feminist blogs

As if Cynthia McKinney didn't suffer enough indignity when she dared to change her hairstyle, now her opponent, Hank Johnson, has a campaign ad on Daily Kos trotting out one of the most hackneyed woman-bashing tropes there is:

I wonder if any politician would ever make a reference to a male opponent's "shrill, polarizing politics"?

Note to Hank Johnson's campaign: Disagree with her views, her voting record if you want to, but don't embarrass yourself by stooping this low.

• Color me impressed with All Girl Army. Jenny emailed me the announcement that the site is live, so I clicked over there. The contributors to the site are writing letters to themselves in the future, which is a great idea. In fact, I had a high school English teacher who assigned a letter to ourselves ten years in the future. She told us to turn them in in sealed, stamped envelopes with the address that would be most likely to serve as a permanent address. She promised to mail them to us. She didn't. You don't know how many times I've wanted to put her name here as a Google bomb. I've even halfway hoped that she had a good reason for not sending the letters, like a fire burned her house to the ground. The only thing I remember writing in the letter was "Re-read The Awakening." So I probably ought to get around to that soon. Anyway, check out All Girl Army.
• I read this article on ethanol with interest, especially this part:
  

  Last year corn production topped 11 billion bushels — second only to 2004's record harvest. But many analysts doubt whether the scientists and farmers can keep up with the ethanol merchants.

  "By the middle of 2007, there will be a food fight between the livestock industry and this biofuels or ethanol industry," Mr. Basse, the economic forecaster, said. "As the corn price reaches up above $3 a bushel, the livestock industry will be forced to raise prices or reduce their herds. At that point the U.S. consumer will start to see rising food prices or food inflation."

  If that occurs, the battleground is likely to shift to some 35 million acres of land set aside under a 1985 program for conservation and to help prevent overproduction. Farmers are paid an annual subsidy averaging $48 an acre not to raise crops on the land. But the profit lure of ethanol could be great enough to push the acreage, much of it considered marginal, back into production.

  Huh. I know there are probably lots of technical and economic reasons this won't work (ethanol can be make more cheaply with sugar than with corn), but what about all that corn used to make the high-fructose corn syrup that's in everything, which may be contributing to the obesity epidemic? How about taking that corn syrup out of the ranch dressing and using that corn for ethanol? This way, maybe the livestock can still eat cheap corn, and the conservation reserve can continue to lay fallow. I wish the article had addressed that argument.

• Check out Bill Benzon's essay about YouTube. Good stuff.
• Songs about sad songs are annoying, and I want to put a stop to them. I mean, there's "So Sick" by LL Cool J feat. Ne-Yo, Elton John's "Sad Songs (Say So Much)," "There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)" by Billy Ocean, and "Another Sad Love Song" by Toni Braxton. When will it end?

Did all of you already know about feministing.org, a rather regrettable parody of the actual feministing? I can't believe I've only just now happened upon it (via Ilyka Damen).

I haven't read through it yet, but the new issue of Scholar & Feminist Online looks fantastic. Those interested in biography, autobiography, and Carolyn Heilbrun's work should head over there. TOC follows:

Part 1: Carolyn and Columbia
Opening Remarks, by Jean E. Howard
Carol and Columbia, by Joan Ferrante
The Power and Joy of Being Difficult, by Ann Douglas
The Life of the Author, by Margaret Vandenburg
Out of the Academy and Into the World with Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Video, CUNY 1992

Part 2: Academics and Their Memoirs
Just Writing (A Feminist's Life), by Marianne Hirsch
Walking (Even Now) with Carolyn, by Mary Ann Caws
Memoir and Academics, by Charlotte Pierce-Baker
Teaching/Depression, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
The Age Difference, by Nancy K. Miller
Not an Academic Memoir, by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
If Only, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
A Border Passage, Leila Ahmed

Part 3: Conference Comments and Conversations
Video with Text Transcripts

Part 4: Coda
Reading in the Waiting Room, by Susan Gubar
Missed Connections/Mourning Carolyn Heilbrun, by Susan Winnett

As you can probably tell, I'm really enjoying Heilbrun's book. I'll likely post more about it in the coming weeks. I find myself wondering if Nels and Prof. B. have read it, and if so, what they think of it. I also wonder what Heilbrun would have thought about all these women who are writing about their lives every day on their weblogs.

As an aside, I created this comic of sorts before I saw that Collin just put up a much better one. Do read it.

Thanks to Pi for the title.

