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

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

Jill

Post a short description of something you’ve written this week, along with a link. Make it specific — don’t just link to your whole blog.

And happy Easter!

64 thoughts on Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

  1. Slow week for me. All I’ve got is a post on where we draw the line when it comes to engaging with people we probably won’t agree with, and when we declare our allies are no longer allies. (Or, perhaps, never were to begin with.)

    (Just for the sake of full disclosure, in the post I link to a call to boycott both Feministe and Feministing. Clearly I haven’t answered that call, but I do think it’s something we should be talking about.)

  2. Sometimes Disability Is A Shared Identity: Looking at how a chronic illness can affect those around you.

    Boo Yaa It’s Period Time: Looking at how the advertising industry creates fear about vaginas to sell us products we don’t need.

    Beauty As Power The Declining Commodity: Looking at how women are treated as we age.

    PeTA: We Employ Teh Minorities: A conversation with PeTA in which they defend their racism, homophobia and sexism as a legitimate path to raising awareness about animal rights.

    Turkish Reporter Wears Black Face To Report On Obama: We have heard endless about the presidential pooch but of course blackface barely made the news. Nice and post racial aren’t we.

  5. This week, I wrote a blog post about about The Emancipation Network. T.E.N. is a grassroots organization that works to empower survivors of human trafficking, teaching them skills and selling their handicrafts through T.E.N’s “Made By Survivors” store so that they can become self-sufficient. I’m hosting a blog giveaway for a necklace from T.E.N. in the hopes of raising awareness for the cause. If you’d like to check it out, you can do so by clicking here. Thank you for giving me a spot to post this!

  6. Some reviews this week…
    Black Male Outsider: Teaching as a Pro-Feminist Man: Lemons’ book highlights his classroom strategies to challenge students to confront the interrelated forces of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, often through teaching black, feminist literature. He also highlights how he worked to encourage students to come to a deeper understanding of the ways white supremacy has shaped American culture.

    Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl: Though Susan Campbell and I come from different flavors of fundamentalism, all of the experiences she writes about ring true. I suspect they would ring true for all women who were raised within a patriarchal religion (fundamentalist or not), as well as women who may not have been raised with any religion at all, but recognized prejudice in American society just the same.

    Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent: The undercurrent of their stories hints at class differences and whether they could afford international adoption or uninsured fertility treatment. Their individual voices speak a multitude of languages: different cultural practices and observations, how their pregnancy was viewed by their communities, how much support and education they were given throughout their process.

    Pray the Devil Back to Hell: Imagine all the worst atrocities that can be committed against women. Think of all of the greatest evils that stain a country with corruption and greed. Then, in the direst of situations, imagine how a group of women could change the face of blood and hopelessness. This is the story of Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

    Natalie Tran – CommunityChannel: The reigning queen of Australian YouTubers, she is a young, fresh-faced woman with self-deprecating humor who picks on the mundane snags of life that often get under our skin. It’s a Seinfeld approach to humor, except this channel features a smart-mouth Vietnamese woman who begins each video with a quirky wave and smile.

  8. Last week I was struggling to articulate why I feel consent is critical but not sufficient. I finally got it down to twenty-five words or less. Actually a lot less: Decision and Respect I’m still not done posting about respecting consent vs. respect for the person making that decison, but I think it’s an important point to get across in discussion with men.

    figleaf

  13. It was a busy week for me — I started a new solo blog. Here are some highlights:

    1. Sex Is Not The Point: A response to the idea that polyamory is good for everyone.

    2. Nerds, Jews And Gender Conformity: A short musing on the intersection of antisemitism and the gender binary.

    3. Does my haircut make me a better feminist? On the idea that some kinds of gender presentation are more feminist than others.

    4. On Religion And Asking The Right Questions. A post about the christocentrism of the everpresent atheism vs theism conversation, and about how the “Is there a God?” question isn’t actually important. I also wrote a follow up, clarifying what questions are fundamental to my religious practice (since the God one doesn’t much trouble me).

  14. I wrote a piece about people criticizing women for “letting themselves go” after giving birth.

    Also, parents are in an uproar over a sex education website aimed at 10-12 year-olds.

    And a woman who was raped four years ago in a deserted subway station while an MTA worker stood by and watched is taking her story public.

