feminist blogs

INCITE! is one of my favorite feminist organizing projects and I’m excited to spread the word about their gorgeous new website. If you don’t already know about their amazing anthology, The Color of Violence, I highly recommend picking it up (especially since I helped craft the chapter that intersects with trans issues, toot toot.) Even if you don’t have a copy, the website is right at your fingertips, right now. Go check it out!

I especially want to draw your attention to one of the centerpieces of their website launch, the Organizing Toolkit To Stop Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color & Trans People of Color. If you have any doubts as to whether police brutality is a feminist issue, their analysis does a much better job of explaining than I have recently. Their toolkit highlights the fact that law enforcement violence against women and trans people often becomes invisible, while at the same time stressing the need to work in coalition with other organizations that struggle against the police state, institutionalized violence against people of color, immigrant rights, and so forth. (See in particular the joint statement put out by INCITE! and Critical Resistance, the prison abolitionist organization founded by Angela Davis and others.) They’re simultaneously working to integrate a gender analysis into conversations about police brutality, and also raise awareness that this isn’t just a problem that happens to young, straight black men.

INCITE!’s toolkit addresses everything from law enforcement violence against marginalized women and trans folks on the streets to violence in immigration practices and against native communities, police brutality against sex workers, and strategies for community accountability — which could be an alternative to calling the police, especially for people and communities who can’t always do that. I’ll quote a couple of my favorite sections after the jump.

Also, check out this sweet poster version.
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Feministe founder Lauren has an excellent article up in the American Prospect. Go read.

On Memorial Day weekend, I will watch the Indianapolis 500. Motorsports can be divided into a lot of types and series; Indy is the senior and signature race of the Indy Racing League series. Indy is an oval, the cars are open-wheel. I love open-wheel racing, but I much prefer road courses. I follow Formula One much more closely. More about that later. So Indy is not my favorite series or kind of racing, but I will watch anyway — because of Indy’s place in history, and because of Danica Patrick’s.

There have been pioneering women at the high levels of many forms of racing, but especially at Indy, I think because of its symbolic importance. First, there was Guthrie. She started out as an aerospace engineer who went racing full-time. She raced around the Sports Car Club of America for a while and turned to Nascar, where she was the first woman to race in their top series, then the Winston Cup. She drove the Daytona 500 and was Rookie of the Year, and she competed in 33 Winston Cup events, finishing as high as sixth. Starting in 1977 she raced in open-wheels at Indy, too. She qualified in 1977, ‘78 and ‘79. The first time, the car had problems and she did poorly. The last time, same thing. But in between, in 1978, she had a really good run, finishing in the top ten: ninth, after starting 15th. With a good car, she could drive with the best in the sport. (Guthrie has a well-regarded autobiography, “A Life at Full Throttle.”)

I have a soft spot for Lyn St. James because, while I was too young to remember Guthrie, I watched St. James’ debut with rapt attention. She was already a road-racing veteran when I first saw her, and in her career she drove twice at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, won the 24 Hours of Daytona twice, and won the 12 Hours of Sebring once. I saw her qualify at the back of the pack in 1992 for Indy. The cars were powerful and twitchy and the track was slick that year; the polesitter crashed on the formation lap! Lyn St. James finished a heroic eleventh, keeping the car on the track when thirteen cars crashed and most of the field did not finish, and was Rookie of the Year — the only rookie to even finish a nerve-shattering 500 miles. Lyn made seven trips to the Brickyard (As Indy is called for the three-foot strip of bricks at the start-finish line), but never again had a really competetive car and never managed a top-ten finish. With a lifetime of top-flight racing, she has not retired to catch up on her reading. Instead, she now runs the nonprofit Winner’s Circle Foundation.

Sarah Fisher started at Indy at just nineteen years of age. When she and St. James started together, it was the first Indy with two women racing. The traditional “Gentlemen, Start your Engines!” has been “Lady and Gentlemen …,” at least since St. James (I don’t recall if they acknowledged Guthrie) but that year, for the first time and not the last, it was “Ladies and Gentlemen …” Sarah Fisher has her own team now, but she’s never had a very good ride. In a half-dozen trips, she has crashed several times and never finished better than 18th. However, elsewhere in the series she managed a pole position, the first woman to start an Indy race from the pole.

