feminist blogs

From the New York Times (link via this ain’t livin’):

The upper house of India’s Parliament passed a bill Tuesday that would amend the Constitution to reserve one-third of the seats in India’s national and state legislatures for women, after the measure stirred two days of political chaos that could whittle the governing coalition’s majority to a dangerously thin margin.
[...]
Tuesday’s vote was the first of four hurdles the measure must clear. The lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, must pass the bill, then the proposed amendment will need to win approval from at least half of India’s state legislatures. Then India’s president, a largely ceremonial post, must sign off.

Click through for some context and criticisms of the bill, for instance there’s concern ‘that it will favor wealthy upper-caste women at the expense of the lower castes and Muslims’.

The Indian Express provides some regional and international context. They also have an article on latest UNDP report, which suggests that ‘that quotas for women-held seats in political bodies can be “effective” and are “necessary” for overall growth.’ And here’s an article at the Hindistan Times that is well worth a read. cim from Refusing the default has an analysis of how quotas work and might work in various political systems, jumping off from the criticism mentioned above.

To recap: See Women owe society neither babies nor excuses. As this post does, it jumps off from the following remark by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to Nina Funnell:

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I’ve come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock.

I’d like to think this was a one-off thoughtless comment, but it’s not. It’s just a slice of the “wimminz are for babiez” pie. I’d like to share with you another slice, one Rudd might have thought of before making his comment, as this kind of sentiment is heaped on his deputy all the time.

Julia Gillard is Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister. And the Minister for Education, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and also the Minister for Social Inclusion. She became the first woman to run the country (well, you know, apart from the Queen) when in 2007 she assumed the role of Acting Prime Minister while Kevin Rudd was overseas. I don’t like everything she’s done, but you’ve got to hand it to her, Gillard is an accomplished politician. Yet her short red hair is a constant topic of national conversation. In fact, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail has a whole gallery of her changing hairstyles! There’ve been rumours and jokes that she’s a Sekrit Lesbian because apparently some people (read: straight men) can’t deal with the idea of a powerful woman who doesn’t take shit and thus must, um, well, the logic fails, really. (I must say I am rather amused that my blog’s the number one result on google for the search term ‘julia gillard dyke’.) But the thing that has disgusted me the most have been the assertions that she’s not fit to lead and that her opinions don’t count because she hasn’t any children.

Famously, in 2007, Senator Bill Heffernan of the Liberal Party (Gillard and Rudd are members of Labor) said that Gillard wouldn’t do well at running the country because she is ‘deliberately barren’. He subsequently apologised. It was… well, you can imagine how jaws dropped across Australia. But it didn’t end there.

Recently there’s been a national discussion, shall we say, about virginity. This was sparked by an interview given to the Australian Women’s Weekly by Tony Abbott, who is the Federal Opposition Leader. (That is, the head of the Liberal Party. The role of the opposition party is to act as an alternative government, pushing against the government and being the rival party during elections. Liberal and Labor are the two main Australian political parties, so one is always in power or in opposition. The Liberal Party is actually the primary conservative party, and Labor is more to the left but not actually to the left. Anyway, back to Tony Abbott.) He discussed his advice to his daughters about virginity and his thoughts on abstinence in general; you can read a bit about it here. His remarks could take a post all on its own, but I want to talk about a chain of responses that ensued. Julia Gillard said, ‘Australian women want to make their own choices and they don’t want to be lectured to by Mr Abbott’. To which Liberal Senator George Brandis replied ‘the vehemence of her reaction in fact shows that she just doesn’t understand the way parents think’.

‘I think that although Julia Gillard is a very clever politician, she is very much a one-dimensional person and I do think her reaction, her over-reaction to the, in my view, quite unexceptionable remarks Tony Abbott made as the father of daughters, is not something she would have said if she were herself the mother of teenage daughters.’

Emphasis mine. Gillard continues to be treated as though she’s a person of fewer dimensions than some because she doesn’t have children. Less worthy of being in power, of having an opinion. She’s being held to different standards than a male politician without children in her position would be. Implicitly, she’s not worthy as a woman, because she’s not fulfilling women’s roles: she’s politically powerful and she’s not a mother. The way Gillard is treated is pretty disgusting, and it’s shameless and public, too.

We need to make it okay for women to be in public life; to be prominent, and powerful, and successful, and a woman all at the same time. We need to make it no big deal to be a woman with no children in the public sphere, and we need to make it viable to be a woman with children in same. We need to accept all women as proper women irrespective of whether they reproduce or not (which isn’t, as Brandis seems to think, a choice for everyone). We need to make it okay.

I salute Ms Gillard for holding her head up through all the bullshit she has to deal with.

There was a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald the other week you should have a read of, Don’t be rattled by the baby guilt trip by Nina Funnell.

