feminist blogs

This is an image from the Icarus Project, a radical mental health support network. I saw it when it was reprinted in a local zine (more on that later): You can find a larger version here.

[Image description: It’s a poster headed taking care of the basics. It is divided into 5 parts: eating, sleep and rest, exercise, schedule and herbs, meds etc. Each has a cartoon drawing, half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as unhelpful, the other half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as helpful.]

I wish I was disappointed; I wish I expected more of so-called radical organizations. But no, when trying to illustrate unhelpful eating patterns for depression they show a fat person eating a burger and fries, and they contrast this with thin people eating a home cooked meal served by a woman (the headline is my alternative title for the Eating Well illustration).

The illustration is not radical. Fat-hatred is not radical. Food-hatred is not radical. People can pretend that their disgust at a burger and fries* comes from their dislike of multi-national corporations. But their disgust at a fat body is in plain view.

* Which as far as meals when you’re depressed go seems pretty good to me. It has protein, carbohydrates and fat. It will fuel your body.

The word ‘Haka’ caught my eye. It’s not one that I’m used to reading on American blogs. It was a headline on Reclusive Leftist Hilary vs the Haka. I clicked on the link, although I assumed she didn’t meant what I would mean if I used the word. Haka, to me and where I live, is the word for traditional Maori dances.

But it turns out that Violet Socks did mean that, sort of, and it was based on a blogger called River Daughter who has been using the word that way for a couple of months. River Dancer explained the metaphor she was making like this:

It’s all advertising and Maori war dancing. It sure looks ugly but it’s not as bad as we think.

River Daughter has continued to use haka as a metaphor for sound and fury from the campaigns that lack substance. In fact she expands what she means by the metaphor here:

What we have here is a Haka. A Haka is a Maori wardance, usually performed by men (figures) to scare and intimidate the enemy. The dancers do a lot of chest pounding and screaming and making truly scary faces complete with bulging eyes and sticking out their tongues. But just like the online world, they aren’t going to hurt you. It’s just to make you feel like they are the most dangerous people on the planet. So what if they scream at you, jostle you or make nasty faces?

To read such an ignorant characterisation of the haka makes me really angry. I have seen haka performed to congratulate and acknowledge achievement. I have been on protests where haka are performed. The racist subtext here isn’t very subtle ‘angry brown men are scary’, but deeper than that is the colonialist attitude towards Maori culture. River Daughter has no idea of Tikanga, she probably doesn’t even know what the word means.

From her posts, I’m guessing the only context River Daughter’s seen the haka is a sporting one. New Zealand’s Rugby team perform a haka before each test. While I think her description of the role of haka in a rugby test, is racist and ignorant, what she wrote was even worse, because there are many more haka than Ka Mate¹ and many more occasions where they are performed than rugby tests. I have seen haka performed as congratulations, as protests, as challenges, as rituals. River Daughter knows very little about the haka, but she is writing as if what she knows is all there is to know.

My point is that the Haka is not River Daughter’s, Violet Socks’s, yours or mine to turn into a metaphor of any sort. It’s worse because this particularly metaphor was ignorant, inaccurate and disrespectful. But I would never use the haka as a metaphor, even an accurate one. That’s one way appropriation works, the idea that you’re entitled to use other people’s culture, even though you know nothing about it.

A note for the comments: There are many threads to discuss the US Presidential elections, this is not one of them.

Edited to add: Sorry I had an incomplete draft and I posted that one rather than this. This is the complete version of my post

1. the name of the haka most often performed before rugby tests

So I find the American political process completely mystifying. At this stage it seems apparent that you guys have reached the baroque stage of elections - a complicated, expensive edifice that references nothing but itself.¹ Both the Democrat candidates would probably be on the right of the National party (our right wing). I read blogs of people who seem to see similar problems with the world than I do, even if they generally have less radical solutions, and I don’t understand the way they view this electoral process. So I’m going to ask a question of liberal/left-wing/progressive commentators, because I really want to know.

Who has said more that you agree with and less you disagree with Obama or Reverend Wright?