• Today, on the way to do some catsitting, I heard "She Loves You" on the radio, and I immediately thought of Jamie Bérubé.
• The blogosphere is talking about dreams lately. Both of these dreams feature a dirty toilet, and others have mentioned having the "unusable toilet" dream too. Apparently it's as common as the naked in public dream and the teeth falling out dream. I'd never heard of it or had it before. The latter dream, flea's feminist anxiety dream, has been eliciting some varied emotional reactions. I'm on the side of those who laughed. Flea points out that the dream has special significance for anyone who has worked for a feminist nonprofit. I found that my past experience participating on feminist bulletin boards helped me to understand it, too. Which leads me to the next matter:
• I'm really interested in reading some comparisons of the experience of blogging vs. posting on bulletin boards. Not studies, but nonacademic narratives. A lot of the same people who are blogging have posted on BBs and Usenet, and I'm curious about the range of opinions on the similarities and differences between people's perception of blogging and BBs/Usenet. I used to be a BB junkie, and I find them to be different from blogs in that with BBs, more thread-hijacking and trolling went on and there could be a good bit of infighting and drama. You're writing for a more specific audience with BBs, and everyone knows everyone else's hobbyhorses and buttons to push. I found it restrictive sometimes. Huh, I may have more to say about this later, but for now I'm going to leave it.
• An announcement about a new web project:
  

  Heather Corinna of Scarleteen.com and I are spearheading a young feminist project, the All Girl Army (http://allgirlarmy.org). Right now, we are looking for feminists between the ages of 10 and 23 to get involved, and we are also seeking older women for web design (desperately needed), outreach, editorial, community management, future planning, and other committees. Please spread the word far and wide about this, and if you're interested in joining a committee, email myself (jenny@allgirlarmy.org) and the group at large (enlist@allgirlarmy.org). We believe this project is going to offer an amazing and unprecedented space for young feminist community and organizing, and we would love to have you all involved.

  Peace,
  Jenny

  All Girl Army/ The Young Feminists Project is looking for a few good women to create, nurture and enjoy a women's community targeted to young women internationally, who identify as feminist, between the ages of 10 and 23.

  We expect to debut the site in May of this year, and it will include:

  * 29 featured blogs by young, feminist women and one overarching blog, collectively edited and compiled.
  * An active, moderated discussion board primarily serving, and intended to benefit, young women with a limited area for those of all genders, as well as a limited area for women over 23.
  * Cooperative ownership and management of the site.
  * Collective, dynamic projects driven by young women.
  * A myriad of current resources for young feminists: books, magazines, film, music, art, events and symposiums, other websites, scholarship funds and organizations.

  What's our goal?

  * To increase visibility and self-representation of young women: of your lives, your ideas, your goals, your achievements and your struggles: to counteract lookism and the media's representation of young women with your real voices, unscripted words and real lives.
  * To help foster a supportive, creative and proactive women's community, and nurture relationships and discussion among women of all ages; to help young women develop their feminism and their autonomy via women's community, and discover that other women are allies, not competition.
  * To create and sustain a collective board of feminist women of all ages to manage the site, with a majority vote in decisions given to women under 23; to provide experience for young women in creating, organizing and managing community, advocacy and support for women.
  * To provide mentorship for young women to learn skills you're interested in.
  * To provide a visible exploration and examination of feminism, of growing up female, by and for young women.
  * To show the world the hearts and minds of a whole lot of seriously awesome young women, and to give others, young and old, the chance to be as inspired by all of you as we are.

  Our board and founders are an evolving and eclectic group of women of all ages, from all walks of life. We are everything from a mother of ten to a sexuality educator; from an IT professional to an advocate for battered women; from a women's studies student to a sculptural jeweler, all of us feminist, all of us dedicated to women.

  One woman said that what we're trying to do is "like the radical Girl Scouts!" That sounds pretty good to us. Namely, we want to pass the torch in the best ways we know how, because we feel that all of you are going to redefine feminism as we know it, and have the capacity to make an incredible mark on the world. We feel the internet is an optimal place to do so because it gives us the ability to work internationally and dynamically.

A minute ago, I took a look at the blogs that Ms. started up after Christine Cupaiuolo stopped blogging for them. It doesn't look like there's much going on at The Smeal Report or A New Leif, and I think that's too bad. What Ms. should have done, and could still do, is recruit someone who's already been blogging for a long time, someone the blogosphere knows who already has an audience, and get her to blog for Ms. Some obvious choices would be Lauren (I know she retired, but perhaps she could be brought back in if it paid), Tiffany, Echidne, anyone from Feministing, Twisty, etc. etc.

I'm sitting in on a class this semester, and the professor often uses examples of public rhetoric in recent history to illustrate theoretical points. In one class, we were talking about norms. Specifically, the most far-reaching and important consequence of the eighteenth-century European bourgeois public sphere analyzed by Habermas is that it set forth a new norm: might-is-right differences in status and power didn't matter in political discussion; instead, the best argument prevails. As problematic as it is that this new norm emerged in settings that did not always welcome women or people of color, it nevertheless is a powerful new norm, especially when appropriated by said groups.

