feminist blogs

Read Mandolin's mashup poem based on pro-life rhetoric from some threads on Alas.

Collecting articles about the John Edwards campaign will have to wait for another day.

A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs, by Brad Stone, New York Times, 9 April 07

Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers, by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, 30 April 07

Fear of Blogging: Why women shouldn't apologize for being afraid of threats on the Web, by Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, 4 May 07

A couple of projects I've worked on are now live:

1. My article "Attracting Readers: Sex and Audience in the Blogosphere" is now live in the new issue of Scholar & Feminist Online. The issue has a companion blog for discussion of the articles.

While I stand by what I wrote, I am somewhat concerned that Daniel Drezner comes off sounding like a bad guy. That isn't actually true at all; he is very nice and collegial, and I reference a couple of posts on his weblog simply as examples of discourse.

2. A Conversation: From "They Call Me Doctor?" to Tenure is live in the Professional Development section of Computers and Composition Online. Cheryl Ball and Kristin Arola composed the piece, but I am one of the people interviewed. My contributions can be found here and here, but I encourage you to interact with the whole thing.

Call for Papers

The 2007 Feminism(s) & Rhetoric(s) conference invites proposals on civic discourse, feminisms, and rhetorics. The conference draws inspiration from the 50th anniversary of Little Rock’s Central High School integration, the Clinton Presidential Library, Heifer Project International & the Clinton School for Public Service.

For conference information, go to http://femrhet.cwshrc.org

NEW EXTENDED DEADLINE: April 27, 2007

Submit your abstracts online—http://femrhet.cwshrc.org/submissions.php

Register for the conference online—http://femrhet.cwshrc.org and click Conference Registration

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Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Krista Ratcliffe

Invitation Pending Keynote Speaker/not confirmed: Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton

Featured Speakers: Hui Wu, Shirley Wilson Logan, Malea Powell, Carol Mattingly, Jessica Reyman, and more.

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This conference asks us to explore civic discourse and how civic discourse, feminism(s) and rhetoric(s) interact with, for, and against each other.

What is civic discourse? What counts as civic discourse?

How has civic discourse changed over the years for women? For feminism?

How can we expand the definition of civic discourse?

What does it mean to participate in civic discourse in the 21st century?

How do women participate in civic discourse?

How has the internet/electronic discourse affected civic discourse?

How has civic discourse become corporatized?

How has globalization impacted civic discourse?

What does it mean to be a feminist and/or rhetorician participating in civic discourse?

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We look forward to reading proposals from a wide variety of disciplines, including, but not limited to, history, ethics, new media, political science, social justice, pedagogy, law, literature, art and art theory, queer theory, international studies, cultural studies, race studies, economics, environmental studies, science, social activism, communication studies, technical communication, visual design, philosophy, and engineering.

Questions--contact Barbara L’Eplattenier (bleplatt@ualr.edu) or Marcia Smith (mmsmith@ualr.edu).

Not that anyone's been asking, but yes, I have been following the M&M controversy intently. To make a long story short, the John Edwards '08 campaign asked two excellent bloggers, Amanda Marcotte* and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister, to write for the Edwards campaign blog. They were hailed by lefty bloggers, not only because they demonstrated web savvy by picking established bloggers who had built audiences, but also because these particular bloggers were women, who are, as we know, underrepresented in punditry.

Then the protests began, spearheaded by Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue. They, along with some other politically conservative bloggers, objected to posts Marcotte and McEwan had written about the Duke lacrosse team rape case and about reproductive freedom. The Catholic League called for their termination from the Edwards campaign. Edwards seems to have decided to keep them, at least for now. You can find more detailed analyses at Noli Irritare Leones, Obsidian Wings, oh, and a couple thousand via Technorati.

Web 2.0 network ecology stories. This, to me, is potentially a very productive methodology for understanding networks and social software.

If you haven't yet read this stunning and courageous narrative by Eric Fair, do so now.

Watch A Girl Like Me, a film by Kiri Davis. Via BlackProf, and read that post too.

Anyone know how to tweak Google Reader to filter out all stories related to sports? I subscribe to Google News and BBC News, and I want to keep those, but I don't give a yotz about sports.

* whom I'd love to hang out with now that she's in Chapel Hill!

This is terrible. We have lost such a brilliant woman. I don't know what else to say.

UPDATE: Norbizness has a much better tribute.

I am so there:

Call for Papers

The 2007 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference invites proposals on civic discourse, feminisms, and rhetorics. The conference draws its inspiration from the 50th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, the Clinton Presidential Library, Heifer Project International & the Clinton School for Public Service.

This conference asks us to explore civic discourse and how civic discourse, feminism(s) and rhetoric(s) interact with, for, and against each other.

• What is civic discourse? What counts as civic discourse?
• How has civic discourse changed over the years for women? For feminism?
• What does it mean to participate in civic discourse in the 21st century?
• How do we participate in civic discourse?
• How has the internet/electronic discourse affected civic discourse?
• How has civic discourse become corporatized?
• How has globalization impacted civic discourse?
• What does it mean to be a feminist and/or rhetorician participating in civic discourse?

We look forward to reading proposals from a wide variety of disciplines, including, but not limited to, history, ethics, new media, political science, social justice, pedagogy, law, literature, art and art theory, queer theory, international studies, cultural studies, race studies, economics, environmental studies, science, social activism, communication studies, technical communication, visual design, philosophy, and engineering.

It seems like national academic conferences in my field are hardly ever held in the south. There was CCCC 2004 in San Antonio, but that's it. I'd like to see more conferences in Nashville, Birmingham, or Atlanta, as I'd have a free place to stay.

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.)

As if Cynthia McKinney didn't suffer enough indignity when she dared to change her hairstyle, now her opponent, Hank Johnson, has a campaign ad on Daily Kos trotting out one of the most hackneyed woman-bashing tropes there is:

I wonder if any politician would ever make a reference to a male opponent's "shrill, polarizing politics"?

Note to Hank Johnson's campaign: Disagree with her views, her voting record if you want to, but don't embarrass yourself by stooping this low.

As if Cynthia McKinney didn't suffer enough indignity when she dared to change her hairstyle, now her opponent, Hank Johnson, has a campaign ad on Daily Kos trotting out one of the most hackneyed woman-bashing tropes there is:

I wonder if any politician would ever make a reference to a male opponent's "shrill, polarizing politics"?

Note to Hank Johnson's campaign: Disagree with her views, her voting record if you want to, but don't embarrass yourself by stooping this low.

UPDATE: Much better. Maybe some Kossacks complained about the first one.