feminist blogs

Left breast

Right breast

Keep abreast of the situation

of the breast

the weight of the chest

that lies there threatening

to cut your breath

it steals your rest

this is just a test

of your breast

to ensure against

unwanted guests

who make their nests

like little pests

who could be cancer

fully dresssed

You must be certain lest

by death you are caressed

You’re just a chicken so obsessed

With your lumpy scary breast

Here’s a real life example of Job Crafting: The Pink Glove Dance.

You may already have seen this video of The Pink Glove Dance, which was created by hostpital staffers to raise awareness about breast cancer. I know that as soon as the music started, I thought it would be just like that now-famous wedding procession video (same music, also makes you cry).

But this video is also a great example of ad hoc Job Crafting. Each of the employees who participated in the video is creating an extra level of meaning to their work at the hospital, just by expressing the connection between who they are at work and their personal commitment to breast cancer awareness.

The phenomenon crosses all levels and departments of the organization– you’ve got surgeons, billing clerks and janitors all sharing part of themselves. While you can see why a surgeon might support breast cancer awareness, what’s in it for the billing clerks and the janitors?

Janitors and Job Crafting

The clearest example of job crafting is with the janitors (at minutes :48, 2:56 and 3:25). It was by studying hospital janitors & cleaning staff that Wrzesniewsk, Dutton, and colleague Geleye Debebe first noticed job crafting as a personal meaning-making strategy.

These scholars noticed that the janitors they were studying often went out of their way to engage patients in conversation, or even just silent interpersonal interaction. In addition to mopping up dirty floors, emptying garbage cans and cleaning up wastes the employees also comforted patients and visitors, demonstrated a respect for their privacy and an attentiveness to their needs, and even helped them get the nurse when a nurse seemed to be needed.

Making work more meaningful

Why would janitors make a special effort to converse with patients, especially patients who seemed lonely or scared? Because interacting with the patients helped make their work as cleaners more meaningful. The janitors realized that they could make a difference in the patients’ experiences, and so they learned how to interact with patients in a comforting, human, life-affirming way.

Janitors who crafted their jobs this way went beyond being cleaners, and became part of the hospital’s team of healers.

So when Bella says “My favorite part of the Pink Glove Dance was the janitor!”, you can recognize that she’s responding not just to his dancing, but to all that this dancing means.

See Also: How Job Crafting Can Get You Closer To Authentic Work

Citation:
Amy Wrzesniewski, Jane E Dutton and Gelaye Debebe (2003)
Interpersonal Sensemaking and the Meaning of Work
Research in Organizational Behavior, Volume 25, pages 93-135.

An article in Wednesday’s LA Times really has me pissed off. (I know . . . that’s really not a new emotional state of being for me, but bear with me.) In it, Barbara Ehrenriech (the author if Nickled and Dimed in America argues that we need a new women’s movement, and that the current generation of feminists is fighting the wrong enemies.

Has feminism been replaced by the pink-ribbon breast cancer cult? When the House passed the Stupak amendment, which would take away abortion rights from women who get any government help purchasing insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.

Soon after, when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that regular screening mammography not start until age 50, all hell broke loose. Sheryl Crowe, Whoopi Goldberg and Olivia Newton-John raised their voices in protest; a few dozen non-boldface women picketed the Department of Health and Human Services. If you didn’t look too closely, it almost seemed as if the women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s had returned in full force.

Never mind that Dr. Susan Love, author of what the New York Times dubbed “the bible for women with breast cancer,” endorses the new research-based guidelines along with leading women’s health groups such as Breast Cancer Action, the National Breast Cancer Coalition and the National Women’s Health Network. For years, these groups have been warning about the excessive use of screening mammography in the United States, which carries its own dangers and leads to no detectable lowering of breast cancer mortality.

Nonetheless, on CNN last week, we had the unsettling spectacle of Cindy Pearson, the National Women’s Health Network executive director and noted women’s health advocate, speaking out in favor of the new guidelines, while ordinary women lined up to attribute their survival from the disease to mammography. Once upon a time, grass-roots women challenged the establishment by figuratively burning their bras. Now, in some masochistic perversion of feminism, they are raising their voices to yell, “Squeeze our breasts!”

Um, excuse me? Muted and inaudible response? What would you call the 1000 activists who showed up in DC yesterday to protest the Stupak amendment? What would you call the 96,000 petition signatures that NARAL collected in a matter of 3 days? I hardly call that muted or inaudible. She has some legit points about the new breast cancer guidelines, but it seems like Ms. Ehrenreich should spend a little more time on Twitter, and a little less time pretending to be a Wal-Mart employee.

The Abortion-Breast Cancer Myth – Passionate Provider
Mormons Used Drag Queen in Prop 8 Ads – Media Bistro
Katie Couric Asks Why Women Pay More for Health Insurance – Womenstake
Women Have the Most to Loose if Health Reform Fails – Huffington Post
Didn’t You Know? Choice Kills – Feministing
Sex 411: The Low Down on Lube – Essin’ Em
Does Choice Mean Abortion? – Womanist Musings
Court Blocks Oklahoma Abortion Website – RH Reality Check

I’m too pissed off about this to write a proper post, so this is gonna be kind of a connect-the-dots type thing. A few quotes and links, some pictures, possibly arrows.