Everyone who followed racing and some who don’t saw Patrick coming. She moved to Europe at 16, alone, to race in the brutally competetive Formula Ford series there. She was second at the English Formula Ford festival, the best ever finish by an American. Motorsports journalists started reporting on her after that, seeing her move through the Formula Atlantics towards the big show.

Qualifying for the 2005 Indy, her car’s rear slid in the first turn. It was a disastrous moment; most drivers would have been in the wall, and she shocked everyone by keeping it on the track and then, icewater in her veins, staying fast despite the scare to start fourth, the best starting position by a woman. She led nineteen laps (first woman to lead at Indy), overcoming two key mistakes to finish fouth, the highest by a woman, and to be named Rookie of the Year. (Two out of five women to face the Indianapolis 500 have been Rookie of the Year. That’s 40%. Just sayin’.)

She took three poles her rookie season, but did not win a race. Everyone knew she could, everyone waited to see when she would.

In 2006 at Indy, with a less competetive car and still a bit shaken by the death of teammate Paul Dana, she started and finished Eighth — two top ten finishes in two tries.

In 2007, she was in the hunt and ran as high as second, but finished eight when Scotsman of Italian descent (and Ashley Judd’s husband) Dario Franchitti won the rain-shortened race. Three top ten finishes in three consecutive years. In the season as a whole, she had three podium finishes.

As Jill reported, in late April, 2008, she won the Japan 300 at Motegi. She is the first woman to win an Indy race. That should put her head in the right place as she heads into this year’s Indianapolis 500.

There have certainly been women racers of distinction in other series. In drag racing, both dragsters and pro stock bikes have women legends in their history (Shirley Muldowney and Angelle Sampey, respectively). (Bonnie Bedelia, one of the better actors of her generation I think, played Muldowney in a now-dated but very watchable movie, Heart Like a Wheel.)

Michele Mouton very nearly won the World Rally Championship in an Audi Quattro that lacked the reliability to match her skills, and did win both one of the series events and a prestigious non-series event, the Pike’s Peak hill-climb. When the governing body decided that the “killer B” Group B rally cars were too fast and powerful, Mouton retired rather than race in less powerful Group A cars. Ha!

However, there is a lot of room for improvement at the top. NASCAR has not had much in the way of women; Formula One has had only five women drive and only one had what anyone would call a career (Lella Lombardi finished as high as Sixth, the other four women had just a handful of races each and never earned a championship point).

There are some women coming up in sports car racing; Liz Halliday does well in American Le Mans, and I think Milka Duno (the third woman, with Patrick and Fisher, in the 2007 Indy) may be less out of her depth in sports cars than she is in Indy cars. Simone De Silvestro got a win in Atlantics in April, and with Katherine Legge is the only woman to win in Atlantics. Legge also tested an F1 car, though she races the German Touring Car series for Audi now. But the groundswell of women at the lower levels of racing is not yet fairly reflected at the upper levels. There should be women in F1 cars, WRC cars, sports cars at ALMS and at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and in NASCAR’s top series every year, not just a few times a decade. I hope we’re getting there.

When my daughter is old enough to watch it with me, I hope that as the starter says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines,” eight, ten, twelve women fire the engines and pull out on the formation lap, each hoping to have her name inscribed on the Borg-Warner Trophy, and little girls in karts around the country can root for any woman, not just the woman.

I don’t pretend to have exhautive knowledge of the women in the pipeline for the top series; if anybody knows of women we should keep an eye on, leave them in comments.

I already posted about reading one sex worker’s blog; that’s not the only one that got my attention recently.

I’ve been reading College Call Girl. She has been on a bit of a break for the last three weeks, and I don’t know her personally, so I have no idea when or if she’s coming back, but I keep hoping.

Now, some folks may think that this is light reading, or one-handed reading. And sometimes it is. But she alternates between the glib and hot, soul-searching, and flat-out patriarchy-blaming; so that passages like this:

Even with all the admittedly sinful diddling and fingering and rubbing and stroking I had done before, I had never once done something as terrible, as sacrilegious as what I found myself doing now.

I was masturbating to the Bible.