  15. I wrote a piece about Debbie Wasserman Schultz which provoked some discussion about whether it is appropriate to “hide a diagnosis” when it could advocate for others.

    Another one about Working through treatment and the increased unemployment among people with disabilities .

    I was out of town last week and fortunately had a couple of wonderful women guest blog, Wendy Harpham who has been a patient and a doctor and Debra DeMers, oncology nurse and two time survivor.

  17. I’ve been writing mostly on the local city council elections and supporters of one councilman are harassing me online including posting the neighborhood I live in so I’m counting the days until the election is over and done with. They did the same thing last year when he ran for supervisor.

    But taking a break from that mess, I wrote last week on retention of female police officers. It’s part of an ongoing series.

    This orginal article provides more details on the issue of female officers in my city’s department. As you can see by the comments it attracted, not everyone was happy about it. One commenter accused me of forcing the police chief to kidnap women to be officers and placing the department in great peril.

    He continued with this:

    Unfortunately because of people like you crying about the number of female officers on the street the department has made the situation worse by tenderly helping certain females through training by placing them with FTO’s that are not proactive.

    Instead of having these females working the Eastside arresting parolees or chasing down “gangsters” in the Arlanza area they are gingerly driving around taking their safe little report calls. The way a number of our female officers get tenderly helped through training just makes the force dangerous for them and dangerous for their beat partners when they get on their own. I mean how many times do you have to be re-phased through training before you pass the FTO program. I am sure it was getting tough finding weak FTO’s to pass these females.

    I will be writing more postings on the FTO program actually. I’m currently researching some information I’ve received about the treatment of female officers there.

  20. Last week I posted a series of reviews of the shows in the “Sex Education Show vs Pornography” series shown on UK Channel 4. Each show managed at once to have some very useful information about sex for teenagers, and yet miss out huge parts that were equally, or more, important. It also managed to propagate several myths while dispelling others, and their take on pornography wasn’t too enlightened either. (Link leads to a page with links to all the different instalments of the reviews). I only got around to finishing the review this Tuesday, which is why this is in this Sunday’s and not last Sunday’s shameless self-promotion.

    I editorialised a little on the role of the police in Ian Tomlinson’s death

    I posted a poem for International Poetry Month, that I wrote when I was just making my first move away from living with my parents: The Leap

    Finally, I enjoyed a guilty pleasure moment of humour at the expense of a porn mail-order catalogue that came through my door (the guilt is because the joke depends on gendered stereotypes…)

  24. I blog about the Great Amazon Deranking Fiasco, wherein Amazon removes the sales ranks from books considered too “adult;” de-ranked books then become harder to find (they won’t appear in the basic search), depending on whether or not they have a Kindle edition.

    (FYI: Of special interest to Feministe is the de-ranking of Yes Means Yes, which now automatically comes up with the Kindle edition in all searches.)

  28. This week in Evil Slutopia:

    ~We put together a WAM! Book List, since we could have filled an extra suitcase with all of the great books we saw and heard about there. (We also got caught up on everything that happened while we were out.)

    ~We bought an issue of Cosmo for our train ride to Boston, and of course we got a couple of blog posts out of that reading experience – a reply to their article about things you should never apologize for, and some thoughts on their use of the term “male post-partum depression”.

    ~We created a Dixie Chicks playlist for Sean Hannity, since he’s such a big fan. And we discussed Bill O’Reilly’s misguided rant about Eminem’s latest video.

    ~We reevaluated terms like “support” and “bipartisanship”, thanks to Meghan McCain.

    ~We gave a quick shoutout to Go Sisterhood.

    ~And we wrote Gay Marriage Makes Adam And Eve Cry, about the reaction of the right-wing group Concerned Women for America to the marriage equality bill passing in Vermont.

  30. In the wake of the Iowa, Vermont, Washington D.C., and Swedish announcements about same-sex marriage, I wrote But we are winning… on how evil creeps who compare same-sex marriage to bestiality are losing – the game, the argument, their “war”. I wrote, thinking about a friend’s funeral, attended by the pastor who officiated at his marriage: “And I thought, for my friend as well as for myself: We got to do what not many people ever do. We live in a better world, a kinder and more generous and less hatefilled world, than the one we were born in, than the one we grew up in. We helped build it, this better world: it’s part of your legacy, as a gay activist, it will be part of mine.” (Also, I did Maggie Gallagher lolcats. Nom nom nom!)

