feminist blogs

The international V-Day campaign has done amazing work for women world-wide — and women themselves have embraced V-Day in 120 countries. According to the campaign itself:

V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual slavery.

Sounds like something we could all agree on, right?

Sadly, no. Domestically, “pro-life” groups dislike the campaign because it involves the v-word: Vagina. And because, apparently, helping to end violence against women doesn’t exactly mesh with the pro-life message. I realize that sounds a bit hyperbolic, but V-Day is, at heart, about empowering women and girls to take charge of their lives. That’s exactly contrary to the “pro-life” view of women, family and society.

Students at St. Louis University are trying to do their part for international women’s rights by holding a V-Day event on their campus. Unfortunately, the administration is shutting them down, so they need a little help and I’m hoping that Feministe can come through for them. Below the fold is an email from one of their organizers, detailing the problems and what you can do to help. Please check it out:

Undoubtedly, you are familiar with Eve’s Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, and the world-wide V-Day campaign to end violence against women and girls. At our Catholic, Jesuit University, V-Day is a very special time for UNA as it gives us an opportunity to raise awareness about gender violence as well as much-needed money for local charities that serve women. Last year, in 2007 UNA was told by the SLU administration that we would no longer be allowed to perform The Vagina Monologues on campus–ever. On top of this, we are not allowed to advertise on campus at all, or even set up tables to sell tickets. Determined to still raise money for our charities, we found an off campus location last year and the protests and controversy surrounding the production helped us sell out all our performances.

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In response to Lauren’s suggestion a few days back that I write a post about something historical, I thought I would share with all of you a brief glimpse into that which supposedly occupies my day-to-day life. Namely, my dissertation.

The main focus of my dissertation concerns the activities of naturalists in the Pacific Northwest and how their work was related to the larger project of imperialism in the region in the early 19th century. In order to set the stage for this I need to spend some considerable time discussing the main economic enterprise associated with European (and, to a degree, American) imperialism in the Northwest, which in this case is the fur trade. Globalization is a term in much use these days, and while some globalizing institutions and processes are fairly recent, globalization writ large is not new. There is no way I can really do justice to the history of the fur trade here, but it has long been a topic worthy of historical consideration. (more…)

If you’ve kept track of the scant number of posts I’ve contributed to Feministe over the past half-year, you may have realized that I get very irritated when I come across blatantly misleading “science” reporting. (I guess it must come from being raised by scientists, then working in the media.) So my eyeballs bulged and turned a hilarious shade of pink when I came across this lead for a “Health” story on the BBC News site courtesty of Feministing:

Humour ‘comes from testosterone’
Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says.

The unicycling doctor observed how the genders reacted to his “amusing” hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal.

Previous findings have suggested women and men differ in how they use and appreciate humour.

Women tend to tell fewer jokes than men and male comedians outnumber female ones.

What we really need to do is find out the gender of whoever research and wrote this story for the BBC, because few things are funnier than someone who’s supposed to be a journalist, working for the largest broadcasting company in the world, making a complete ass out of themselves. Not to mention spreading the story to all sorts of other news services that seem to be taking the story seriously.

So, the first thing I always do with these science stories is find the original study: Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling. It turns out that Sam Shuster is a retired professor of dermatology. (Note to BBC researchers: this means he studied skin, not hormones or psychology.) Shuster wrote about reactions to his unicycle for the traditional end-of-year issue of the British Medical Journal. This season, the BMJ also features densely written scientific papers on which brand chocolate bar doctors ought to use to demonstrate bone fractures and whether magical powers are heritable, based on an analysis of Harry Potter novels. In short, it’s clearly a joke. I would blame the notoriously dry wits of the British for the confusion, but it seems all too likely that the BBC reporter is… also British, albeit maybe not a doctor with enough time on hand to write witty, self-referential papers about the statistical mistreatment of orthopedic surgeons in medical journals.
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Clearly a Godless liberal.