I don’t remember what section in particular it was that got me so steamed up, although I think it was in the Old Testament.

rub shoulders with passages like this:

One of the cruelest tragedies of the sex industry is that it attracts girls like me who already have skewed ideas about sex and self-worth and then completely reinforces all our secret fears. The men you meet, the whole lifestyle, whispers to you that you were right all along, that all that really matters is being desired.

I still struggle every day to change my thinking. It makes me almost sick to my stomach to meet new people whether in a personal or professional capacity, because I worry they will not think I am pretty. Most of my friends are men with whom I have had former dalliances because I just do not feel comfortable around people who I don’t know with certainty find me sexually attractive. In my head, my worth is completely tied up in my appearance and sex. As a result of being abused at a young age, my thinking is fucked. There is something wrong with my brain. No matter how logically I know that who I am is more important than how sexy I look, I have internalized the lesson that it is my sexuality that makes me lovable.

Of course, this is a trap that will keep me perpetually insecure because not everyone is always going to be attracted to me. When you feel that perfectly normal fact as a deep blow to your self-esteem, it’s impossible to ever really feel confident.

She’s not a representative sample; she’s one woman from a particular social position (white, class-privileged, etc.). She doesn’t represent all sex workers — nobody could, or should, or should be expected to. She represents her own experience; which is ambiguous and nuanced. She both loves and hates sex work; she’s honest about keeping it light to keep her audience entertained, and honest that she knows this glamorizes and whitewashes her own experiences:

But there’s another side to this deal that I’m afraid I haven’t shown you. It’s not easy to write about prostitution in a totally honest way because it is painful… I am a tangle of contradictions. I am not ashamed of my choices and I will fully defend mine or anyone else’s right to make them. But when you ask me if you should do this? My immediate instinct is a loud, desperate no.

Along her road of self-reflective posts, CCG put up one that I’ll probably never forget, [Trigger Warning] the sort of speaking out that one woman can do to make thousands of other women feel less alone:

The Number is Eight

I have been sexually assaulted more than once. Each time that it happened to me, I felt that extenuating circumstances kept it from truly being rape. I was working as a prostitute, he was my boyfriend, I was drunk, I got in the car. I never believed that I had fought hard enough. I made excuses for the men who hurt me; I told myself “he didn’t know what he was doing.” When I spoke about my experiences with sexual assault (which I did very rarely), I would say only that “a lot of bad things have happened to me.”

And she lists them. And she tells the story. And every one will resonate with some woman out there who reads it, who will know that it wasn’t just her; that it wasn’t her fault; that what happened to her was wrong.

Nothing I ever write will matter that much.

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.

Happy May Day. As people around the world celebrate the struggles of laborers, and as many immigrants and supporters of immigrant rights set off on protest marches around this country, I wanted to link you to one of my favorite blog posts of the last week: Sudy’s explanation of kyriarchy, a concept coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza.

It’s a useful neologism for an idea that comes up a lot: multiple, overlapping, shifting pyramids of power. Try to focus too hard on just one, try to figure out with some kind of precision exactly which individuals are at the top, and you lose sight of the entire awful kyriarchy, that has any number of ways to crush people. It’s another trick that power structures play to distract you. I’ve heard this kind of concept discussed before — some people I know just use the word “hierarchies” to talk about this, and in some feminist writing this is what “patriarchy” means. But I like the word kyriarchy, not least because it doesn’t just focus on “fathers” as the top of the pyramid.

For me the word summons up a bizzare image of holographic, floating, disappearing and reappearing ancient step pyramids. Because that’s how complex the overlapping of power can be, and how surreal. Sometimes we talk about this stuff like patriarchy, white supremacy, or homophobia is a bunch of craggy old white guys having a meeting down the street where we can kick the doors in and turn over the table piled high with money and blood. Too bad that the history of oppressive cultural attitudes, social enforcement, the accumulation of religion and greed and control and security is never that simple. But don’t think I mean it’s all ideology either. Kyriarchy kills. Don’t let it get behind you — or under you.

