In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: June 2007

Egypt Outlaws Female Genital Cutting



Two girls sit next to an old knife that is used to perform female circumcision during a rite of passage ceremony in 2001. via.

Good on them.

Ninety-seven percent of Egyptian women have undergone clitoridectomies, according to a survey conducted in 2000. A twelve-year-old girl recently died while undergoing the procedure. Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation of FGC.

Wait a minute…

Apparently, seeking a judicial bypass is evidence that you are not mature enough for a judicial bypass. In fact, being a minor is a huge strike against you:

After the hearing the judge found that “she lacked the maturity to decide whether to have an abortion.” The court emphasized her “unwillingness to communicate with her mother or consult with other adults, her focus on her own needs, and her failure to discuss the matter with a doctor.” The trial court also felt that she had “only minimal understanding of the risks of the abortion procedure” and that she was “unemployed and being supported by her mother.”

(Hat tip to lefarkins.)

Scott has also been blogging the Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down school desegregation. Starts here, then here, here, and here.

Scott quotes from Justice Stevens’ dissent:

There is a cruel irony in The Chief Justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education, The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.” This sentence reminds me of Anatole France’s observation: “[T]he majestic equality of the la[w], forbid[s] rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” The Chief Justice fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways, The Chief Justice rewrites the history of one of this Court’s most important decisions.

And this is the crux of the decision: decisions based on racial demographics that seek to repair inequalities–no matter how staggering–are exactly the same as the segregation, legal and informal, that created those inequalities in the first place.

Right, so.

I’ve spent the past two weeks trying to paint pretty much all of a mural, working title, “The Fucking Mural.” Aside from a misconceived blockout in house paint*, I hadn’t done any work on it until about two weeks ago. I have about three more hours this morning, not counting packing for the weekend (see below) and breakfast, and then…it needs to be finished. It’s almost done. Just the detail in some of the mountains, the talus, this little section in the lower left, and the bit under the wall sconce. I’m a little punchy.

My deadline is so tight because I’m also about to go on a trip. I’m going to the Grand Canyon over the weekend, and then I have about twelve hours back home, and then I’m going to Europe for five months to paint and draw things that are not murals.** I was not originally planning to have to take much time off at all, but a bunch of stable houseguest arrangements crumbled just recently, and now I’m gonna be in hostels for most of my trip. I’m hoping to keep up with feministe, and I’m sure I’ll be plenty homesick, but things are up in the air. I will have a stable address from the end of July though the end of August, so I’ll be back then.

So I nominated a guest-blogger, one I’m sure you’ll all be glad to see, and will be lining up other guest-bloggers as I go. Assuming I actually do lose internet access, I’ll miss all of you.

*House paint is far cheaper than artist quality oil paint. The texture and quality’s somewhat different, but the biggest problem is that you can’t really select the colors all that carefully. Artist paints are standardized–there are some variations from brand to brand, but you get to assume that “cadmium yellow” is a bright sunny yellow that mixes sunlit greens and warm oranges, whereas “alizarin crimson” is a cool dark red good for eggplant purples and soft greys. Artist paints typically do not have names like Kittredge Point Memories, Plum Bake, Salmon Pearl, and Delicate Orchid. I had no idea what the hell I was purchasing, not on the level I needed in order to actually use the paint. Was Midnight Dove anything like prussian blue? Would it mix well with December Sky? Would Scandinavian Blue, Brilliant Blue, or Montana Blue be closer to ultramarine? Was it just a really bad idea to buy a color whose name started with Las Vegas? I ended up trying to paint the mural with colors selected more or less at random, and it showed. Even the undertone, which was supposed to be a nice yellow ochre (and yeah, we bought and swabbed on samples of all of these), turned out like something that really should have been in the “fair warning, it’s bright orange” name family. Harvest Melange, or Adobe Sunset, or Pumpkin Spice. Now I’m using artist quality paint, and it’s suddenly like painting a picture on a wall.

**Okay, so maybe it was a bad idea to agree to paint a mural right before leaving the country for half the year. At least now I know exactly how long it takes me to paint a mural, give or take a few hours, right?

A few little things

1. I’m not used to writing on a site that gets so many visitors. For those of you that read my tiny little blog, you might notice that the comments are from the same group of people, some that I know personally and some that I feel I have gotten to know. Part of the reason why I didn’t write yesterday is because I suddenly became intimidated by the number of people that read my previous two posts. It shouldn’t overwhelm me, really, because this is a great opportunity, and to some extent, this is what blogging is about. And a part of me hopes that one day W.O.A.C. becomes as large as this community here. Until then, I’m really thrilled to be a guest blogger here – I think it is an important experience.
2. One of the things I noticed in comments on my own site as well as here, in response to the wedding post that I put up, is the notion of women needing to “be themselves” and “make their own choices” and “worrying about what is culturally acceptable”. I want to address this here rather than in another post because it borderlines on being such an issue for me that I don’t want to make it one. I think there many brown women, many women from diaspora communities and immigrant communities, many women who are from working class and poor families, many women who are hard working and hustle everyday of their lives…who can’t necessarily “just be themselves”. Sometimes these women have to pick their battles – sometimes they have to follow their hearts and their dreams and sometimes they have to yell and scream so that people will hear them at the risk of being emotionally wounded and even ignored. But sometimes women have to help their parents and their families. Sometimes they have to keep the peace by performing certain gender roles or holding their tongues. My choice to “be myself” is always going to come at a price – and sometimes, and for other women many times, this price is simply not worth it. So we learn to pick our battles, work through the system. I become weary of the comments and phrases above because it ignores the system and risks putting blame on the victim (not to suggest that women are victims – but rather that we are products of larger institutional systems that need to be looked at). There is so much more to say about this but for now this will have to be sufficient. My thoughts aren’t clear enough to be completely articulate.
3. Self-care is really really hard. So many of my women of color and queer people of color and working class friends become so invested in taking care of one another and in facing the challenges of the everyday, we get exhausted and the thought of taking care of ourselves seems daunting. As someone who has the privilege of accessing healthy food choices, I sometimes get too tired to just make a salad. I get lazy about exercising everyday. Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier if I had a lot of money to buy myself beauty services and gym subscriptions. I need to remember that women of color have to take care of themselves, their bodies, because otherwise what do we have left? We just become empty and then who are we helping and empowering and supporting?
4. Gaining weight is difficult and upsetting and frustrating. Staying healthy is something I need to think about more consciously.
5. Sometimes my posts, my discussion of race&gender, my specifications of women of color, alienate some white people and make them uncomfortable and guilty and defensive. I have encountered this while blogging, in classrooms, and in public. I’m beginning to believe more and more that this is about doing my work. My work right now is to talk about these things because it keeps me sane. Because there are people who leave me wonderful comments that say “I totally feel that way”. Do your work. That’s all there is to say about that. There isn’t really a response to the discomfort/alienation claim – I agree that this is a result of my writing, a result of my voice, a result of being a loud working class woman of color, and a result of someone who is extremely against second wave feminism, rather hoping for transnational frameworks of solidarity.

