feminist blogs

PortlyDyke wrote a beautiful post about reflexive, safety-making cloaking:

I doubt that most straight, cisgendered people think about, or notice, how frequently they touch their partner in public in ways that are not necessarily “sexual” (in addition to kissing, cuddling, and the odd bum-squeeze) — ie. holding hands, walking with an arm around the waist, smoothing the other’s hair back out of their eyes — nor do I think that most straight, cisgendered people are probably aware of the fact that when I touch my partner in public, it’s nearly always a considered act. […]

So, I issued her and her husband a challenge (and I’ll issue the same challenge to any straight coupled allies here who want to raise their awareness of LBGTQ issues):

Spend an entire week pretending that you’re not a couple. Don’t write a check from a joint bank account. Hide all the photographs in your home and office which would identify you as a couple. Take off your wedding rings. Touch each other, and talk to each other, in public, in ways that could only be interpreted as you being “friends”. Refer to yourself only in the singular “I”, never in the “we”. When you go to work on Monday, if you spent time together on the weekend, include only information which would indicate that you went somewhere with a friend, rather than your life-mate. If someone comes to stay with you, sleep in separate beds. Go intentionally into the closet as a couple. For a week.

They took my challenge.

They lasted exactly three days.

There’s lots more, and I recommend reading the whole thing. Curtsy: TeaOtter.

I trust the anti-colonialist and anti-racist reasons to oppose most US uses of military force against other countries are clear to most “Alas” readers. I haven’t been discussing that connection because it’s too clear to be missed, not because it’s not important.

In contrast, I am worried, perhaps needlessly, that some readers will read this series of posts as me saying that I’m voting based on foreign policy concerns, not concerns about sexism, misogyny and LGBTQ issues.

I don’t believe the distinction exists. I’ll use this post to discuss why the distinction between a hawkish versus a moderate foreign policy should matter to feminists of all sorts.

And make no mistake — Clinton is a hawk, not just posturing as one for the election. Quoting Stephen Zunes:

…When her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt instrument of military force to deal with complex international problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her husband’s inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to resolve the Kosovo crisis.

Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians’ nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the militant Kosovo Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail Sheehy’s book Hillary’s Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.

The most famous difference between Clinton and Obama is Clinton’s support of invading Iraq — an approach to foreign policy fully consistent with her history, and likely to continue in a future Clinton adminstration, judging from who she’s chosen to lead her foreign policy team so far. From a feminist perspective, it cannot be overemphasized that our decision to invade and occupy Iraq has been a nightmare. Here are just a few examples:

First, from an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

Roz Kaveny writes:

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

Riverbend:

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, writes: (link via Bitch PhD):

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. […] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq.

Melissa at Shakesville writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.[…]

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.

Riverbend again:

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another.

There are no laws that say we have to wear a hijab (yet), but there are the men in head-to-toe black and the turbans, the extremists and fanatics who were liberated by the occupation, and at some point, you tire of the defiance.

I could go on with quotes like this for another fifty screens, easily. The scope of the disaster is almost impossible to comprehend.

What’s important for this election isn’t how bad Iraq is, however. Iraq has happened, and neither Clinton nor Obama can change that. What’s important is how a Clinton or Obama presidency will change what happens in the future.

If Obama’s approach to foreign policy, and his team of policy advisers, comes into power, that will not mean that progressives occupy the White House, and it will not mean that horrible abuses of American power will cease to happen. Obama is not perfect. Obama is not even progressive. He’s just significantly better than the alternatives.

An Obama White House mean that a group of people who are significantly less warlike, and more critical of the U.S.’s use of military power, will become much more important in Washington and in our national conversation than they have been (and will remain so for years after Obama leaves office). It means that questionable invasions and bombings, which Clinton has supported throughout her career, will probably happen less frequently.

If Clinton becomes President, that will be a big improvement over Bush, in that we’ll switch from having a Republican hawk to having a Democratic hawk. It will be a much saner and more intelligent hawkish administration; but it will still be a hawkish administration, and from a feminist perspective — especially a feminism perspective that recognizes that anti-racism, anti-colonialism and LGBTQ issues aren’t separate from feminism — that’s bad.

Clinton didn’t intend the enormous harms I discussed above, of course. (On the contrary, Clinton has a dedication to women’s rights internationally that goes back many years, and which I admire.) But the unintended consequences of hawkishness aren’t less dire because they’re unintentional. The unintended consequences of Clinton’s future hawkish policies could easily turn into thousands of deaths, thousands of rapes, thousands of women under virtual house arrest, thousands of LGBTQ people in prison or worse. For people on the margins, unintended consequences are deadly.