    I noted, also, that Obama now has till May 11th to decide if he is for or against torture – that’s when the British lawyer representing Binyam Mohammed goes on trial.

    On a slightly less serious note, I wrote about how Jennifer McCann, the Vegan Lunchbox Blogger, has turned to the dark side and is now equating “being thin” with being healthy.

    Finally, I wrote about how an LGBT bookstore in my home town got closed down by a big chain, which then – just like Amazon this weekend – tried to stuff all the queer books back into the closet.

  35. My thoughts on the teen sex show on this week’s Oprah. http://snipurl.com/flg06

    When Transgendered People Are Assaulted Why Do People Make A Joke Out It? http://snipurl.com/fiez9

    Queen Latifah Goes Back to Hip-Hop Roots http://snipurl.com/fi2ed

    New Blog Post On: Holiday…Celebrating Lady Day http://snipurl.com/fgc0g

    New Blog Post On: That Old Objectification Song http://snipurl.com/ffuxv

    New Blog Post On: Ladies Get It From the Horse’s Mouth http://snipurl.com/fcesf

    New Blog Post On: Hipster Racism Strikes Again http://snipurl.com/fbxfu

  38. I did a bunch of posts this week, but here are just a few.

    My letter to a guy who had “I love boobies” bumper stickers on his car, among other things. I suggest some other bumper stickers he may enjoy… “Dear Misogynist (Bumber Sticker Edition)”
    http://quitthecompromise.blogspot.com/2009/04/dear-misogynist-bumper-sticker-edition.html

    My personal story involving eating disorders and how veganism actually led to my recovery and was not another manifestation of disordered eating… “Veganism, Eating Disorders, and a Guy Named Giles Who Doesn’t Get It”
    http://quitthecompromise.blogspot.com/2009/04/vegetarianism-eating-disorders-and-guy.html

    On this week’s episode… “Law & Order SVU is Pushing It… Again”
    http://quitthecompromise.blogspot.com/2009/04/law-order-svu-is-pushing-it-again.html

    Also, not mine, but the 21st Carnival of Radical Feminists is up:
    Part One
    (http://demonista.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/sorry-carnival-of-radical-feminists-pt-1/)
    Part Two
    (http://demonista.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/21st-carnival-of-radfems-part-2/)

  45. This week on Yes Means Yes Blog:

    My thoughts on the self-serving narcisist who sexually assaulted a woman and wants to be a presence in the feminist blogosphere, Kyle Payne.

    I celebrate/speculate about how the marriage equality dominoes will fall.

    Kendall McKenzie published a very long, thorough and good article on sex toys at Sadie, which I reviewed.

    I rushed out a post pointing to a mainstream commentary decrying abusive prosecutions of sexting under the child porn laws, but I missed a major part of the analysis and corrected it when Cara raised the issue.

  46. Women’s History: Ada Byron Lovelace http://suchcoolstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/womens-history-ada-byron-lovelace.html

    A rabbit girl http://suchcoolstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/rabbit-girl.html

    Strangeling: The Art of Jasmine Becket-Griffith http://suchcoolstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/strangeling-art-of-jasmine-becket.html

    Retro-inspired with a sexy, feminine fit, Joan Hand Stroh’s aprons have been featured in Shop Smart Magazine and on Good Morning America. http://suchcoolstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/momomadeit.html

    Jessica just launched the Kunklebaby Organics Collection featuring hand-printed fabric with her artwork designs. Happy Baby-Happy Earth! http://suchcoolstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/kunklebaby.html

  49. I just started a little blog as a place for me to ramble about links between academic analysis and pop culture, and here I do some thinking aloud about my problematic love of movies that tend to run counter to my feminist sensibilities.