While conservatives are declaring war on the Muslim world, liberals are apparently launching an assault on the holidays.* This time it’s Thanksgiving. Michelle Malkin is in a tizzy because the Seattle School District sent out a letter to its staff letting them know that Thanksgiving may be a difficult time of year for Native students, who for some crazy reason don’t just associate Thanksgiving with turkey and pumpkin pie. Now, the school district didn’t tell teachers not to discuss Thanksgiving; it didn’t even give them rules or guidelines for what to say. It just asked them to recognize that this may come up — in other words, district leaders did their jobs by preparing teachers and staff for potential issues.

But that doesn’t fly with Michelle. Here’s how she thinks Thanksgiving should be taught:

Chuck Narcho, a member of the Maricopa and Tohono O’odham tribes who works as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.

“If you are going to teach, you need to keep it positive,” he said. “They can learn about the truths when they grow up. Caring, sharing and giving — that is what was originally intended.”

I may be crazy, but last I checked, a whole lot of Seattle School District students are not “younger children.” Further, school is for teaching, not cultural indoctrination. We can pretend that settlers and Native populations got along just dandy, and we can also teach students that slavery was a real hoot for African Americans, that Japanese internment was kinda like camping, and European Jews didn’t mind being relocated to their own special neighborhoods — that doesn’t make it so.

Malkin and other conservatives routinely accuse “left-wing academics” of twisting the truth to suit their ideological aims. So here’s the introductory paragraph to the letter that the Seattle School District sent out to its staff; I’m sure you can just taste the liberal brain-washing:

We recognize the amount of work that educators and staff have to do in order to fulfill our mission to successfully educate all students. It’s never as simple as preparing and delivering a lesson. Students bring with them a host of complexities including cultural, linguistic and social economic diversity. In addition they can also bring challenges related to their social, emotional and physical well being. One of our departments’ goals is to support you by suggesting ways to assist you in removing barriers to learning by promoting respect and honoring the diversity of our students, staff and families.

Respecting and honoring diversity? Recognizing that people come from diverse backgrounds? Sounds like Communism to me.

Reading Malkin’s comment section is always a trip, because I’ve never seen so many people with such victim complexes all in one place. One dude bemoans his oppressed status and says, literally, “Is there a special interest minority group for white heterosexual males?” Others proudly declare that, in my house, we WILL celebrate Thanksgiving!

It would be sad if it weren’t so funny (or perhaps the other way around?). Soldier on, staunch defenders of Thanksgiving. Soldier on.

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*Probably because we’re big pussies who don’t know how to fight with real guns keyboards in the face of deadly carpal tunnel syndrome.

A well-timed entrance, if I do say so myself.

Hey y’all, hope your week’s wrapping up nice like Saran. My name is Katie, and I’m an undergrad at Harvard surviving writing my senior thesis on whiteness in U.S. feminist and pro-feminist blogs. Evidently my interview with Jill the other day wasn’t too traumatizing: she’s generously offered blogspace to let me solicit reader participants — a.k.a. you! — for the research. Thanks again, Jill; it’s a trip to be posting on a blog I’ve read and loved for years.

A little bit about the research, then. In a nerdy sense, I’m fascinated by the process of “performing” racial identities and constructing selves (in this case, white racial identities and selves) in disembodied online spaces. How do people read each other racially in feminist blogs? What white racial cues, if any, do bloggers and blog readers (white or otherwise) offer each other? Do offline experiences of whiteness and white privilege translate into blogging practices? If so, how?

Academics are publishing some exciting stuff on whiteness these days: the current issue of Feminist Theory has a whole crop of articles on the subject, and a few works have popped up that deal with whiteness as “habit.” In another vein, there’s a wealth of cool scholarship on “cyberfeminism” that investigates questions of identity, power, and anti-sexist social action on the Internet. Unfortunately, at this point there’s not much overlap between the whiteness and cyberfeminism fields.