Funnell was recently in attendance when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a speech ‘about the ”crisis” of Australia’s ageing population and the various economic challenges we will face as a result.’ For context, Australia’s birth rate has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 since the 1970s and Australia is strict on immigration. After the talk, Rudd came to speak to some under-30s who had grouped together, including Funnell:

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I’ve come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock.

You should read the whole piece as Funnell takes this down beautifully. (‘Why do we assume it is the obligation of all women to reproduce? And why do we label them as selfish when they don’t? We never label career-driven men as selfish.’) I’m reluctant to tear apart Mr Rudd’s statement myself as, well, while the sentiment is pretty clear, what’s not clear from the article is what he said in full.

In any case, we can turn to the general sentiment. There are various harms in treating women as a monolith. I resent the assertion that not having children and at the “right time” is a bad thing. It holds women to be essentially baby makers who aren’t doing their duty to their country if they don’t follow the script – and this is something that needs an excuse. It also holds women responsible for the difficulties involved in pursuing higher academic study and starting a family at the same time. If Mr Rudd’s government, and governments worldwide, would be more supportive of those in that position, fewer people would have to face a choice between them. Until then, that some are put in this position is hardly their fault, hardly something for which women ought to be treated condescendingly.

What this script also does is assume that “avoiding” starting families (avoiding the right and inevitable thing, those naughty girlies!) is a choice for all women. Not every woman is able to reproduce or adopt or some such, or is able to keep their children if they do. Some women are actively forced into reproducing. And some women, rather than having this obligation to reproduce weighed on them, are considered to have quite the opposite obligation, to not reproduce at all. Disabled and poor women, for instance, are often discouraged – if not actively prevented – from having children. You know, supposedly for the good of society. Placing the emphasis on “avoiding” reproducing means adopting a monolithic view of women’s experience, erasing many. They’re written out of the script.

And, moving back to the idea that women who don’t reproduce according to the script owe excuses, I think it’s important to determine precisely to whom these women are supposed to be offering their justifications and apologies. Really, who? We’re autonomous human beings, we don’t need to go around with bowed heads and guilty expressions for doing as we please, or as we must, with our own bodies and lives. Women certainly don’t owe babies to society, or to politicians, or to those judging them, or to anyone at all.

Women’s reproductive choices should be ours alone. We ought to be accountable to our own desires in these matters, not those of onlookers who think they know better.

Next time, I’m going to return to Mr Rudd’s remark and some of its particular significance in Australia’s federal political context.

Recently I was taking a trip through the Feministe archives when I came across this post of Jill’s from 2007, Feministe All Over The World. She took a look at the Sitemeter stats, which show you where in the world the most recent visitors to the site are.

I’ve been taking looks myself at different times of day over the past few weeks; we have visitors from all over! Most of you are from the United States, much as you might expect, and there are also a fair few folks from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. We’ve visitors from New Zealand, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Germany, Norway, Morocco, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Yemen, Ukraine, France, Hungary, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates, and that’s only a sampling!

It’s a marvellous thing to know that you’re tucked away in front of your computer in your little corner of the world, yet you’re in community with so many people. So let’s see where we’re all from!

Leave a comment telling us where you’re from and, if it differs, where you live. Also, what’s the time where you are as you’re commenting?

I myself was born in Sydney, Australia, and live here still, though I keep threatening my family with moving to Denmark. It’s 8.17 on Sunday morning.

International Women’s Day is coming up in just a few days. What is IWD, I hear you say? I’m glad you asked! IWD has been marked yearly on 8 March since the early twentieth century. That is, it began with a National Women’s Day in the United States on 28 February 1909 as started by the Socialist Party of America. The next year, a more international Women’s Day came about with a vote at the Socialist International meeting in Copenhagen. IWD was first celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland the next year, and gradually spread around the world; you can read more about all this at the UN website. Wikipedia lists the following countries as observing the day: Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Italy, Israel, Laos, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zambia. That’s quite a list!

In 1975, International Women’s Day was adopted by the United Nations. They assign a new theme every year; this year’s theme is ‘Equal rights, equal opportunities: Progress for all’. On their site they’ve got listed a wide range of events, and these are not limited to 8 March. In fact, if you hurry you can get into online discussions by way of contributing to Beijing+15, the 15-year review of progress following on from the hugely important Beijing Platform for Action. Here’s the UN’s calendar of events around women’s rights for this year.

But wait, there’s more! Here’s a pretty good website dedicated to International Women’s Day, not an official one, I’ll note. They maintain a list of IWD events around the world; as I’m writing this, upwards of 500 are listed. What’s more, if you’ve got a celebration or event or gathering planned, you can add it to the site yourself. If you were wondering whence I obtained that nifty logo up top, it’s from this page and there are a bunch more.