The amazing Julia Serano has contributed a post to Feministing about this Philips ad for an epilator:

All of her points are great, and you should go over to Feministing and read them, and then follow the link from her fourth point to her essay on media depictions of trans women. Personally, I shave my legs about twice a year, and mostly so I don’t have to be aware of disgusted stares from random assholes. So I’m especially glad that Serano pointed out how myopic this portrayal of trans-feminine spectrum folks as hyper-feminine propagators of sexist stereotypes and beauty rituals is. (If you really want more examples of that, just click on the Youtube link and look at all the sex-objectastic “related videos.”)
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Once upon a time I wrote about this woman, who fought back. Inevitably, some guy showed up to defame her and defend her oppressors. Time passed and the comments closed. But last night, she apparently found what was said about her, found another thread to put in a comment on, and spoke for herself.

Some of you know me from the comments, and from my past guest spots here. I’ll be around to fill in for a couple of weeks. I’m not big on introductions.

Back when the Spitzer story broke, there were posts (notably this one) here and a lot of discussion about sex work. Whenever that happens, someone reminds us (err … I mean “me”) that, whatever the rest of us have to say about sex work, sex workers can and do speak for themselves. Renegade Evolution, the last link and no stranger to Feministe’s comment threads, is one, and her blog links more. Lately, I have been reading another.

Those of you who read certain blogs by women of color, Sudy’s for example or BlackAmazon’s, may have run across Joan Kelly in the comments or even visited her blog. She does the kind of writing that there isn’t space for anywhere else but blogs; she lays out long-form personal ruminations and self-exploration. Lots of people do that, and not all of them well.

(As an aside, BA’s blog is now apparently friendlocked in the wake of the dual Marcotte controversies and dual Seal Press controversies; a sad loss for those of us who had a lot to learn from her. Sudy’s is still up and her Saturday post in particular requires readers to employ real intellectual chops. I recommend reading it and ruminating.)

I first saw Joan comment on Feministing, a year or more ago, and I thought, “it can’t be that Joan Kelly.” But it was: the former professional submissive Marnie, already a published memoirist. The book focuses on her work in the pro BSDM scene and skews heavily positive. On her blog, she deals with class issues and and race and racism and with white privilege a lot, and links WOC blogs heavily. She also deals both with sex work and with BDSM, but she is much more critical. Including sometimes pretty self-critical.

(That’s an endorsement of her writing ability, her intelligence and her willingness to dig into issues, though certainly not agreement with everything she says.)

I’m always impressed with bloggers who are willing to dig both hands into deeply personal stuff; as Jill posted about recently, it’s hard to do. Carol Hanisch recently reminded all of us, 38 years after the original was published, what she meant by “the personal is political.” And reading Hanisch’s new intro has reminded me that women’s stories about their lives, about the “personal” misogyny and indignities of patriarchy, should not be dismissed as “personal,” that in sharing them the pattern emerges and the structural nature of these dynamics is laid bare — to quote Hanisch, “women are messed over, not messed up.” Women who share their deeply personal stories do a service of inestimable value to other women and to male allies. Joan did that this month, posting frankly about her past experience being raped by a coworker and sometime lover. It was one of those posts that I expect lots of folks would write and erase instead of posting. But she didn’t. She put it up.

You know, the jungle. Where the savage brown people and ferocious animals are defeated by heroic white folks:

Jill is writing her own follow-up post about this subject, but I feel so nauseous and sleepless about this whole thing that I felt the need to weigh in as well. I felt the need to post these pages, which I saw in person earlier tonight at a bookstore. The images were scanned by Wolfa and posted by Ico after being poitned out by Radfem. These pages are chapter headers from It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, published by Seal Press and written by Amanda Marcotte.

More than 20 years ago, I made my very first contributions to feminist writing in a book that was published by Seal Press. This might be a little surprising given that I’m in my early 30s. But at the time, I spoke better English than the editor and translator of that anthology of fiction by women authors: my mother, a Japanese immigrant and a lifelong feminist. She grew up in a city that was devastated by American bombs when she was a young girl, and then run by American soldiers. When she got older, she attended the first women’s college in Japan, and eventually immigrated here, although she never naturalized; she couldn’t stomach the “swear to defend and bear arms” loyalty oath. In the early 80s, Seal started publishing her collections of translated stories, fiction by Japanese women writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the war. I was a little too young to help out with the first book, but as I got older she’d ask for my help with editing and choice of words more and more. I was so proud to be helping out.

Today I don’t know where that pride has gone.
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