Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

"Financial success"? Amazing what genes can do when they put their little minds to it! Apparently, they correctly predicted the invention of money.

This was a nice thing to see on BBC 4 the other day (UK only).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03ycql8/oh-do-shut-up-dear-mary-beard-on-the-public-voice-of-women

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women
(been meaning to read)

Hey all I'm sorry if this is inappropriate but I figured it's as good a place as any. If you're FB friends with me or read the abortion threads you've already seen this but I know some of you aren't and my not so I'm posting this again because it's really fucking important to me and to the women this might help benefit.

This weekend every donation to my fundraiser will be matched 1:1 by an anonymous donor to a to a new fund in West Texas, the West Fund. This means your money goes twice as far and to a place that really needs it considering that Texas passed a law that made 1/3 of their abortion clinics close in the past 6 months and that thousands of rural TX women now have no legal access to abortion. Anything you can donate counts even $5 (which this weekend is $10). The matching thing is only now through tomorrow so this would be an excellent time to give if you can.

http://bowlathon.nnaf.org/nnafbowl/participantpage.asp?uid=7819&fundid=1864#.UycCQG7E07U.facebook

i went to this kimberlé crenshaw lecture last week. she's such a good speaker and that ambulance metaphor really stuck with me.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2360

on the other hand you have the utter horror of the no more page 3 advert that came out today :(

My laptop really doesn't like to play videos (or indeed audio streams that aren't divided up into 4 minutes sections it can easily buffer). :-(

Would it be cheeky to ask what the "ambulance metaphor" was, or is it totally context dependent?

oops sorry didn't see your answer til just now. it was pretty straightforward - if intersectionality is analogous to being located at a junction and intersectional oppression is being hit by cars coming from two directions, then the ambulances (eg anti-racist groups or feminist groups) tend only to come from one of those directions and fail to diagnose you properly/consider it the other ambulance's problem

anyway, interview with crenshaw: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could

Oh, OK, that metaphor makes sense.

It's Bim's interview! Haven't had the chance to read it yet, but this will undoubtedly be excellent.

today in women's news

“Life didn’t work out that way,” she said. “I didn’t have a child. I probably treat my dogs more like children than someone with children would.”

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20140415/NEWS01/304140039/More-single-unmarried-women-choosing-small-pooches-over-motherhood-survey-finds?nclick_check=1

i found this because one of these proud dog-owning women posted it to a fb group about dachshunds in ohio that i joined for some unknown reason (i guess for lols?)
she boasted very seriously that she and her husband were super proud of their two dogs and then tagged all of these words and phrases that appeared to be about pride in being child-free
it was kinda weird and i didn't know where to put it so i put it here

Stephen Jay Gould's essay on neotony, as illustrated by the evolution of how Disney characters are drawn, sheds an interesting side light on the phenomenon of small dogs being treated like infants. I forget which of his many books of essays that one appeared in, but it was one of his most memorable ones.

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2014/4/17/nonconsensual-sexwhenrapeisreworded.html

Jordana Rosenberg on mothers, mourning, and rereading Judith Butler: http://www.avidly.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/

A friend sent me this as a response on why she's skeptical of sex-positive feminism. Don't really know what to make of it.

http://radtransfem.tumblr.com/post/39655781190/undoing-sex-against-sexual-optimism-negationparty

rape is implicated in all forms of sex, and to perceive rape rightly as a scandal calls into question the foundation of every form of sexuality. Normative, civil sex is only one part of a system which has rape as its basis, as a central operating principle. The imagined integrity of the perfectly consenting subject amounts to little more than a regulatory principle of rape, a purity to be defended against a threatening Other.

the fruits of a tumblr education

that's hardcore

This is not to say that humans, as animals prior to any development of culture, did not engage in behaviors now recognized as “sex”, but rather their discursive meaning and all the material practices constituting them are historically produced. In the same manner, humans have always acted and created, but it is only in capitalist development, in the processes that alienated and proletarianized us, that this becomes secured as “labor.” What drives us towards having sex, in the here and now, is something determined by the flows of power and economic structures that produce us as “women,” “men,” “trans,” “straight,” etc. If thousands of years ago there was a pre-gendered mode of pleasure, embodiment, and usage of genitalia, it is irretrievably lost to us.

