feminist blogs

Well, it’s been quite the week, hasn’t it?

My time here at Feministe is coming to an end, and I just wanted to say a quick thanks to Jill et. al. for handing over the keys to the Porsche. I hope I didn’t put too many dings in it.

In all seriousness, this has been an awesome (though also occasionally terrifying and/or overwhelming) experience. Y’all — commenters, readers, bloggers, everyone — have consistently surprised me in the best of ways with your generous contributions and challenges and support. I’m a girl who likes to stir the pot on issues I care about, and y’all stirred it right back at me, in ways I couldn’t even have anticipated. That was the best part.

In gratitude, and because I can’t resist, I leave you with three parting gifts:

1) A Call to Action

Some of you may already know that the Elizabeth Stone House here in Boston suffered a devastating fire this week. Stone House has been doing heroic work for over 30 years and is the only domestic violence emergency shelter in the state that allows women to stay with their children while they get help, and it also houses a groundbreaking program for women with mental health issues which empowered them to take a strong role in their own care. These losses are devastating for the displaced women and children, who obviously are already at a major crisis point in their lives, even before this fire. Check this quote from The Boston Globe:

But for Erika, who had just set up the playpen for her infant and was hauling the last of her goods into the apartment Tuesday afternoon when the building started to burn, the loss was impossible to quantify.

“I’m just devastated,” said Erika, 34. “I just know my life was starting over . . . [now] I have nothing — nothing, nothing, nothing.”

No donation is too small to matter in a crisis like this. If you’ve got anything at all to spare, here’s how to give.

2) A Shameless Self-Promotion

If you enjoyed my blogging, you’ll probably enjoy my performances. The best way to keep track of when & where I’m on stage next is by joining my email list. (Mostly I perform in New England/NYC, though I definitely get to Montreal sometimes and I take gigs anywhere I can find them, so you never know. I do have stuff coming up for the Fall, it’s just not on my gig calendar yet, sorry.) You might also check out Big Moves, as a lot of what I do these days is make theater & dance-style trouble with those broads.

You can also make some trouble of your own by buying & wearing my Sticks & Stones Clothing tshirts, all of which feature insults usually used to shut us up (i.e. lying, man hating whore, angry black woman, hairy-legged lesbian, etc.).

Because words can’t hurt us if we make tshirts out of them. You can get them in a wide variety of styles, sizes & colors. Plus, every purchase you make supports a struggling feminist writer/performer. (That would be me.)

While I’m at it, let’s call this the Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday thread, since no one else seems to have started one. Promote away!

& finally:

3) Some NSA Love for Everyone, Even The Trolls.

(Be sure to watch through to the end, there’s an extra payoff. H/t Flea.)

This conference sounds awesome — and there are several bloggers who want to go but need a little help getting there. Brownfemipower has the list, which includes Fabulosa Mujer, Hermana Resist, Please Professor Black Woman, BlackAmazon, and The Primary Contradiction. If you have some extra cash, consider tossing it their way.

At the request of Roni in the comments, I’ll add that all of these women are fabulous women of color bloggers, who do not get nearly the blogospheric attention they deserve. I should have noted that earlier. And the Allied Media Conference looks like a pretty incredible event. Please help them get there.

I’m also going to move this post up to the top of the page every day or two for the next week so that it gets the attention it deserves.

Does anyone know how to get paint off a dog?

This conference sounds awesome — and there are several bloggers who want to go but need a little help getting there. Brownfemipower has the list, which includes Fabulosa Mujer, Hermana Resist, Please Professor Black Woman, BlackAmazon, and The Primary Contradiction. If you have some extra cash, consider tossing it their way.

Give us what you got.

Any family lawyers in the house willing to answer a question or two?

Email at feministe (at) gmail (dot) com.

Thanks!

I play on a pub trivia team, and one of my teammates is putting together a quiz of her own with some guys from a rival team. I mentioned to her that I’d like to see more questions about women, about women’s accomplishments, about historical events meaningful to women (not to mention more sports questions about women’s sports) in pub quizzes in general. To the extent that there are questions about people, they tend to be about men. And many of the rounds (like sports) are geared to what men are socialized to think is important.* Women aren’t exactly erased, but they’re overlooked. And if women and women’s concerns aren’t considered something worth knowing or learning about, then it’s a short step to women and women’s concerns being considered unimportant.

So, since Elizabeth agreed that more questions about women and women’s issues would be a really great and subversive way to get more people thinking about women-related factoids — because they could come up at any time on a quiz! — I’m doing a bleg for feminist trivia.

Melissa McEwan suggested Eve’s Quest, which she reviewed here, as a good source of trivia questions. But do any of you have any good sources of feminist trivia or factoids you can share with the class?

____
* Despite the fact that there’s a sports round every time and my team is mostly-female and mostly-uninterested-in-your-typical-American-sports, we win frequently. It helps that the Quizmaster is from Ireland and therefore, we escape the kind of football-and-baseball-centric sports rounds that favor American men. However, the Olympics are open to both men and women, and Liam’s sports rounds still largely ignore the women.

If you don’t donate to Feministe, this dog will be forced to wear a stupid visor forever.

Sorry for the outage. Turns out that the Feministe domain name had expired. I’ve renewed it through March 2009, so we should be safe for a while.

Renewal, however, is not free, and I am seriously strapped for cash right now, so if you love Feministe and feel like helping me to reimburse myself — and supporting the site in general — we would love you forever if you’d click the button below. Another copy of the button is in the About Jill section and we’ll put one in the sidebar, just in case you feel like giving us continued support. If you can’t donate, no worries — we think that your well-wishes and comments are better than money anyway. Aww.

I know I explained a couple of weeks ago that I’d been quiet because weird things were happening at work. Now, I am here to tell you a little something about the weird things: I wound up being forced into choosing between going along with a substantial change in the terms and conditions of my employment or leaving. I decided to leave.

So I’ve been a little taken up with decompressing after that experience (read: napping and going to the gym), filling out paperwork for unemployment insurance, and trying to find a new job. No real bites yet, but it’s only been a couple of weeks.

Fortunately, once I get one more form, I can file my tax return, which means a pretty good refund (thank you, mortgage interest deduction!), so I can be comfortably unemployed for a few months even if my claim for unemployment is denied. And even if my former employer withholds my final paycheck, which might happen.

So. If anyone has any job leads or contacts, preferably in public-interest law, drop me a line at feministe (at) gmail (dot) (com). Thanks!

(p.s. I can’t yet discuss the details of what happened, so don’t ask)

Merry Christmas!

If you have any cash left to give this year (or if the rellies gave you a check or two), consider donating to Wampum. Mary Beth and Eric and Dwight run the Koufax Awards every year, and every year, the traffic gets higher. Which puts a strain on their servers. They recently got a generator so they can run their servers off the grid, but the servers need new hard drives if they have any chance at all of being able to put the Koufaxes on this year.

Chris Clarke has the details.

MB’s Amazon honor system page is here. There’s also a link to PayPal from the Wampum front page, though PayPal has been a little wonky sometimes.