I am not saying that if you’re a feminist, you must vote against Clinton because she’s a hawk. Feminists can vote a variety of ways for a variety of legitimate reasons, and countless feminists I admire will be voting for Clinton, or already have.

But foreign policy isn’t separate from feminist issues. It makes no sense at all to say that you’re voting based on feminist concerns, not foreign policy concerns. Foreign policy is a feminist issue, and anyone voting as a feminist should take that into account as they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate.

(Links NSFW. Depending on your workplace, I guess.)

Bechdel doesn’t seem too torn up about it, though.

From KSL channel 5 in Utah:

Time Magazine voted it the book of the year, but some students are calling it pornographic and asking it be removed from their curriculum.

Thomas Alvord, with the group “No More Pornography,” says, “The issue is exposing people to pornography.”

The issue is with “Fun Home,” a book assigned for reading in a mid-level English class at the University of Utah. The class introduces students to different literary genres. In the case of “Fun Home,” it’s told in the style of a comic book. The story centers around the author as she comes to terms with her own and her father’s homosexuality.

Drawings depicting sex acts are included in the 230 page novel. A student in the class was offended and approached the group “No More Pornography,” which made headlines earlier this year when it staged a successful protest of music videos shown a gym in Provo. The group has started an online petition in protest of the book. […]

The student in question accepted an alternate assignment but would like to see further changes. The university has no plans make any. It says while a student has the right not to read the book, other students in the class have the right to judge for themselves.

“No More Pornography” hopes to continue talking with the University of Utah and will continue the online petition. The group is also asking that filters be installed on campus computers to prevent students from accessing explicit images.

I’m pretty sure these are Christian anti-porn activists, not Feminist anti-porn activists. But this still reminds me of one of my primary arguments against the MacKinnnon/Dworkin anti-pornography legislation, back when that argument hadn’t yet been made moot by court rulings that the M/D ordinance was unconstitutional: Any anti-porn legislation that isn’t extremely narrowly defined will be used by right-wing Christians to harass queer and feminist cartoonists.¹

Fun Home is, for those of you who haven’t read it, one of the best American comics of the last decade. I posted about Fun Home previously here.

Curtsy: Dykestowatchoutfor.com and Journalista.

Illustration beyond the fold is NSFW.

1. And other sorts of artists, as well, I suppose. But it’s only cartoonists who are really important, needless to say.

From a post I wrote several years ago:

From early boyhood, men are taught that their masculinity must be protected above all else, or else it will be lost. Men who have lost their masculinity are objects of contempt, derision and violent abuse, and have lost the right to be loved or respected by their fellow men and by their fathers.

Boys are also taught that masculinity is fragile and high-maintenance; you work to get it and to retain it, and the slightest slip can cause it to be altogether lost. You can slip instantly, with no transition, from the most popular boy in the room to the butt of everyone’s jokes: all it takes is a moment’s lapse in which you say or do anything that can be interpreted as feminine.

This is essential: Masculinity is fragile. The man who has lost his masculinity is, in the eyes of male culture, less than nothing, worse than dead. Therefore, force in defense of masculinity - like beating up a boy who accuses you of being a faggot - can feel to boys and men like self-defense.

I was reminded of that post while reading a news story about Brandon McInerney , a 14 year old boy who murdered his openly gay and gender-anticonformist classmate Larry King:

In the days before the shooting, Brandon was hanging out around Silver Strand with his friends, doing what they always did: sitting on the jetty, hanging around the taco stand.

Brandon’s friend Lauren said the rumors about Larry “hitting on” Brandon were heating up. Kids were joking that Brandon must be gay if Larry was acting that way toward him. […]

Brandon joined the Young Marines — the Marine Corps’ equivalent of a JROTC program — several years ago and became a leader in the group, which disbanded last summer. […] His hours in a martial arts studio helped trim his physique into a lean, muscular one.

I’m not saying this alone drove McInerney to murder — it’s almost certainly significant that McInerney’s family life was disfunctional and one or both of his parents were abusers. And it’s possible that McInerney is just essentially a bad person in some way. Nonetheless, I doubt this murder would have happened if McInerney’s friends hadn’t been teasing McInerney by calling his masculinity into question, making McInerney feel that he had to do anything — anything at all — to defend his masculine image. (His hobbies — Young Marines and martial arts — imply that masculinity is important to McInerney.)