Scholastic geekdom aside, I want to learn more about white feminist bloggers’ and blog readers’ experiences with race and racism online. It’s a topic that’s dear to my heart: for the past two years (what’s that — a decade in blog years?) I’ve been writing on a group blog for progressive Harvard students, a process that’s been tremendously exciting and, as you might imagine, incredibly frustrating. (Flame wars + Ivy League entitlement + Harvard Republican Club trolls = “Why am I at this school, again?” Q.E.D.) My blogging teammates and I have sparred with campus conservatives, but also had some tough conversations among allies, especially regarding “identity politics.” So my interest in U.S.-based feminist blogs, and how they relate to anti-racist whiteness, also comes from a practical, personal connection to this fine little corner of the blogosphere.

Okay, now for the requesting bit. If you’re white, if you’re feminist or pro-feminist, and if anything about my project appeals to you, I would love to interview you over the phone. It only takes an hour and, as Jill and I learned after conquering an international calling obstacle last weekend, it can happen even from a location far, far away from Boston. Comments you make in the interview will not be connected with you whatsoever in the final publication: for blog readers, I’ll be using pseudonyms in order to maintain confidentiality, so nothing in the thesis will reveal your name or individual identity.

If you’re interested in participating in the research, email me at kloncke at fas dot harvard dot edu, and we can set up a time to talk. If not, I hope this note finds you in good health and high spirits — and, perhaps, that it might spark some reflection and strategy sharing. Jill shared some insights in her post update yesterday, so maybe they can serve as a starting point. How can we be ever more responsible, accountable, conscientious, and creative in our anti-racist feminist online communities? Among white folks, what’s working well, and what needs improving?

Thanks, y’all, and take care,

–katie

Ugh.

A hangman’s noose was found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office at Columbia University Teacher’s College on Tuesday morning, prompting the police to start a hate-crime investigation.

Detectives with the New York Police Department’s hate-crime task force were investigating whether the noose, which was discovered on the fourth floor of the college at about 9:45 a.m., was put there by a rival professor or by a student who was angry over a dispute. Colleagues of the professor identified her as Madonna Constantine, 44, a prominent author, educator and psychologist.

Ms. Constantine is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia and has published several books on race relations, including “Addressing Racism” in 2006 and “Strategies for Building Multicultural Competence in Mental Health and Educational Settings” in 2007.

I don’t think it was hung on her door by accident.

This professor is fantastic. He was fired from his job for telling students that the story of Adam and Eve should not be taken literally — students apparently felt the professor was “denigrating their religion.” But his responses to the situation are hilarious and spot-on:

“I’m just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job,” Bitterman said.

Well, if the Bible says to teach it…

“I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here,” he said. “From my point of view, what they’re doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the eighth century.”

So perfect.

There was a much smaller-scale blow-up like this one when I was in college and taking a required first-year course on literature and philosophy from antiquity to the Enlightenment. We read parts of the Bible, and our professor (also the dean of the college) referred to the stories within the Bible as “myths.” A handful of mouth-breathing freshmen didn’t bother to look the word “myth” up in the dictionary, and instead whined to everyone in the class and to their advisers that our professor was insulting Christianity. The professor eventually had to get up and explain the term “myth” and even publicly self-identify as a Christian just to stop the “you’re persecuting Christians” bitch-fest. Even as a green 18-year-old not too far removed from my days at Christian horse camp (yes, really) I knew they were a special kind of self-righteous and stupid.

In other words, the “you’re insulting my religion” argument in response to scientific evidence is anti-intellectual and moronic, and it’s embarrassing to people of faith who haven’t totally traded rational thought for dogmatism. If you believe that the Bible should be taken literally, then please, follow the recommendations of one President Bartlett:

Back to the good professor, who sums it all up nicely:

“As a taxpayer, I’d like to know if a tax-supported public institution of higher learning has given veto power over what can and cannot be said in its classrooms to a fundamentalist religious group,” he said. “If it has … then the taxpaying public of Iowa has a right to know. What’s next? Whales talk French at the bottom of the sea?”

I’m sure he’ll eventually get his apology. Just like Galileo, right?

Thanks to Ms. Lauren for the link.