The discussion then turned to norms in general. The professor claimed that the women's movement, while an absolutely invaluable and much needed stride forward in the overall path to social justice, failed to provide a new norm to address the problem of division of labor in the home, especially an equitable arrangement for how to raise children.

Okay, I know there's a lot to be said for getting rid of norms altogether. For many people, they're oppressive, they're restrictive, and they institutionalize disapproval of perfectly valid choices (or courses of action taken when there was no choice; i.e., many women have no "choice" whether to work outside the home or not). But this professor helped me to see norms in a different way. They're templates, common forms for how to live, he said. Norms make things less complicated, which can be a good thing. They can be useful, eliminating a great deal of the struggle of having to figure so much out at the individual level and then justify the choices made to the community at large.

Right now, for example, I'm reading Feminism, Breasts, and Breast-feeding by Pam Carter here and there on the stationary bike/stairmaster. This set of questions Carter poses helps to show the confusion that comes with the absence of a solid norm:

[N]o feminist practice has evolved around infant feeding. A number of questions can be raised: is bottle feeding in some way equivalent to medical intervention in childbirth? should it therefore be avoided? does breast-feeding offer greater possibilities of control by women? or is bottle feeding equivalent to contraception in allowing women greater control over their bodies and their lives? should feminist support pro breast-feeding policy in order to strive to recapture the time when infant feeding was within the control of lay women? should they try to recreate the kind of conditions where all women breast-feed? or does a safe and (relatively) healthy alternative offer women more control and autonomy? are middle class women being good girls in breastfeeding their babies realizing that 'doctor knows best' providing a good example to the working class? should feminists campaign for private space for lactating women or should they challenge the dominance of public space by male sexuality and refuse privacy? (p. 19-20)

What do the rest of you think? A new norm seems reasonable, at least to try as a thought experiment. Would a new norm reduce the number of mommy wars, alluded to by Linda Fishman, Laura at 11D, Dooce and over 1000 commenters there, and most recently in the New York Times? Or would it not make any difference, because a new norm may still judge implicitly some people's decision to deviate from the norm? Does feminism already point to new norms for the division of labor at home, but they're just not articulated in a way that's clear to the general population? If so, what are the new norms? As I see them, they are:

• Destigmatize stay-at-home fathers. I've probably said here before that the SAHDs I know always seem to feel compelled to explain, even apologize for, their work. Their families don't approve of the fact that they aren't bringing money into the household, etc.
• Destigmatize young mothers (also single mothers). Provide more support for young women who want to have children before starting a career. This would come in the form of social support and free daycare for student parents in high school and college so that they can continue to pursue their studies.
• Provide on-site daycare at work and school.

Other than that, I guess there are only individual systems in which domestic partners split up the chores in a way that approximates 50/50. But that's not as easy as it looks when there are pervasive older norms lurking in the background. Plus, these new norms I've listed only tell social institutions what to do, not individual people. A solid new feminist norm, assuming we're going to try to think of one here, should (I use a heteronormative model here tactically) tell everyone what to do: the woman, the man, and the corporation, school, society, etc. I'd be interested to know others' thoughts about this; I believe I've written myself into a corner here.

One snap of my fingers and I can raise hemlines so high the world is your gynecologist!

The models on the Gucci runway wore purple print dresses that barely skimmed their tiny derrieres. They teetered atop platform pumps that seemed to be cobbled together out of iridescent plastic. Some of the tawdry dresses were cut so low that they looked as if they were stuck on backward with double-sided tape and must surely be in violation of some E.U. decency laws.

I don't read fashion stories very often, but this morning I was in the mood for taking in the florid writing style often used in descriptions of fashion shows. This story from the Washington Post had just that, but I was surprised also to find this bit of reflective critique:

Designers here have been engaged in their biannual ritual of defining what it means to be a contemporary woman. Strong. Ladylike. Sexual. Intellectual. Miuccia Prada celebrates what is inside the modern woman's head. The Gucci collection, designed by Frida Giannini, aims to address the lusty desires of a far different region of the body. (Definitions of masculinity are essentially static. With each turn of the fashion season, the only questions in menswear seem to be: How much will the peacock be stroked? Will the Everyman's inner Johnny Weir be coaxed into the light? Or will it be a time for caveman instincts to be set loose?) Each season, the definition of femininity is reworked from whole cloth. Instead of seeing a woman as a whole person with many moods, designers prefer to treat her as an assemblage of characters. Fashion demands and allows a woman to reinvent herself.

I'm just now reading and linking to the February edition of the Radical Women of Color Carnival and the February Big Fat Carnival. It's the first-ever instantiation of both, and I hope to see many more. This is important work.