feminist blogs

Since Courtney is on vacation, I'm stepping in this week to do my first Thank You Thursday post!

This week I want to dedicate to graphic novels, and particularly the bad-ass women who write them. In the pretty male dominated world of comics and graphic novels, these women rock their content. I love the way reading a graphic novel makes my brain work differently, giving visual context for the words and characters on the page. Two women in particular stand out for me: Alison Bechdel and Ariel Schrag.

I've written about Alison Bechdel's stellar book, Fun Home, before. It's gotten TONS of well deserved attention, and I've read it at least five times. She has such a witty and thoughtful style and tells the story of her own coming of age and coming out, as well as her dad's own struggle with his sexuality. She's also the author of the favorite comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which is coming out in a collected edition this fall.

Ariel Schrag is a newer find of mine, but she's also a fantastic contributor to the lesbian graphic novel world. She wrote a series of graphic novels while in high school in Berkeley, one about each year. It's really cool to watch her skill and style develop and really fun to delve back into the world of high school through Schrag's eyes.

Both these women write with such honesty and humor it makes my life feel just a little less foreign.

Who are your favorite female graphic novelists?

This incredible Congressional leader is gone, but her legacy will live on in the fierce stand she took against the war and repressive Bush-era policies, her unflinching support of reproductive justice, and her insistence on speaking out often.

Tubbs Jones chaired the House Ethics Committee. In 2002, she voted against the use of military force in Iraq. And again, when most of our nation's leaders were hoodwinked by faulty testimony about WMDs and fear mongering, she was one of only 11 House members to oppose a resolution supporting U.S. troops in Iraq in March of 2003.

Tubbs Jones also opposed President Bush's tax cuts and the privatization of Social Security and spoke out against election fraud in 2004.

And by all personal accounts, she was a joy to be around. She will be missed, but modeled after for years to come.

We ask you to contribute to our redesign project, and you donate money with generous abandon. We create a community blog and you fill it full of fascinating analysis, personal experiences, and media debunking. We ask you to fill out a reader survey, and you do, in absolute droves.

Not to kiss your asses, but we really do want to thank all of those in our feministing family for being such involved, dedicated readers and writers. You make us smarter everyday. You confirm, for the millionth time, that feminism is obviously not dead. And you have a great sense of personal style. Well, we don't really know, but we can imagine.

We showed you McCain stumbling over the question of whether birth control should, indeed, be covered by insurance companies in the same way Viagra is (answer=hell yes). But who asked the question?

Many news outlets have alluded to "the woman from the LA Times," but we wanted to name her and thank her for doing what journalists are supposed to do--ask the hard questions and demand answers from our nation's political power players. Thank you Maeve Reston!

By the way, I love that community blogger JentheFem and others have started to write their own Thank You Thursdays. The best form of flattery!

It sort of goes without saying that Hillary deserves our love this week. As you may know, from reading my writing elsewhere, I'm an Obama voter, but a Clinton supporter. I'm deeply touched by her courage, her grit, and her grace here at the end. I thought her concession speech was beautiful. She really led with her feminist identity--referencing Seneca Falls, invoking her grandmother, mother, and daughter, addressing race and social change. I especially loved these lines:

Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.

I wrote a letter in thanks, which you can read here, but this is an excerpt:

I thank you for weathering this storm of anxious masculinity and outright sabotage, but even more, for creating a moment where the kind of subtle sexism that women experience everyday—in boardrooms and courtrooms, in college classrooms and dining halls, on city streets and in small town bars —was brought to undeniable light. Your campaign was a perfect flashpoint to finally get us talking about the tangled knot of leadership and gender, our society's obsession with looks and youth, the double-bind that so many women in positions of power are forced to face—either you're a bitch or a doormat, no in-between. You made sexism newsworthy in a way it hasn't been since Anita Hill. No doubt young minds have been shaped and older minds have been changed by watching you over the last year.