Test

You may know that there are lots of web sites that consist of collections of brief quotations uttered by political leaders. They're decontextualized sound bites, pretty much. I tell my students that they may not use these sites as sources for their papers; this is because the quotations are insubstantial and out of context, and they simply will not suffice as evidence to support an argument (it's in the syllabus, even). Imagine my disappointment, then, when I saw the following in the October 2006 PMLA, by brilliant feminist critic Susan Gubar:

It's no laughing matter that the Supreme Court is being reconfigured, along with our traditional civil rights and liberties, by a president whose commitment to education remains in doubt ("You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test"), whose military aggression has harmed people here and around the globe ("I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace"), and whose tax cuts injure many health and welfare programs ("They misunderestimated me"). As large numbers of women are put at risk by the widening divide between rich and poor ("I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family"), by the incursion into civic arenas of religious ideologies that reinstate traditional sexual hierarchies while failing to mask proliferating ecological disasters ("I trust God speaks through me"), have the goals of feminists been put in jeopardy?

The source cited in the bibliography is The Complete Bushisms. So maybe I'm a fuddy-duddy, but in my opinion this use of sound-bite quotations is not witty or clever. It's lazy, it undermines Gubar's credibility, it alienates a segment of the audience, and it mucks up the otherwise articulate and important points Gubar is making. It aids in lowering the level of political discourse to which I aspire and to which I hope my students will aspire. How can I not allow students to make this type of move when an eminent scholar is doing it in one of the field's top journals? (I mean, I'm still not going to allow it, but there it is.)

Founded in 1868 as a college for women, Wells College in upstate New York went co-ed this year. Based on this New York Times story, it's been an uneasy transition for everyone. What's most disappointing, though, is how gender stereotypes persist among men, even though it is clearly a female-dominated campus.

While I applaud the respect some of the male students display for "the feminine side" of things, I wish they wouldn't simply throw up their hands and say it's a woman's thing. It reminds me of Richard Roeper's lame defense -- that the attitude come with the equipment. You'd hope that in a space with strong female leadership that everyone would begin questions their assumptions about gender in a more profound way:

The students - 33 men and 383 women - came to campus late last month. Both sexes are now trying to navigate the new social landscape. "I do not say 'babe' on this campus, you know what I mean?" said Daniel J. Henderson, 22, a freshman majoring in environmental studies.

Mr. Henderson studied automotive technology at a community college in Syracuse, but transferred here for a different curriculum and small classes. In addition, his mother is an alumna. He did not think about the possible hostility until a few days before he came. "I was pretty scared," he said. "You can't walk in here and be a guy."

But by toning down his language and jokes, he said, he has avoided offending his female classmates. "You have to be more understanding," he said. "Not to sound cliched, but you have to be in touch with the feminine side of yourself."

Mr. Phillips is also being cautious, picking up after himself and taking out the garbage in his coed dorm. "You can't do guy stuff," he said. "Every time you want to sit and watch sports or a game, it turns into a movie."

"Not that I don't like 'Spanglish,'" he added quickly, referring to the 2004 movie, a romantic comedy about a Mexican maid in an American household.

Trust me: Plenty of women would prefer to watch sports over Spanglish any day of the week.

For more about the struggle to keep Wells a women's college, this story ran in the Spring '05 issue.

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In Bakersfield, Calif., high school student journalists are suing their school district for not allowing them to publish a series about gay students. The Los Angeles Times' Veronica Torrejon writes:

Similar scenarios appear to be playing out increasingly in schools across the country as gay and lesbian issues emerge as a topic of choice for high school journalists, said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Law Press Center in Arlington, Va.

"The old standard was teen pregnancy," he said. "It was a topic of great interest to teenagers, but one that school officials preferred not to see in print."

According to the LA Times, the stories under dispute include a look at gay students on campus and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; the nature-vsersus-nurture debate; and students and local pastors opposed to homosexuality.

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A new dormitory built to encourage student interaction at Swarthmore College is named Alice Paul Hall. Nice.