PS - the other thing I’ve been wondering is for Americans who are anti-war which is the more pertient question:

“What’s Obama doing meeting with Bill Ayers”

or

“What’s Bill Ayers doing meeting with Obama”

1. unless I’ve got what baroque means wrong, in which case it’s something else

1. I want to express my (very late) solidarity with Blackamazon, Adele and all the other women of colour who were ignored and dismissed by Seal Press. I want to express my support for the girlcott of Seal press. While there’s not a lot I can do personally, since I would neither buy books from Seal Press (can’t afford them) or write for Seal press anyway. But the whole point of solidarity is answering the question ‘which side are you on?’ I think women of colour activists are more important than a feminist publishing house. I know that my liberation is impossible while women of colour are enslaved, and that means that I have to make it clear that I stand with them against racism from feminist institutions.

2. I want to express my (equally late) solidarity with brownfemipower who will be missed. It is disgusting the way her names and intentions have been dragged and lied about across the blogsphere by people attempting to defend Amanda. Brownfemipower is amazing.

[There used to be bits of my opinion on appropriation in here, but I moved them to this thread. If you want good discussion on appropriation go there, or Holly , Daisy and Sylvia/M.

3. Finally, and less belatedly on my part, Amanda’s book itself. These images are racist.¹ They come from Amanda Marcotte’s book “It’s a jungle out there” that was published by Seal Press. I don’t just want to say ‘these pictures are racist and racism is bad’, but to talk about the harm that these sorts of images cause, because the racist ideas that they maintain are very specific. They are presenting indigenous people as a dangerous other. They are presented as things that must be conquered so that white people can live freely on their land. The idea represented in these images are one of the many ways colonialism is maintained and justified.

I live in a country where land has been stolen from indigenous people in the last five years. Amanda Marcotte lives, and Seal Press operates, in a country where the history of stealing land from indigenous people stretches back five centuries. We all live in a world where the distribution of wealth was established, and justified, by colonialism. The white woman, and man, in those pictures were stealing land and resources - everything Africa had that they could use (a century earlier, of course, they would have also been stealing people).

I’ve been writing this post for a week. Writing other posts about these issues for several weeks and not finishing them. I’m posting it now, rather than trying to make it better, because silent solidarity isn’t much good to anyone.

There have been a number of racist dynamics developing in various comment threads. Amanda, and her defenders, only talking to white people and ignoring people of colour. Re-centring the issue on Amanda by focusing on a very small section of comments and demanding that they be addressed first. These behaviours will not be welcome in this comment thread.

I am not interested in the pontifications of outsiders on this. So specifically Robert, RonF and Sailorman are not welcome, nor are anyone of their ilk.

1. note for Hugo Schwyzer the problem is not that they could be interpreted as racist. It is that they are racist

The Union express, the paper of the National Distribution Union, is one of the better union newspapers in New Zealand. But there was an appalling article about climate change in their latest issue (not available on-line but it’s February-April 2008 with a Bunnings protest on the front cover). I think it typifies what is ridiculous about much discussion about the environment.

The article is called Be The Change and is based on the website of the same name.

My main objection is to the section called Save Money and the Planet, which gave all sorts of advice about what union members could do. Much of the advice assumed that you own your own home, and have capital to make upgrades, with suggestions to install insulation, and consider solar water heating. Then there’s the advice to turn off your heated towel rail and your second fridge.*

I am angry to read this nonsense in a union magazine, which is going to some of the lowest paid workers in the country. While some of NDU workplaces, such as mills, are well paid enough that workers might own their own home and a heated towel rail, many are not.

I regularly turn off my hot water heater, not for energy efficiency reasons, because it’s the only way I can pay my electricity bill. The idea that workers need to be lectured at how to save electricity is ridiculous. Low paid people know from saving money. What they don’t have is capital, some people can’t afford to buy a $6 light bulb now to save $20 over the course of the year.

There was nothing about landlords and government’s responsibility to provide better quality housing, and what unions are doing about that (which is probably because the answer is ‘nothing’). There wasn’t even any information about the schemes that some councils are running which subsidise landlords to install heat-pumps and installation.

I would expect a union magazine to be the one place you could find discussion of environmental issues that goes beyond individualistic moralising. That it didn’t, that all the Union Express had to say was the banal ‘be the change’ is a really bad sign. Recently discussion about climate change and carbon footprints have gone mainstream. Airlines and power companies want us to believe if we do our little bit then everything will be fine. Some environmentalists seem to see this as a victory, but it’s not, it’s distraction and co-option. Individuals can’t save the planet, anymore than they can end war. The way the world’s resources are used is not decided by consumers, but at by companies at the point of production. Action around climate change which ignores this isn’t so much rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic, but telling the passengers to lose weight so it’ll sink slower.

