feminist blogs

The 53rd Carnival Against Sexual Violence is now up. Check it out — as always, it contains a ton of excellent posts.  Thanks again to Marcella for taking the time to make it happen.

Coco Wang has written a series of comic strips documenting stories of rescue from the devastating earthquake in China. An excerpt from Wang’s introduction:

Thousands of heart-breaking stories are happening 24 hours non-stop everyday, some are so sad that you can hardly bear, some are incredibly moving that you just can’t stop crying… I wanted to go to the front to help with all those people, some of my friends have already gone there, but I heard that the traffic needed to be kept totally clear for rescue transportation at the moment, people like me without knowledge of first-aid and experience of rescue operations going there now would cause choas and trouble… but I can’t just sit at home and do nothing, I have been crying my eyes out in the past three days, I have never felt more proud of my country and people… their love, courage and kindness rock me to my core! I have decided to tell these touching stories by drawing comics.

It’s a very difficult read. Many stories are inspiring, but they’re just as often unbearably tragic — though actually, there are a few funny strips towards the end. The sixth comic “My Father is a Hero” had me crying like a baby.

But, at least in the U.S., these are stories that we aren’t hearing. And they deserve to be heard. Also, Wang’s illustration and retelling of the events amounts to a wonderful tribute.

So get your hankies, and head on over to read all of the earthquake strips.

via Lauredhel

The long-awaited 2007 Femmostroppo Awards have been announced!

Head on over to read some really great feminist writing.

The Femmostroppo Awards honor (what this group of judges deems to be) the best 40 feminist or womanist blog posts of the year. Congratulations to everyone who made it in. I’m happy to see several of the posts that I personally nominated, and so many bloggers whose work I regularly read.

I’m also happy/proud to see so many Feministe writers and alumni. Special congrats to Jill, Zuzu and Jack . . . and thank you to the judges for including me.

Give yourselves a pat on the back, everyone — and then get back to work!

Sudy says:

The question is not what makes the issue feminist, but has a feminist perspective been applied to the issue?

Thinking cap? Check. Reading this is highly recommended.

Note: comments off. Go there.

40 years ago, the day after delivering this speech, he was assassinated.

Moving this up to the top because the book comes out today and it’s fabulous. Go get it. Really, go now! You can read an excerpt here. And more on the book from AJ himself here. Order it on Amazon by clicking the image below. -ed

I don’t do book reviews as often as I’d like, mostly because I don’t get around to reading non-law books as often as I’d like. But it’s something we’re going to start doing more often at Feministe. We’re also working on developing some sort of books section of the site to post reviews and thoughts; in the meantime, if you scroll down a bit, there’s a red Amazon box on the middle column of the site that has some of our book recommendations. We selected them ourselves, so it’s not an Amazon-bot or anything, and they do all come highly recommended. Please check them out.

I did get around to reading the book Still Broken: A Recruit’s Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagonby AmericaBlogger AJ Rossmiller. Quick full disclosure: AJ is a friend in real life, and he gave me a copy of the book. That said, he made it very clear that there were no strings attached, and no obligation to review it or even read it. I did read it, but had decided beforehand that if I didn’t like it, I simply wouldn’t write about it. I ended up really liking it, though, so here we are. He also tried to buy an ad on the site; because I’m reviewing the book, I rejected payment on that ad, which should be going up tomorrow (in other words, no one here made any money off of it). So, while AJ is a friend and while there will be an ad for the book on this site, this review is neither a favor nor an obligation nor something I have any financial interest in doing. Ok? Ok.

Still Broken is described as “a riveting and sobering portrait of Bush-era intelligence failures and manipulations, laid out by someone who witnessed them up close and personal.” While “riveting and sobering” certainly apply, I would suggest that it’s more along the lines of “infuriating,” “mind-boggling” and “thoroughly depressing” — and simultaneously wry, engaging and easily readable.

AJ graduated from Middlebury College having studied political science with a focus on the Middle East, always with the goal of working in intelligence. The events of September 11, 2001 were, for him, a call to action, and after graduating college he decided to go to work for the Department of Defense, despite his general opposition to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. AJ and I aren’t exactly politically in line — at least from the book, he comes across as far more moderate than I am* (I don’t know whether that’s accurate in “real life” or not, as our written presentations of our ideas are rarely comprehensive) — but he is is exactly the kind of person that I would want in the Pentagon and on the ground in Iraq. He’s smart, well-versed in Middle East politics, patriotic, passionate, honest, brave, hard-working and endearingly idealistic. He is also more interested in doing his job well, gathering accurate intelligence and protecting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians than he is in pushing a particular agenda or ideology. While he makes it clear that those characteristics are extremely common amongst his co-workers and military personnel, the chain of command in the Defense Intelligence Agency manages to pervert and compromise good intel work on every level — often with disastrous results.
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I’m catching up on a week’s worth of news and blog-reading, which is bringing me to a lot of great articles that I just don’t have the time to individually post on. And it’s actually rather frustrating because I have a whole lot to say about each and every one of these, but finals are in a week and I’m just starting to study today (yeah, color me fucked), so I’m trying to devote my brain power to corporate law in Germany (just typing it makes me twitchy and unhappy) instead of blogging. So while my posting is limited, check these out. They’re all really, really good:

-Europe is a pretty nice place to live. It’s slightly less nice if the dollar is your currency.