From Holly at Feministe:

Seriously, when you think about this kind of situation in all its disturbing dimensions and possibilities, which is more likely? That one of the school bullies decides to take it a step beyond name-calling and shoving, pulls out a gun, and shoots this kid? Or that the killer felt personally threatened for some reason, to the point of bringing a gun into a middle school classroom and shooting someone in the head, first thing in the morning? With the few details that have emerged, it’s impossible to say.

But I fear the worst — and the worst would not just be that some homophobic asshole killed a child. There’s an even worse worst: that a child is dead, and the other child who pulled the trigger did so because he couldn’t deal with his own feelings. And now that second child will be tried as an adult, and another life destroyed.

From the NY Times story:

The gunman, identified by the police as Brandon McInerney, “is just as much a victim as Lawrence,” said Masen Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Center. “He’s a victim of homophobia and hate.”

McInerney is being charged as an adult and, if convicted, faces a minimum of 53 years in prison (25 for the murder, 25 for the gun, 3 for the hate crime). The Transgender Law Center is opposing trying McInerney as an adult.

I agree with the TLC. Nonetheless, typing this entry, I kept on having to correct my wording to refer to King in the past tense, and McInerney in the present tense. I feel terrible about McInerney being tried as an adult, and I agree with Masen Davis that McInerney is a victim (although “just as much a victim as Lawrence” is going too far for me). But still.. it’s so fucking unfair that King is the one of them having to be in the past tense.

From Patricia Nell Warren:

The fact is – when school administrators find bullying going on, they often refuse to see the speeding train coming straight at them. Yet they usually get advance warning on a bully or clique of bullies and who the victim is. But they fail to act immediately — to suspend the problem students and get them out of the school without any delay. Why? Because they don’t want to deal with the angry parents of one bullying kid, or the parents of an entire bullying clique, especially parents with political juice. They also don’t want to deal with local church conservatives who insist that protecting LGBT students is equal to saying that homosexuality is OK. Not to mention the fact that every student not in school that day is ADA money that the school doesn’t get. Teachers, too, are often afraid to speak out against bullies, because they know that teachers are assaulted at school as well.

Big Mouth at Big Queer Blog on the non-mysterious way that no journalists ask, in anguish, “why?,” when a gay kid is shot:

Look, I don’t think for a second that music or clothes make a killer. I also realize that there are plenty of bipolar folks in the world that wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s not that I want these connections to be made; it’s just that they always are except when it’s a gay kid getting killed. How can we not see the silent implication here?

Meanwhile, from the insano-Christian Right: Michael, in the comments of California Catholic Daily, wrote:

What an incredible tragedy for all concerned. However, as Bishop Fulton J. Sheen has noted, “Love is not tolerance” and, “a cry for tolerance never induces it to quench its hatred of the evil philosophies that have entered into contest with the Truth.” This situation calls for so much more than “tolerance” . At a time when young people are becoming aware of their own sexuality, a confused, apparent young teen aged boy is allowed to come to the school environment dressed suggestively as a member of the opposite sex. Who allowed this? Was it the home where he was being cared for, the school,etc. Obviously,he was troubled and needed help..indeed his behavior cried out for it. That this behavior was confusing and threatening to other boys, going through the so-called latency period of their own sexuality is not unusual or unexpected. He should never have been allowed into the school environment in the first place. His apparent dress was begging for a confrontation, it appears, and the home and the school allowed this to happen. Why? This situation should not have been “tolerated”. It should have been addressed and stopped before it led to this tragedy.

To be fair, several other comment-writers there scolded Michael for his comment. Then “John L. Sillison” wrote:

I don’t see homosexuals going after the killers of American troops who are fighting and dying while trying to protect the free world. I don’t see homosexuals organizing to keep old people from being euthanized. Where are the homosexual lobbying efforts to stop abortion? There is a kind of political alliance between homosexuals and blacks … but what about alliances between homosexuals and Mexicans, Asians, Indians, Native Americans? Why can’t homosexuals stand up for themselves? Why is it so hard for them to persuade so many other people that they deserve to have greater political power than anyone else?

Box Turtle Bulletin tells a bit of fascinating history: One magazine, a gay rights magazine¹ published in the 1950s.

The occasion was the Post Office deciding that One was not criminal to send through the mail, a decision that greatly improved One’s prospects. The editors declared their lack of gratitude in an editorial printed on the cover:

Your August issue is late because the postal authorities in Washington and Los Angeles had it under a microscope. They studied it carefully from the 2nd until the 18th of September and finally decided that there was nothing obscene, lewd or lascivious in it. They allowed it to continue on its way. We have been found suitable for mailing.

