, more boys agreed with these statements: "In the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating." "A person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed." "People who are willing to lie, cheat, or break the rules are more likely to succeed than people who are not." More girls thought: "Being a good person is more important than being rich." "It's not worth it to lie or cheat because it hurts your character." Yet, boys and girls scored pretty much the same when asked how they rated compared with other people they know.
The AP asked whether kids these days are worse than kids in the olden days. As usual, no one asked questions about gender differences, such as: Why do boys appear to be less ethical than girls? What implications does this have for girls in school, the workplace and their personal lives?
Think of politics, in which men still dominate the upper echelons. What may seem like playing the game to some people may seem unethical to others.