I saw Top Girls last night with the ladies on my intergenerational feminist panel and it got me thinking so much about women's lives, childbirth, sacrifice, our feminist legacy etc. It started out with a crazy theater version of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, where all these women through out history had dinner together and told the stories of their lives (while sometimes interrupting, crying, screaming, and drinking a lot of wine). While it definitely confused me (she's all post-structuralist and Brechtian in this one), it also made me want to give a big ol' shout out to Caryl Churchill, the playwright, and other women playwrights over the years who have helped us look at some of our deepest issues through artful lenses.

Some of my favorites are Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Nzotkae Shange, Margaret Edson, and Winter Miller.

Who are yours? What plays by women have changed the way you look at the world?

I saw Top Girls last night with the ladies on my intergenerational feminist panel and it got me thinking so much about women's lives, childbirth, sacrifice, our feminist legacy etc. It started out with a crazy theater version of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, where all these women through out history had dinner together and told the stories of their lives (while sometimes interrupting, crying, screaming, and drinking a lot of wine). While it definitely confused me (she's all post-structuralist and Brechtian in this one), it also made me want to give a big ol' shout out to Caryl Churchill, the playwright, and other women playwrights over the years who have helped us look at some of our deepest issues through artful lenses.

Some of my favorites are Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Nzotkae Shange, Margaret Edson, and Winter Miller.

Who are yours? What plays by women have changed the way you look at the world?

This might strike y'all as painfully obvious, but I just wanted to make sure that we officially devoted a little gratitude (or, make that a whole lotta) to the suffragettes. We wouldn't even be getting in all these Clinton/Obama shananagins if we didn't have the power to influence who was elected.

We don't normally link to Fox in a favorable light, but their's a first time for everything. Reader Amanda told us about this incredibly touching story that, we agree, deserves some serious play (ah, sports puns).

When Sara Tucholsky of Western Oregon University scored her first home run ever (whoooo-hoooo!) it looked like life was golden, but as she rounded first base, she cranked her knee and ended up on the ground, writhing in pain. Her opponents, who you think might have rejoiced, actually did the exact opposite:

Members of the Central Washington University softball team stunned spectators by carrying Tucholsky around the bases Saturday so the three-run homer would count - an act that contributed to their own elimination from the playoffs...As the trio reached home plate, Tucholsky said, the entire Western Oregon team was in tears.

Every awesome sports movie song of triumph and sports(wo)manship is playing in my head right now. So awesome.

As Madonna celebrates the launch of another album today, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect a little bit on her influence on the way that we (or at least those of us born before, like what, 1985) think about our bodies and ourselves.

When my friends and I made dances in my living room, sliding down walls seductively, moving our hips in circles, donning those fingerless gloves, it was Madonna we were channeling. In a fairly frigid suburb, she was one of the only experiences we had of a girl/woman who seemed resolutely in charge of her own sexuality and the expression of it. I think amid all the virgin/whore thinking that permeates too much of most American girl's childhoods, she's was always an interesting anomaly, a woman who couldn't quite be pinned down, someone who disrupted all of those categories with a certain sinful glee (think "Like a Virgin" and "Like a Prayer").

Her legacy is confusing. After all, she is also the material girl--urging total conformity to conspicuous consumption. And as she says in the above clip, she can be "spoiled and petulant." But who can't? And how awesome is it that she is honest about herself? She did smooch Britney Spears during the VMAs in what seemed like a totally flagrant display of "kissing for boys' titillation." Her lyrics have sometimes been incredibly boring, but they've also been awesome: think "Express Yourself" and, one of my personal favorites, "Human Nature"--"Did I say something true? Oops, I didn't know we couldn't talk about sex. Did I have a point of view? Oops, I didn't know I couldn't talk about you?"

Nevertheless, it's fascinating to me that this working class gal from the Detroit suburbs, who had dreams of becoming a ballerina and studied with Alvin Ailey, who dropped out of the University of Michigan and hopped on her first plane ever to New York City with $35 in her pocket, ended up changing the way just about every young woman of a certain generation understood sex. Thank you, Madonna, for being someone who complicated the idea of female sexuality on such a grand scale.