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

Month: December 2008

The Pope vs. “Gender”

(Piny just posted on this, but I was working on a longer post so I figured I’d finish it.)

When I heard earlier this week that Ratzy was railing against the gays again, I didn’t really take much notice. What else is new? I guess it’s soooort of interesting that the Catholic Church has managed to jump on the bandwagon with a few other religious denominations in publicly acknowledging the necessity for ecological conservation, unlike some of the conservative religious right in this country. As a result, we get a papal analogy of saving the rainforest to saving mankind from the Horrible Creeping Plague O’ Gayness. How about they figure out how to save altar boys from predatory priests first, etc. etc. usual accusations of hypocrisy, blog post over.

Yesterday, I saw a more complete translation, and the controversial part of his annual Christmas proclamation caught my eye:

And in so doing, it ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself. What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense. When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term “gender”, results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator.

Watch out for gender this Christmas, kids!

Of course, it’s not hard to grasp that he doesn’t mean gender is dangerous in the sense of “the power structure through which bodies are classified as male and female, and assigned sets of gender roles, proscribed and mandatory behaviors, and different levels of privilege, creating an upper class and a lower class.” He means that naming this system, questioning it, attempting to empancipate yourself from it,

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Bamboozling the Etheridges

Dear Melissa and Tammy,

You were just hustled by a member of one of America’s oldest fraternities of snake-oil salesmen: the slick-talking preacher. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, because it’s clear that you both want to sincerely move forward into a new era of change with a spirit of openness, trust, and respect for the differences and disagreements that inevitably divide any group of 300 million people. You want to believe that Rick Warren really likes you, really likes gay people, really wants peace and equal rights for everyone as much as you do. I’m sorry — it’s just not true. He acted as if he likes you. Maybe he really does at some level. But that doesn’t change his job, and part of his job is to do things to hurt your family and families like yours.

At best, Rick Warren is a political opportunist who sings different tunes for different audiences, and is willing to change his colors on the surface if he has an opportunity for the spotlight. Unfortunately for that Rick Warren, he’s on the record about gays, abortion, and the proper submissive place of wives any number of times, and he can’t fool all of the people all of the time. At worst, Rick Warren may simply believe everything he says. In that case, he’s cynically furthering a far-right agenda to equate the pro-choice movement with Nazi concentration camps, keep gay sinners down, and keep wives submissive to their husbands by acting as the movement’s “nice guy, good cop” face.

I can understand why you might have made this mistake. You’d never heard of Rick Warren before all this, and your first reaction was that he must be an old-school fire-and-brimstone preacher in the style of Fred Phelps, railing against godless fags. He’s not. While you weren’t paying attention, a new breed of anti-gay politicians and preachers has seeped out of the far right: the ones that pretend they really like gays. Strangely, some of them are the SAME PEOPLE who used to outright revile and insult gays to our faces. In fact, some of them still do, including Rick Warren.

Rick Warren is a likeable teddy bear with an affable personality. As you said, he doesn’t have a tacky tweed suit and televangelist hair; he looks like a dad from down the street. His church does good work on global poverty and HIV issues, and I’m told he’s one of the more moderate evangelical leaders; he’s even broken with most of the others by believing in global warming, fancy that. But even if you believe that Rick Warren is suddenly sincere in his desire to help gay families, that all this attention has suddenly made him realize that all those statement he’s made were big mistakes, he and his church have a VERY long way to go before you can ask anyone else in the gay community to just take his word for it. But I guess you didn’t get around to asking him to put his money where his mouth is, huh? Slick-talking preachers have a way of avoiding that.

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NC Panel Recommends Reparations for Victims of Forcible Sterilization

A North Carolina panel has recommended that reparations be paid out to some 7,600 people who were victims of forced sterilizations:

A state House panel recommended the state give $20,000 to victims of the eugenics program, which sterilized about 7,600 people between 1929 and 1975 who were considered to be mentally handicapped or genetically inferior. Though North Carolina and several other states have apologized for such programs, none have offered reparations.

“Yes, it is ugly. It’s not something that we’re proud of,” said state Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth, who has been working on the issue for several years. “But I’m glad that North Carolina has done more than any other state to step forward and not run away from it.”

Lawmakers in the full General Assembly will have to approve the idea. They convene next month.

Illinois was the first state to offer a eugenics program in 1907 as social reformers advocated for a way to cleanse society of the mentally handicapped and mentally ill. Many states curtailed their sterilizations after World War II, recognizing it was similar to the actions taken by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

North Carolina, however, moved ahead aggressively after the war, conducting about 80 percent of procedures after 1945 and growing the program to be the third largest in the nation, behind only California and Virginia.

Most of those sterilized in the 1960s were poor black women.