Tomorrow I will write something good!

Do No Harm – Except to Women

Ema at The Well Timed Period has this fantastic post up detailing just how easy it is for doctors to refuse reproductive health care to women. Go read it. She’s responding to this article, which discusses all the different ways that women’s health is compromised by ideologues in white coats. And it is disturbing as all hell.

It begins with the story of a rape survivor who was denied emergency contraception in the ER:

Lori Boyer couldn’t stop trembling as she sat on the examining table, hugging her hospital gown around her. Her mind was reeling. She’d been raped hours earlier by a man she knew—a man who had assured Boyer, 35, that he only wanted to hang out at his place and talk. Instead, he had thrown her onto his bed and assaulted her. “I’m done with you,” he’d tonelessly told her afterward. Boyer had grabbed her clothes and dashed for her car in the freezing predawn darkness. Yet she’d had the clarity to drive straight to the nearest emergency room—Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania—to ask for a rape kit and talk to a sexual assault counselor. Bruised and in pain, she grimaced through the pelvic exam. Now, as Boyer watched Martin Gish, M.D., jot some final notes into her chart, she thought of something the rape counselor had mentioned earlier.

“I’ll need the morning-after pill,” she told him.

Dr. Gish looked up. He was a trim, middle-aged man with graying hair and, Boyer thought, an aloof manner. “No,” Boyer says he replied abruptly. “I can’t do that.” He turned back to his writing.

Boyer stared in disbelief. No? She tried vainly to hold back tears as she reasoned with the doctor: She was midcycle, putting her in danger of getting pregnant. Emergency contraception is most effective within a short time frame, ideally 72 hours. If he wasn’t willing to write an EC prescription, she’d be glad to see a different doctor. Dr. Gish simply shook his head. “It’s against my religion,” he said, according to Boyer. (When contacted, the doctor declined to comment for this article.)

Boyer left the emergency room empty-handed. “I was so vulnerable,” she says. “I felt victimized all over again. First the rape, and then the doctor making me feel powerless.” Later that day, her rape counselor found Boyer a physician who would prescribe her EC. But Boyer remained haunted by the ER doctor’s refusal—so profoundly, she hasn’t been to see a gynecologist in the two and a half years since. “I haven’t gotten the nerve up to go, for fear of being judged again,” she says.

Read More…Read More…

The Kids Are All Right

After all the depressing stories yesterday, I bring you good news:

–Young Americans are leaning left. Forty-four percent support marriage equality. Twenty-eight percent describe themselves as liberal. Sixty-two percent support a government-sponsored healthcare program. Seventy-five percent of them are generally pro-choice, even though about half of that 75 percent favor greater restrictions.

By a 52 to 36 majority, young Americans say that Democrats, rather than Republicans, come closer to sharing their moral values, while 58 percent said they had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, and 38 percent said they had a favorable view of Republicans.

We’re also optimistic, even about the Iraq quagmire. I think that’s a good thing, provided that optimism helps to positively influence reality.

-High school seniors who were honored by President Bush for their academic accomplishments handed him a letter urging him to end torture. Awesome. Thanks to Elizabeth for the link.

-Feminist artists have created The Feminist Art Project, and it looks pretty awesome. Their work will be all over the country — see if there’s an event near you. Thanks to Roy for the link.

–Cheney’s office and the White House have been subpoenaed. Yeehaw! Thanks to Louise for the link.

-And there’s a new Die Hard movie coming out. Sweet.

You all have sufficiently cheered me up. Gracias.

…and we’re back!

Sort of. Sorry about the outage. The server issues should be temporarily fixed, but the site is still iffy. Hopefully the little guy will hold out until I can get a tech genius up in here to fix it.

I’m looking to get the site updated so that this doesn’t happen again, and so we have better security and spam controls. If you would like to contribute to the upgrading effort, we always appreciate donations — just click the PayPal button below (also permanently posted in the About Jill section).

Thanks for everyone’s patience!











Branded

Dawn points to this article about a woman being branded with an iron for reporting another couple to Child Protective Services:

When the woman entered the apartment, the group assaulted and held her against her will, detectives said.

The suspects shaved off a portion of the victim’s hair and using a branding iron, wrote the word “snitch” on her face, then blindfolded her, officers said.

Her body was also burned with a propane torch, investigators said.

Ugh. I don’t have much to add here, except to say that this is apparently Depressing News Night at Jill’s house. Sorry for all the downer articles. If someone wants to send me something fun and/or uplifting, I’ll post it…