Gender Across Borders (which is a marvellous feminist blog with an international focus you should check out) has something special planned. They’re running a Blog for International Women’s Day event which you yourself can participate in! Bloggers are being asked to think on either ‘What does “equal rights for all” mean to you?’ or ‘Describe a particular organization, person, or moment in history that helped to mobilize a meaningful change in equal rights for all.’ Be sure to sign up and get your blog on the list of participating blogs. You can grab all the details you need here.

So get ready for a day packed full of events and blogging and focus on women around the world!

I wanted to draw your attention to protests against the Winter Olympics by a number of indigenous groups in Canada. I’d not heard much about it until Anna of Trouble is Everywhere drew my attention to the protests; speaking of which, thanks to Anna for for helping me find some of these links! It seems there has not been much coverage outside of Canada, so let’s you and I do some background reading. Before I go on, a note on language. I’ve done my best to use appropriate terminology when referring to particular groups. I recognise that I may have slipped up and if so apologise in advance. Here’s a terminology guide if you’d like to learn more yourself.

On Restructure!, Vancouver 2010 pretends indigenous people have institutional power over Canada, a look at the Opening Ceremony and an overview of race and racism (particularly as they relate to indigenous peoples) in Canada.

Another rather good overview is Vancouver Games & First Nations resistance by Renee Martin, writing at Global Comment. She also notes that ‘Much of the Canadian coverage regarding the protests does not seek to discuss why the protesters are attempting to disrupt the games. The protesters are seen as rabble rousers who are destroying our chance to showcase Canadian wonders.’

An Indigenous Olympics? by Toban Black, guest posting at Sociological Images. Black discusses the use of Arctic Inuit imagery in the Games logo and the wide range of problems this entails, including the collapsing of First Nations, Inuit and Métis groups into one, the implicit endorsement of the games on the part of these groups and much more. ‘Of course, the refusal to take indigenous protests seriously is just another manifestation of disinterest in the welfare of living indigenous peoples. Even as gestures are made toward native culture, actual natives generally are ignored.’

prof susurro at Like a Whisper has Winter Olympics & Aborigines’ Rights. She points out the wide range of impacts the Olympics is having – and will have long after the Games are over – on indigenous Canadian peoples, with a bonus ice skating routine incorporating a truckload of racism against Aboriginal Australians.

Games, Games, 
go away at the Montreal Mirror, thanks to kaninchenzero. It’s a brief run down on resistance to the games (both in terms of reasons and organizations concerned). ‘“There’s a misconception that we’re against the Olympics,” says Stuart Myiow, secretary of the Mohawk Traditional Council of Kahnawake. “What we’re against is the theft of land, the oppression of people, the destruction of our Mother Earth and the continued oppression of the Native people and of women.”’

On the 15th, Democracy Now! had a report called Olympic Resistance: Indigenous Groups, Anti-Poverty Activists, and Civil Liberties Advocates Protest 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.

Here is a collection of photographs of protesters’ posters, stickers, and graffiti around Vancouver.

Some protesting organisations:

The Olympic Resistance Network. This one’s via Dorian of Dorianisms.

no2010: No 2010 Olympics on Stolen Native Land.

The Indigenous Environmental Network.

Lastly, I thought you might also find this article from The StarPhoenix of interest as it features short profiles of the two Aboriginal women competing in the Games, snowboarders Callan Chythlook-Sifsof and Caroline Calve.

You know how this goes. Hope you’re having a marvellous day!

‘Everything that can be invented has been invented.’ Perhaps you have heard this quote before, attributed to a Charles Duell, commissioner of the US patents office in 1899. This is a funny story, but it is not actually a true one. Still, sometimes I like to have fun thinking of all the things that had not yet been invented in 1899. You know, useful things. Amazing things. Inventions that have had a great deal of impact and importance in our lives.

Like… inflatable toast! You can buy 6 inch tall vinyl toast that you can blow up and carry around with you in case, um, you’re not actually hungry but you feel like having some toast on hand. It’s comforting!

No, I don’t really understand, either. I don’t think there is anything to understand.

Hey! I am surely not the only one to have had the urge to smash her alarm clock into tiny little pieces and consider throwing it out the window and then climbing out after it and jumping on it until it is so much dust WHY WON’T YOU STOP THAT ANNOYING SELF-SATISFIED BEEP, ALARM CLOCK? Well, perhaps a clever novelty alarm clock would be the solution to that or, indeed, perhaps the source of the problem. Either way, allow me to present you with the Flying Alarm Clock.

According to the website, it ‘launches a flying propellor when the alarm time is reached’. You have to retrieve the propellor from wherever it has flown to and put it back on the clock base in order to stop the alarm going off. It sounds pretty great, but, were I to possess it, I might well crush it in my sleepy rage within a week.

