feminist blogs

I was at the mall last night. I loathe the mall, and yet, I find myself there fairly frequently. The village where I live has no pharmacy, nothing other than a small convenience store that charges convenience store prices. So all necessities come from the mall and the large grocery store next to it. Thus, my position at a table in the Food Court, eating Subway sandwiches with my daughter for our late dinner.

As usual, I was people watching. The college students are gone, flown like robins in reverse. They’ll return in the waning days of summer, and change the character of this area. Last night, it was locals. And I started noticing something. Virtually everyone was carrying around extra weight. Lots of belly fat. Some of them were so slowed up by the extra weight that they lumbered. I started looking for lean people. There were a few, but as a percentage, it was less than 20 percent.

I know that we’re engaged in a national crisis over American obsesity. We blame television, and our sedentary lifestyles, and the availability of cheap, high-fat food. We drink too much soda. We eat too much candy and potato chips and fast food. We don’t exercise. It’s all our fault. We’re the richest nation on earth and we’re a bunch of slobs. Blah Blah Blah.

Welcome to My Amusement Park, where popular attractions include feminism and politics, NYC, sex, arts and culture.

Published by Kortney Ryan Ziegler, M.A. : My reasons for blogging are many, but most important, I blog to improve my writing, to connect with other bloggers of color, and to provide a space where my research has an audience outside of academia.

i am currently a graduate student in creative writing at Eastern Michigan University--holy crap, it's a chicana who writes! my mission in life is to make lots of money (as demonstrated by my women's studies undergraduate degree and my creative writing masters degree) and to end violence in all its forms against women of color and their communities. i respect resistance but get turned on by those who create power.

Who is hysterical blackness? She is a black, queer, feminist academic who lives, writes, and teaches in the US northeast.

Ruminating, speculating, pontificating, luxuriating, eviscerating. And cheese. And some other things. I can't name all of them here, I'm just mysterious that way. Did I say "mysterious?" I meant "lazy." Oh, well.

Midwifery as feminist praxis

Monday I was all day at Conferences & Events | Personal Democracy Forum, where I talked with Nancy Scola, Aldon Hynes, Juan Melli and Gur Tsabar about The Rising Power of Local Political Blogs.

I have no idea wether anybody podcasted the panel, but it was pretty clear that we all agreed on three basic truths of blogging in the tri-state area:

(1) We're hitting insiders and wonks. We have not even scratched the surface of the local media market.

(2) Open source community platforms rule, but CivicSpace/Drupal beats Soapblox's ass 4:1.

(3) Last but not least, as I was wanton to say all throughout the conference, if there is one distinction to be made between bloggers and journalists is that we are not there to break stories like investigative reporters would do. Our brand of blogging is of activist Op/Ed writers with a simple mission : Deconstruct the news and expose the truth or lies beneath the media-speak.

Which takes me to the moral of the (conference's) story :

El mundo from el punto de vista de una Nuyorican mami soltera livin la vida from the borderline while writing, spitting activist poesia and entertaining her daughter la MapucheRican

Publicly wrestling with feminist guilt since 2006.