  51. I posted a translation of an article written about my work in Ma’arav Magazine by Israeli Art Historian David Sperber. Frida Kahlo at the synagogue: Maya Escobar and the young Jewish-American Creation

    In the first short film in the series she appears dressed up as the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo who became an icon within the feminist discourse. it is commonly argued that Kahlo had some Jewish roots. Escobar is dressed and made up as is famously attributed to Kahlo – the uni brow – while screaming “I am Frida Kahlo, you are Frida Kahlo, we are Frida Kahlo”. In agitation or in ecstasy she tears her custom, messes up her hair, wipes her make up off of her face and returns to being herself. In another short film in the series she carries on with a monologue of a jewish orthodox woman. The text here is so exact that for a minute the line between irony and slapstick to deep seriousness is blurred. In another short film the stereotypical Latin female as a sexual sensual object is presented, when here too the subject is moving between embracing the stereotypes and breaking them. Escobar is presenting different episodes that she had experienced herself and that deal with her hybrid identity as a woman, as a Jew and as a Latin American.

  54. I wonder how likely it is that a vacant lot north of Bryant Park will turn into an art gallery (post is actually from two weeks ago…).

    And on my professional blog, I link to some national coverage of transit cuts (which are impacting cities all over America). It’s good to see that advocacy efforts have gotten this meme into the mainstream, but boy is it sobering.

  55. I blogged more than I expected to this week:

    She doesn’t get paid?, about Michelle Obama’s extensive free service for her husband and for her country.

    “Well, there’s not a lot of elections in China.”, about Rep. Betty Brown’s suggestions to Asian immigrants living in the United States.

    AmazonFail, or, Dirty! about the retailer position on teh gays and teh lesbians.

    I cannot process this animal feces anymore. about Seth Rogen’s oeuvre of misogynistic projects.

    Enjoy!

  56. I reviewed one of the worst books I’ve ever read, which was insanely sexist. Basically, you’re either a young hottie sex bomb or a disgusting old woman. Wonderful. I also include some of the horrible purple prose in the book. It’s all quite hilarious, in a sad way.

    I discuss repetitive learning and low standards in university courses. I also talked about the story of a 13 year old girl with Fragile X syndrome suing a sperm bank for giving her mom donor sperm that caused the disease, and genetically why this is a horrible idea.

  57. From a NY Times article by Nicholas Kristoff:
    “A distinguished philosopher, Thomas Taylor, reacted to Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 call for “the rights of woman” by writing a mocking call for “the rights of brutes.” To him, it seemed as absurd that women should have rights as that animals should have rights.”
    my (vegan) commentary:
    http://www.vegansoapbox.com/the-rights-of-brutes-are-now-mainstream/

    And… Rape threats via meat promotion…
    Check out the rampant misogyny, heterosexism, and other fucked up shit said by anti-vegans:
    http://elainevigneault.com/worse-examples.html
    For example, YouTubers are telling me “Why don’t you shut up you old bitch, I’ll make you eat my meat.”
    It’s nothing new, really. I just got a bigger dose than usual this last week.

  60. Check out my thoughts on Afghanistan’s new marriage (aka we hate women) legislation.
    I discuss the role of feminism and self-liberation within Afghan society, and whether we have the right to intervene in the cultural affairs of Afghanistan.

  61. One of the “Kings of Werribee” gang rapists has gone public with a rap piece boasting about his part in the gang rapes and rape DVD sales. The press are calling it a “sex DVD”. Trigger warnings apply.

    And in the wake of some rather terrifying local press on what women “should” be “allowed” to do, I’m challenging feminists to support all aspects of reproductive rights, looking a bit more closely about deprecated birth choices including freebirth in Australia.

  63. I am putting together a play about abortion. I’m hoping to gather a collection of submitted (anonymous) monologues and write a play to be performed at my college’s Women’s Week. If anyone would like to submit their stories anonymously, please send an email to foxglovefinn54@gmail.com and/or join the Facebook group, “Silent No More: Women Speak Out About Abortion.”

    The stories can be personal stories of abortion. We would also love to have stories about helping friends/family deal with abortion, what it’s like to be a male helping a female partner through abortion, or even a story about an elderly relative telling their tale of abortion pre-Roe. All stories are welcome, basically. My undying gratitude goes to anyone willing to submit a story.

  64. This is way late, but FYI, V’s post is pure trollage about how women are destroying video games, and it contains a lot of sexist, homophobic, and ableist language.

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