…But one point must be made very clear. ONE is not grateful. ONE thanks no one for this reluctant acceptance. It is true that this decision is historic. Never before has a governmental agency of this size admitted that homosexuals not only have legal rights but might have respectable motives as well. The admission is welcome, but it’s tardy and far from enough. As we sit around quietly like nice little ladies and gentlemen gradually educating the public and the courts at our leisure, thousands of homosexuals are being unjustly arrested, blackmailed, fined, jailed, intimidated, beaten, ruined and murdered. ONE’s victory might seem big and historic as you read of it in the comfort of your home (locked in the bathroom? hidden under a stack of other magazines? sealed first class?). But the deviate hearing of our late August issue through jail bars will not be overly impressed.

God, they fucking rocked.

Click through and read the entire Box Turtle Bulletin post — it’s fascinating stuff, including the first pro-gay-rights Supreme Court decision in US history (fifty years ago last week), and brief mentions of John Gielgud and (shamefully) the ACLU.

1. Judging from the tiny snippets BTB quotes, it seems that they were very much focused on gay men, not on lesbians.

From M. LeBlank at Bitch PhD:

Both fat people and gay people who are trying to fight bigotry spend a lot of time arguing that their condition is genetic. It’s pretty easy to see why: it seems like a very obviously bad thing to hate or discriminate against someone for something that is not within their control. So if you can just show someone that it’s genetic, or “it’s not a choice,” then you will show that they are being an asshole for judging you on that basis.

The thing is, I think this argument is selling the concept of “acceptance” really short. […] Arguing that things are out of someone’s control, and thus beyond criticism or bigotry, is a seductive tactic because it mirrors the arguments that are used against race discrimination. But the problem is, it’s the wrong metric.

“Choice” or “environment” is the wrong way to determine what reasons are good reasons to hate others. Discriminating against or hating someone for being fat or gay makes you an asshole because there’s nothing wrong with being fat or gay. Not because it’s not a choice.

Negotiations between Philadelphia Boy Scouts and the city government have ended; the Scouts are being evicted.

For three years the Philadelphia council of the Boy Scouts of America held its ground. It resisted the city’s request to change its discriminatory policy toward gay people despite threats that if it did not do so, the city would evict the group from a municipal building where the Scouts have resided practically rent free since 1928.

Hailed as the birthplace of the Boy Scouts, the Beaux Arts building is the seat of the seventh-largest chapter of the organization and the first of the more than 300 council service centers built by the Scouts around the country over the past century.

Municipal officials drew the line at the Beaux Arts building because the city owns the half-acre of land where the building stands. The Boy Scouts erected the ornate building and since 1928 have leased the land from the city for a token sum of $1 a year. City officials said the market value for renting the building was about $200,000 a year, and they invited the Boy Scouts to remain as full-paying tenants.

Jeff Jubelirer, a spokesman for the local chapter, said it could not afford $200,000 a year in rent, and that such a price would require it to cut summer-camp funds for 800 needy children. […]

So they’re saying that if a group does some sort of good, they should be exempt from anti-discrimination law? “Well, it’s true we fired all the Jews, but we also built a home for stray cats, so we should be exempt from the law!”

I’m sorry for the decent scouts and boys this hurts, but the city did the right thing, and dealt the Scouts an important symbolic loss. It’s right that the Scouts suffer some consequences for their decision to support bigotry. The Scouts will be much better off in a few decades, when enough of the yahoos currently running the organization have died that their homophobic policies can be removed.

I’m not sure if discrimination against atheists was also at issue in this conflict.

(I previously posted about this conflict in August of 2006.)

Via Language Log.

This is the best thing I’ve read in probably a month, and it’s am absolute must-read for anyone who’s ever wondered about the political and theological confluence of events that became the religious right.

It’s 3 years old, but I just read it this afternoon, so it’s new to me. Also, it’s long, but I found myself entertained and interested all the way through.

It is, of course, of special interest to those among us who would like to live by Biblical principles, since there’s a fair amount of talking about just exactly what those principles are.

It’s broken up into 5 parts:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The author, bradhicks, is awesome in several other ways as well. It’s worth poking around his LJ, especially for some of his political writing.

PS. This was originally posted at my LiveJournal page, but I decided to repost it here for the general quality of conversation.