* It makes me want to write a whole series of climate change advice in a similar vein: “Turn off the heating system in your spa pool when you are going to be away for a few days. Consider an energy efficient air conditioning system for your second home.” etc.

The sun was shining as I sat down at the Cenotaph. Like most war memorials it looks like a giant penis. No-one else was there, but I was I knitted a few rows, and the mother of kids I used to babysat for walked by. We talked a bit, mostly about knitting and she left. I knitted a few more rows; no-one else showed up. I packed my knitting away, and walked off. For ten minutes, I’d vigiled alone in solidarity with the people of Iraq.

That was the political action in Wellington on the fifth anniversary of the War on Iraq. Maybe the people who had called the vigil turned up after I left, I don’t know. It’s been a hard six months for many of us here - there are extenuating circumstances

But it’s not just here, the movement against the war in Iraq was at it’s peak in the first six months of 2003. I own this book:

I’ve always loved it, I flick through and look at the sea of placards in London, the shivering scientists in Antarctica, the incomprehensible naked demos and the mass of people in Santiago. I think back to what we were doing on the fifteenth of February 2003, and what a crazy chaotic time it was, and how much we managed to do.

But tonight, I thought different things at I looked at the photos of the young woman in Sydney who had written ‘Make Love Not War’ written on her arm and was making out with an equally young man; the school kids on strike in London, on the first day of the war; the soccer fan who ran on the pitch with “Stop Bush” written on his backs; the hundreds of windows in Milan with peace flags flying; the two women in Washington DC who had written Peace Womb on their pregnant bellies - their children would be five by now. I want to know where they all were on Thursday, the fifth anniversary.

Almost everyone in those pictures must still oppose the war, five years later. It’s not as if it’s gone better than planned. But in those five years they must have lost something, all those people who came out and took action in so many ways. They must have lost hope.

I think we, by which I mean the anti-war movements in the broadest sense, must have done something wrong, not to be able to build on that hope that existed in those months. I can tell you some of the specific things that I would do differently in Wellington. But those details are too specific to explain the world-wide shrinking in the anti-war movement (unless every anti-war group had massive disagreements around meat).

The fifteenth of February 2003 was amazing, but a war cannot be stopped in one day, even one day with millions of people. Anything we do must be sustained longer than the period where urgency overwhelms us. I think the question for those of us who took part is how we can build, next time.

In order to keep the discussion focused, comments on this post are only open to those who supported the goals of stopping, and then ending, the war on Iraq.

The first is at Pandagon, where Amanda wrote about Huckabee:

McCain has the Republican nomination, but Huckabee’s continuing ability to win certain states is still a major story. Now that he can’t get the nomination and the schadenfreude pleasure is over, it’s time for us to very carefully examine why an out-and-out ayatollah is so fucking popular in this great, modern nation.

That’s saying, pretty explicitly, this Christian is so misogynist he’s a misogynist as a Muslim.

The other is at The F-Word, a British site. This one probably needs some background. A while back The Archbishop of Canterbury (the head of the Church of England, the official religion of Britain) gave a speech where he discussed the role that Sharia law could take within civil law in the British legal system. If you’re interested in what he said I’m guess it’s a good idea to read it, rather than a summary, because to say the British Press frothed at the mouth in response to what he said is a vast understatement.* I was shocked at the response on the F-Word. The author of the post said that she wasn’t going to comment, because she didn’t know much about Sharia law, and then said that she thought this anecdote was relevant:

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a ‘no-go area’ for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: ‘The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn’t want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don’t you people write about this?’

Posting that story, in the context that she did, implies that the central fact here, is the religion of those involved. It treats these sorts of events as a horror which only occur in another culture. Nothing could be further from the truth. Families with connections to the medical establishment have been able to do all sorts of things to women by claiming they’re mad(a famous example is Rosemary Kennedy, but it’s not as if she’s alone). Why didn’t the f-word present this story in that context?

I think it’s offensive when white feminists create an ‘other’, which is the . I think it is a vile misuse of feminism when the other they chose serves imperialist goals, as islamophobia so clearly does.