Here we go:

If you’re a sentient adult female in this country, you probably know that “breast cancer awareness” is a pink sewer hole of foul commercialization. If you don’t know this (possibly because you’re new to sentience, or because you’ve somehow managed to get through life without ever coming within hurling distance of the Susan G. Komen Foundation), read The Artist Formerly Known As Twisty Faster for background:

• Just when you thought it was safe
• Pink: Hell Trembles at the Hideous Name
• Breast Cancer Awareness Month Finally Over: Retailers Descend Into Funk

As TAFKATF noted pithily in that last-linked post (emphasis mine):

My fucking problem is not that a few girls got a pink rose and a “mini-manicure,” or even that some well-meaning beautician thinks dipping cancer patients in paraffin is a good idea. My fucking problem is what these things represent: that breast cancer has been turned into a cult of überfemininity.

And now the next, inevitable stage in the evolution of the cult has arrived: pornification! Mais bien sûr. It’s the key component of modern American gender construction, the fabric of our lives, the thing without which none of us could function or dress ourselves in the morning or even know what sex we are. It’s our fucking North Star. Can’t make a cult of femininity without porn, man. Bricks without straw.

Well thank fucking god, the Good Ship Porn has docked.

As detailed in this horrifying post from some blog I’ve never heard of, “breast cancer awareness” is now basically just “breast awareness.” It’s an excuse for strip shows and porn sites and T-shirts that encourage men to look at women’s boobs instead of their faces. I suppose there’s a buck for cancer research somewhere at the bottom of that barrel, but jesus christ. What’s next, “Tricking for the Cure”?

You have to go read the whole post, but here are some of the ads and pictures:

I salute the author of the post (whoever she/he is — no byline is in evidence) for pulling together the exhibit, but I wonder at her/his weird optimism as to the location and velocity of this particular shit train. The mysterious author writes that “we can only hope this trend won’t go full-PETA, using overt sexuality to advance one cause at the expense of another.”

Knock me over with a Wonder bra, but I think that fucker has already gone full-PETA.

New, Cheaper Female Condoms Now Available – Hiphop Wired
Holland Imposes Stricter Rules for “Import Brides” – NRC
Breast Cancer is Not Just About Boobies – The Guardian
Is Soy the Ticket to Good Health, or Infertility? – Alternet
Second Trimester Abortion: Breaking the Silence & Changing the Discourse – Abortioneers

Is a Personhood Statute Coming to a State Near You? – LA Times
Abstinence-Only Violates the First Amendment – RH Reality Check
Dr. Susan Wicklund on Native American Women & Reproductive Health Care – Blog For Choice
Google Will No Longer Accept Pro-Choice Ads – Women’s Rights @ Change.org
The Conversation on Race That Most Americans Won’t Have – Pam’s House Blend
Warning Signs of Breast Cancer – Susan G. Komen Foundation
Is Fear of Population Control Trumping Green Solutions? – RH Reality Check
Will Portugal Legalize Same-Sex Marriage? – Gay Rights @ Change.org
35 Catholic Leaders Support Repeal of DOMA – Catholic.net

As per my usual nightly routine, I was watching the Rachel Maddow show last night as Terry O’Neill, President of the National Organization for Women, appeared in a guest interview. The right wing nuts have stooped to a new low, realizing that their scare tactics with the elderly community aren’t sufficient enough to rally negative sentiments about health care reform. Their next target: women with breast cancer.

The Independent Women’s Forum has been broadcasting an unscrupulous ad in eight different states outright lying to women. The ad seeks to establish the idea that under a public option women are some how more vulnerable to dying from breast cancer. The factually incorrect nature of this lie just goes to show how stupid the IWF takes women to be. Attaching to this idea of women’s vulnerability under the health care system in an attempt to shore up support for an industry that holds a heavy burden for the current inequity seems blatantly asinine.

Let’s talk about the IWF for a second though. It seems as though an organization that constantly fights for the exclusion of women’s reproductive health services from a health care package would have little interest in the well being of women’s health. That’s the point though; the IWF has everything but women’s interests in mind. Their advertisement, for starters, is funded by millions of dollars donated from special interests on the side of profit-driven insurance companies. I think that makes their intentions pretty clear at this point; find entire groups of people perceived as vulnerable and weak (the elderly and now women) and then make them objects of your political agenda. It doesn’t matter what kind of lies you come up with; all that matters is that you scare already vulnerable people into believing that health care reform will impact their lives for the worse, regardless of the actual facts.

Unfortunately, women are already suffering from breast cancer at alarming rates in the status quo because of discriminatory science and a lack of attention to women’s health concerns. Under the current system women are less likely to get preventable care, more likely to live below the poverty line, and majority of the time work part time jobs that don’t provide coverage at all. This is the reality. Not some deceptive video by the IWF that contradicts what every breast cancer advocacy group is saying in this country; women need health care reform.

Abortion and Health Care: Is There Common Ground? – Feministe
Do We Want to Have Another Child? Factors That Can Influence the Decision – Queercents
How Do I Talk to My Kid About Safe Sex? – Mombian
Breastfeeding Can Prevent Breast Cancer – Feministing
Will Hillary Follow Through on Promise of Feminist Foreign Policy? – American Prospect
New Poll Shows Pro-Choice = Majority – Feminist Campus
Quebec Laws Could Force Abortion Clinics to Close – Vancouver Sun

After the jump, I’ve got a clip of Stewie Griffen singing show tunes, and a sexy party as a bonus!