-What Digby said. Short version: Kids were seriously injured in a bad car accident — the boy was in a coma and the girl was seriously brain damaged. The kids weren’t insured, and the S-CHIP program — you know, the one Bush just vetoed an expansion of — provided for their medical care. The boy, who is now 12, gave the Saturday Democratic address supporting the S-CHIP program. And various conservative scumbags like Michelle Malkin and writers at the National Review decided to go on the attack — they painted the family as rich and entitled (not true) and Malkin went so far as to show up at their home and business and talk to their neighbors. That’s borderline stalking and I have a feeling that if someone showed up in Malkin’s neighborhood and at her workplace and started asking questions about her, she’d flip shit. Anyway, read Digby’s whole post — what it comes down to is that Republican shills are now attacking a 12-year-old boy and his handicapped sister. It does not get lower than that. (And I’m hoping to write a fuller post on this one later).

-So we said that we don’t torture people. Well… we kinda do.

-The modeling industry is even more fucked up than you thought - not only are models starved (and their agencies are finally admitting it), but they’re also being screwed when it comes to their paychecks.

-There’s an ongoing cry of “What happened to the Grand Old Party?,” as if today’s Republicans — who are incredibly fiscally irresponsible, generally incompetent, morally bankrupt, deeply racist, and frightening authoritarian — are different from generations past. Paul Krugman sets the record straight in a must-read column. What has Krugman been putting in his water? Because I’m usually pretty lukewarm about him, but he’s been on a roll lately, and his columns over the past month are some of the best I’ve ever read.

-Warner Brothers isn’t planning on having any more female leads in its movies. And this is exactly why we have the “assholes” tag.

-Why is the T in LGBT? It’s certainly a question worth asking, and another link that I will hopefully find the time to expand into a full post. Thanks to Yuri for the link.

-A Chesapeake Bay marina and bar fired a female employee for not complying with its dress code — the employee had undergone treatment for breast cancer and requested to wear something other than the required tankini top.

-Members of the Polish Women’s Party posed nude to promote themselves in the upcoming Parliamentary elections. My take: Cool that they have a women’s party. Not cool that they have to get naked to get noticed.

-Another wingnut is running for Congress. Tim Fasano, who is also an occasional porn-maker, is at the very least honest. He says: “I really believe the answer to this war is to kill all Muslims on Earth and destroy any written or computer record of this horrible religion.” Points for not mincing words, I guess.

-The Global Gag Rule is gagging women’s health. The Gag Rule happens to be one of my pet issues within the reproductive justice movement. I’ve written quite a bit about it here (a search should bring up some of the older posts), but Amie’s article is one of the best I’ve read. It’s an issue that certainly deserves more attention.

-If Christina Hoff Sommers really thinks that women are intellectually inferior to men, then I suggest she stop writing books and giving lectures and start washing some dude’s feet or something. As for the “women in science are not held back by bias” argument, I would suggest that women in every discipline are held back by our many unconscious biases. Women’s voices aren’t considered as “authoritative” as men’s. Women simply aren’t taken as seriously, whether we’re speaking or writing (there’s a reason that a lot of women use gender-neutral handles online, and it ain’t just to avoid harassment). And good old science backs up the contention that many of us unthinkingly situate men as intellectually superior:

Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people - half men, half women - rated papers [about politics, education and the psychology of women] on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was “John T. McKay” than when the author was “Joan T. McKay.” There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave.
…
A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job - one with more education, the other with more work experience - they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time.

But yes, I’m sure it’s just the tiny lady-brains.

-Elderly gay people are being treated poorly in care facilities.

-We are not a Christian nation. And it’s actually pretty un-Christian and un-American to argue otherwise.

-Democrats are weenies. They should not be extending wiretap powers, but it looks like they’re set to. I watched “The Lives of Others” last night (which is excellent, by the way), and it details the frightening forms of observation and interrogation used by the Stasi (the East German secret police). In the beginning it shows an interrogator forcing a prisoner to remain awake for a very long time — there isn’t much question that this is torture, and in the next scene a Stasi-in-training even refers to it as “inhuman.” It made me feel sick to my stomach realizing that in my country, sleep deprivation isn’t considered torture — and compared to the other things we do to prisoners in our secret prisons around the world, it’s on the gentler end. The rest of the movie is about a Stasi officer wiretapping the home of an East German playwrite and monitoring his conversations for anything possibly disloyal to the Socialist state. The parallels to the United States were really, really sickening. And it’s pretty depressing that Democrats are falling in line with these violations of civil liberties and basic privacy rights.

And since we forgot to do shameless self-promotion Sunday this week, feel free to promote yourself in the comments.

If you’ve got money to spare, wing it over Blackamazon’s way. Any amount is welcome, but she’s got a special deal going on too.

Heres the deal:

Donate an amount over $25 ( the amount I make for a one hour tour) and with your donation submit a topic.

If I accept your donation I write for an hour on your topic.

There are tons of other worthy bloggers out there who could use your donations (Kactus springs to mind), so don’t just stop there!

If you (or someone you know) are soliciting donations for something, leave a note in the comments and I’ll add you to the list of Instant Karma.* Please include a link and a (short) explanation, for maximum clicky goodness.

* Note: May be slow in posting, as my internet at home is down and work is really dumbly scheduled.

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 will be my last post as a guest-blogger, it’s been a lot of fun to be able to interact with so many of you versus at my place where I only get the occasional troll who likes to make sure I know what he thinks of me. Thanks Jill, I look forward all of the different voices this summer.

I wanted to share an email that I received from a blog friend who is collaborating with author/activist Kevin Powell to create a different dialogue about masculinity, please contact Charles or myself if you are interested in contributing:

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