Have you ever wanted a solar-powered bra? I sure hav- I mean, no, I didn’t think you did, of course not, who’d want that and what exactly would you be powering anyway? I’m glad you asked, gentle reader.

A solar panel attached to the Solar Brasserie powers a small electrical bulletin board which, ahem, I’m sure you could find some uses for. Apparently you can store liquids in the padding and there’s a means of inserting a straw, in case that is a thing you are inclined to do. Also, the cloth they use is organic, just so we all know.

Thus this post is concluded.

The United States is not the world. It’s not even the centre of the universe.

I know, I know, it’s shocking stuff. If I were polite, I would have offered you a seat first. But I am an uncouth foreignerWell that’s just too bad. Also, you have frequently whipped the seat out from under me in the past. I shall illustrate how through the following fun fact-filled lessons.

Not all non-white people are black. Stop referring to us as such. In fact, neither do all non-white people fit into that routine construction of ‘black/Latino/Asian’ that you so frequently employ. Yes, indeed, you are not being inclusive even if you sometimes tack Native Americans on as an afterthought – you know, as though you’re not in their ancestral homeland or anything that would accord them some respect. In fact, there are many many many many many people in the world other than the ones you choose to mention. I would tell you about some of them, but I don’t want to contribute to that whole list-some-people-and-erase-other-people thing you do. And also it would be a great exercise if you could go learn about them! Maybe you could even meet some! Maybe you have been meeting some and have also been erasing their identities by acting like they were from ethnic/racial groups you’re more familiar with!

Oh, another thing about all that racial stuff! USian racial dynamics do not translate anywhere else on the planet. Hence their being called USian racial dynamics. No one else has the precise history you do, that unique racial make-up, those particular constructions of what those identities mean – things that ought to be respected. Likewise, this stuff works differently in other countries because your experiences don’t magically melt over into and obliterate ours. Do not, do not, ever try erase or modify our experiences of racism, Indigenous experiences in particular, by framing my country’s appalling racist history in USian terms. Have some respect for the stuff other people have to deal with every day, some basic consideration of where we’ve been. That means sometimes people are going to be uncomfortable with the use of terms that are benign or even positive to you, like ‘person of colour’ (because it’s often considered a term particular to the USian context, because it indicates a sense of alliance that isn’t universal, stuff like that). Sometimes you are going to be uncomfortable with such non-white-shaped cultural aspects in other countries. It is not cool to force your ideas about race and racism on us and in doing so alter and damage our cultures, our strategies of resistance, so that you’re more comfortable. I seriously don’t know how you stomach doing that.

We do not instantly understand all of your cultural references, though we do get a lot of them because USian popular culture saturates our consciousness until sometimes there’re barely any local TV or films or books. It is almost impossible to make a living as a writer in this country because USian products flood the market. Sometimes I’m watching TV and I’ve gotten so used to hearing USian accents all the time it doesn’t even register that I’m watching a program from the United States. We do not have your legal system, so references like ‘you can’t censor my free speech, it is protected in the constitution’ get REALLY annoying in a way that is quite apart from it being annoying on the level of, you know, the fact that censorship cannot by definition be performed by anyone who is not the government. And, believe it or not, the world does not operate according to your timezones and schedules, so quit complaining when we don’t respond to you at 3am our time.

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving! (Though that’s pretty messed up, not sure why you do.)

We don’t celebrate Independence Day either, because it is the day of USian independence and on account of our not caring!

We sometimes spell words differently, not wrongly, when we’re speaking English! English came from a country called England, not the USA, and it has spread out all over the world so that there are lots of different spellings! So can you stop using the USian flag to symbolise English on your little translator flags unless you have multiple versions of English on your system, please?

We, depending on context, may well have TVs and soft drinks and jeans and newspapers and it is not incredibly amazing that countries that are not the United States have those things! USians didn’t even invent all those things.

We are not all super unlucky to not be in a country like the United States of America, because there are lots of great things about living in other countries too and quite frankly a country with that bad a healthcare system in spite of having that much money and that large a population is not really a country I want to be in!

Other countries exist! And the people in them? The world around you? Do not revolve around you. We have our own contexts, but sometimes it is hard to focus on anywhere but the United States because YOU KEEP THRUSTING EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR COUNTRY IN OUR FACES ALL THE TIME.

So when you try and put USian racial narratives onto us
or your cultures
or the expectation that everyone you are interacting with is USian
Well, I get really tired of it.

So stop that please.

Sincerely,

A person from another country.

Link us up with posts you’ve written this past week. Include a short description and don’t just link to your whole blog. Have a most fabulous day!