seems iffy? at the very least this pre-cultural sex should be vestigial, if not underlining the entire thing.

it's such a bold critique to say that we are not only more than animals, but actually not animals at all

just glancing at the quotes, it seems like a bit of critical theory by numbers, even including a kind of negative idea of the subject as a way to, you know, actually do critical theory as itself something "undetermined" by "flows of power and economic structures." it makes an exception of itself from a totalizing vision of determination as a way to guarantee the coherence of that picture.

the idea of a prelapsarian sexuality seems a little... optimistic to me

but what do i know, i stan for kludgey modernity

i don't think anyone would describe animal sexuality as prelapsarian!

mb bonobos

http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2014/05/22/animal_social_justice_equality_in_bonobos_chimps_monkeys_lions_baboons.html

http://i.imgur.com/XgesA6n.jpg

wtf

Good article tbh

do not feed the clickbait

?

You talking about the Slate article?

Not sure how well this article fits here, but I found this interesting...
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-in-search-of-horrible-women/

About how some people find it difficult to accept realistic female characters that are bad people.

does that article discuss the book Tampa?

No but there is something quite similar

Article reminds me FONDLY of the couple times a stranger has asked me, while knitting in public, if I was doing a Madame Defarge code. <3

guess she's overhighlighted or whatever but i hope lady macbeth kills everyone on that list until she's #1

that which hath made them drunk hath made me bold
what hath quench'd them hath given me fire

This is pretty interesting. I don't have much to say about it and am just gonna throw it out there:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/29/slut-shaming-study.html

thanks for the links, RAG & hurting.

wr2 the "h-word" article, i'm torn in two directions. on one hand, i'm often troubled by the limited number of modes available to women as characters in popular entertainment. on the other, i sometimes have the unpleasant sense that "horrible" women in stories created by men are punching bags for the venting of grievance. thinking in particular of the "bad exes" of mad men and weeds.

You might know about this already but Kier-La Janisse written a book called House Of Psychotic Women and she talks about lots of films that have been dismissed as sexist (misogynist often). The book (which I haven't read but I listened to a series of interviews with her about it) is about horror films prominently featuring female neurosis and how they resonate with her and seem to with quite a lot of other women (plenty of female bloggers particularly love giallo and slasher films). She talked about even though giallo films are sexist they still showed her things that she felt were true in her life. The book has been well received and it doesn't sound like it strains too hard in the apologist bullshit direction.

Personally I think that men often get actresses or create female characters that are often beautiful (usually in a innocent or ethereal way) and can scream and express emotions in way that is impressive, enviable, cathertic and intoxicating. I think it helps them articulate emotions that they couldn't otherwise.

i sometimes have the unpleasant sense that "horrible" women in stories created by men are punching bags for the venting of grievance. thinking in particular of the "bad exes" of mad men and weeds.

wasn't weeds created by a woman?

wuzzit? [investigates...]

lol, yeah, i guess i'm guilty of exactly what SPM was talking abt in that nightmare essay: rejecting a negative female character based on what i assumed it was trying to "say". weeds eps written by a large and gender-varied group of people, but by no means generally "by men".

imaginary sexism aside, show's treatment of elizabeth perkins' cecilia still bugs me. seems vindictive & unfunny. i don't dislike her, but the show seems to.

I felt like even though the characters were good in Sopranos, I feel like a lot of them were punching bags too. I think Betty Draper is a good character too.
I feel like when I read Victorian ghost stories there is often an idiot portrayed with total contempt and that annoys me, maybe these writers didn't have anyone to bitch about these people to, but I rarely appreciate characters who are nothing but punching bags.

I just read my previous post, sorry for how horribly I written it.

Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don't respect them, study finds

karma

And Hurricane Amanda seemed so warm and fluffy.

didn't she though

Regarding that hurricane article, there was a comment on the Economist that was basically to the effect of "people who evaluate the danger of a storm by its name are being killed... are we sure this is a bad thing?"

Lol do not underestimate Hurricane Amanda.

No one could have predicted that a sassy lil thang named Katrina could have breached the levies.

xp i called her mandy and she blew my house down now that's just over-reacting