There are strong intersections here between sexism, racism, classism and ableism.  Though people of all genders were forcibly sterilized, women were generally seen as the ones responsible for fertility; those with mental disabilities were seen as unfit to reproduce; and those who were of color (especially but certainly not entirely black) and/or poor were more likely to be seen as having a mental disability, even if they didn’t, and unfit to parent for a variety of reasons.

The history of forced sterilizations is one that’s highly important to modern understandings of systematic, violent discrimination, reproductive justice, and how social movements, certainly feminism, have often failed to help those burdened under the weight of more than one type of oppression.  In fact, though much less common, forcible sterilizations and attempts at forcible or coerced sterilizations continue in America today.

For a much more comprehensive introduction on all of this, I can’t more highly recommend both Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

As is always the case with reparations, they don’t actually right a wrong.  With something so serious and irreversible, the wrong cannot in fact possibly be righted.  They do, however, act as an acknowledgment of the suffering that was inflicted, and the fact that it had very tangible results.  If the state approves the idea of reparations, as I certainly hope they will, $20,000 for each survivor will not heal the wounds that NC created, but they will act as an important symbol of how people, all people, should and should  not be treated.  And no one should have their reproductive rights and their bodies violated.  Ever.

h/t CripChick

Happy Hannukah!



, originally uploaded by JillNic83.

I’m in Seattle, enjoying the crazy snowfall. What are you all doing for the holidays?

I Cried As If I Were His Daughter

This video comes with a VERY STRONG TRIGGER WARNING, as the poem performed here by Jasmine Mans contains graphic descriptions of rape.  But like Renee, who led me to the video, I feel like it must be shared.  I do in fact believe that while sharing our stories about sexual violence can be deeply triggering, it can also be deeply healing.  And they’re stories that need to be told.

Just wow.

UPDATE: Transcript below.  Big huge thanks to Renee for doing it.

I Cried As If I Were His Daughter  (transcript)

He held my fingers to my mouth and said hush little girl because right now only me and you exist in this world. He took off his pants and began unzipping mine. I cried while thinking this isn’t the way I envisioned my first time but when I saw the blood pore from my legs, I thought if it wasn’t me the tears another girl would shed. I looked him in his eyes and realized that he was old enough to be someone’s father, so I cried as if I was his daughter, as I felt my insides being slaughtered. I cried like she cried at night, locking her door praying for the illuminating existence of sunlight because when night came he came, pain came. Hoping that a bath could wash away the shame, hoping that a bath could wash away the sores that her vagina bore when her hymen was torn. Her bath washed away the semen but it didn’t wash away the memories of when he forced her to get on her knees and suck his – so I cried as if I was his daughter because of that rage and that possible AIDS between my legs, it could never add up to her pain, her distortion and her three different abortions and that one suicide not that she wrote saying mom, “I gotta go, don’t find out why I did this I love you. Even though I felt all alone just find a way to continue to be strong.” As he rammed his fingers in me I thought of reaching in my heart and pulling out my soul, now my ninety-eight point six degree body turned cold. I cried as if I was his daughter, lying there trying to hide her privates. This gave her reason to believe that God didn’t exist. Her mother knew that she heard sounds in the other room but she forced herself to believe that they were only cartoons as he licked my body up and down. I hope that he would ejaculate enough that in his own semen he would drown. He carved his name in my uterus so that my first born child could on be as cursed as ..inaudible.. thinking that this only happened in movies, she was the main character in the (inaudible) when she cried and he opened her credits. Too scared of the night, that is why she wished for ongoing sunlight. When he got off me I swear, I stabbed myself like his daughter cried because another pain wouldn’t feel good right now. I stabbed myself like his daughter cried because I could no longer look in the mirror. I stabbed myself like his daughter cried for him making me want to be gay. I stabbed myself like his daughter cried over the 160 babies that would be raped the next day. I cried as if I was he daughter because of that rage, that possible AIDS between my legs it could never add up to her pain, her distortion her three different abortions . That one suicide note that she wrote saying, Mom I gotta go. Don’t find out why I did this, I love you. Even though I know all along, but honestly nothing more tragic could help me write a better poem . I looked him in his eyes and realized that he was old enough to be someone’s father, but I looked him in his eyes and realized that he was old enough to be someone’s father, so Mom I died because I was his daughter.

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

Jill’s out of town, but since someone asked, here you go! Promote away — in fact, I’ll start!

Over at the Curvature, I’m writing a series about my favorite feminist Yoko Ono and the public perceptions/myths surrounding her. The Introduction and Part One are up already, and I hope that fellow Beatles/Yoko fans will go check them out.

See how truly shameless one can be? Follow that example and hit me with your recent posts.