But I also find it mystifying. Feminist bloggers stare down the vile misogyny of the culture that we live in everyday. I don’t understand why any feminist blogger would need to invent an ‘other’, or how she could escape from the fact that her culture hates her.

* I’m personally too lazy to read what he said. I can see the arguments in favour in allowing people to pick the framework they use to decide civil matters. But I think limiting those choices to frameworks based on different religions prioritises religion in a way that I believe is totally unacceptable. In Britain, (or the US, or NZ) it would also leave all those without religion still suck with a framework that is based on Christianity. I don’t think the solution to a legal framework based on one religion is to say ‘we’ll let other religions have an influence in some parts of that framework’. Although I’m willing to be convinced if people want to argue about that issue in the comments.

I’ve loved Joss Whedon for going on ten years now. Sometimes my fangirl moments can be fickle and short lived, but my love for Joss Whedon has remained constant.

It’s helped that every so often Joss will surprise me by being far more awesome than I ever imagined (have you ever listened to the Innocence commentary? There’s a lot of awesome there). The first I remember was from the Onion AV Club, way back when I didn’t know that much about his politics:

don’t want it to have my name on it if it doesn’t reflect what I want to say. Because once you get to the position of actually getting to say something, which is a level most writers never even get to, and is a great blessing, you then have to worry about what it is you’re actually saying. I don’t want some crappy reactionary show under the Buffy name. If my name’s going to be on it, it should be mine. Now, the books I have nothing to do with, and I’ve never read them. They could be, “Buffy realized that abortion was wrong!” and I would have no idea. So, after my big, heartfelt, teary speech, I realize that I was once again lying. But I sort of drew the line. I was like, “I can’t possibly read these books!”

Joss has often suggested collective action as the solution for the big problems and recently that’s got a lot more overt (I’m thinking the Buffy series finale, and ‘The Chain’ comic)

But I still didn’t expect him to become a militant union activist. He’s just posted on United Hollywood. He said

Our negotiators have the specific task of forgetting the past and dealing only with the numbers before them. Their ability to do that impresses me greatly, but I maintain that it’s their job to treat the studios like business partners and it’s our job to remember who they really are. The studios are inefficient, power-hungry, thieving corporate giants who have made the life of the working writer harder from decade to decade. They are run by men so out of touch with basic humanity that they would see Rome burn before they would think about the concept of fair compensation. I maintain that they have never revealed their true agenda in the causing and handling of this strike, and to expect them to now is cock-eyed optimism of the most dangerous kind.

and

This is not over. Nor is it close. Until the moment it is over, it can never be close. Because if we see the finish line we will flag and they are absolutely counting on us to do that. In the room, reason. On the streets, on the net, I say reason is for the ‘moderates’. Remember what they’ve done. Remember what they’re trying to take from us. FIGHT. FIGHT. FIGHT.

I have been mugged an embarrassing number of times, even for a New Yorker. I’ve been yelled at and chased, beaten down and kicked, threatened with a gun and the only mugger who still hurts my gut is the one who made me shake his hand. Until there is a deal – the right deal, not the DGA deal – held out, let’s keep our hands in our pockets or on our signs. Let’s not be victims. Let’s never.

He also did a radio show on the strike, which is of similar stuff.

I think ‘imperialist lapdog’ would be the nicest thing that I could say about Suharto, the former Indonesian Prime Minister who died recently. His government secured resources for capitalists, by systemic brutality of the people who lived there. Timor Leste has fought and won independence (of a sort), but West Papua and Acheh are still fighting for their freedom, having withstood decades of attack from the state.

Those who remain silent about his actions at the time of his death are making it explicit that they prioritise West Papua’s Copper and gold over its people.

I will say this at least the American Ambassdor is honest:

Cameron Hume, the US ambassador in Jakarta, said Suharto was a close ally who led his country through a period of “remarkable” development.

Nothing I could say about Palestinians forcing open the Gaza-Eygypt border at Rafah could possibly measure up to that action’s power.

Egypt is already trying to close the border. Maybe by the time I wake up tomorrow this relief will be shut off again, but maybe the Egyptian government will find it hard to shut people back in. It’s the world’s biggest prison break and should remind everyone of the possibility and power of resistance.

For more Raising Yosuf, brownfemipower has a great collection of links, and Al Jazeera is always good.