feminist blogs

Hey all you women's studies devotees, it's time to gather round the proverbial fire and swap theories. Jessica and I are off to the National Women's Studies Association's annual conference tomorrow. This year the title is "Resisting Hegemonies: Race and Sexual Politics in Nation, Region, Empire" and it is in Cincinnati, Ohio. The keynote is (awesome, awesome, awesome) Patricia Hill Collins.

I'll be part of a roundtable on the election led by Ellen Bravo on Friday afternoon, and then Jess and I are doing a panel, along with my friend Amada from Princeton's Women's Center, called "Swinging Back to Center: Balancing Judgment and Empathy within the Women’s Studies Classroom and in the Feminist World Beyond" on Saturday. We hope to see old friends there and meet plenty o' new ones. Please introduce yourselves to us feministing readers!

Read more if you want a sense of what we're going to be talking about at our panel on Saturday...

Recent popular feminist analysis seems to fall into two camps, crudely put “the judgers”—Get to Work by Linda Hirshman, Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, Unhooked by Laura Sessions Stepp—and “the includers”—Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Sisterhood Interrupted by Deborah Siegel. The judgers argue that there are, indeed, more and less feminist choices, more and less feminist ways to live, and that until feminists owns up to these distinctions, we will be a movement awash in our own ambiguity and inclusivity. The includers, on the other end of the spectrum, worry that feminists too often come off as righteous and bullheaded, and that this perception keeps women from embracing the movement’s rather uncontroversial mission of equality and choice.

This same imbalance is mirrored in classrooms across America, where young women are trying to understand and integrate feminist ideas. They complain of feeling judged by professors who point fingers before asking questions—like, why does pole dancing seem like a passage to power for college-educated women? Why do young women listen to music with misogynistic lyrics? Some women’s studies programs, in an attempt to attract students, seem to water down their politics and course offerings until their feminism is practically unrecognizable.

So how do we—women’s studies professors, feminist thinkers, writers, and activists—find the middle ground? How can we articulate a concrete vision of the most feminist way to live, but also have empathy for the motivation and psychology of others? How can we move feminism forward, without alienating its future?

Greg Mortenson is an unlikely advocate of girls’ education. A hyper-masculine mountain climber, he spent much of his young twenties figuring out how to get to K2, one of the tallest mountains in the world, and climb it. He failed. But as with so many failures, there was a wild success underneath.

He fell in love with Pakistan and its people, especially the native peoples of Korphe, a tiny village high in the mountains that defeated him. After building a school there (another climb that included many, many obstacles), he found that it was not outdoor sports but education that he was most called to. He wanted to keep building schools, keep interacting with the people of Pakistan, keep—he would later conceptualize—fight terror through the safety of books and open minds.

The 300 page book (exhaustively detailed at times) is a powerful retelling of Mortenson’s journey. As a sucker for these kinds of biographies in altruism, I was riveted the whole time. Mortenson’s resilience and determination inspired me to take a totally new perspective on my own definition of “set back.” He is sometimes frighteningly unafraid.

But what I found missing from this account were the moral complexities. In Korphe, for example, Mortenson helps the village people—historically separated from “civilization”—by an abyss, build a bridge. What seems simple, however, had to have caused all sorts of wild changes in the community. Relin only dwells on the positive, briefly mentioning that there are often unintended side effects of well-intentioned acts. As someone interested in all the gray of international development and civic involvement, I want to read about those side effects, not see them glossed over.

In short, the biography was too sunny for me, to glowing and angelic. Nevertheless, I was incredibly moved by Mortenson’s example and you, no doubt, will be too (if you haven’t already been…it's a bestseller after all).

Next time: The Oxytocin Factor by Kirsten Uvnas Moberg

From the U.S. Gulf Coast post-Katrina to Somalia, Iraq, Darfur, Zimbabwe, and South Sudan, today is Juneteenth, folks. Black Americans still have our eyes on freedom, and nowadays, all over the world, many more people do, too. Today, 19 June,...

Silly Site o' the Day

We welcomed our twins into the world last Friday via C-section. Eli arrived weighing 7lbs. 3oz., at 8:16 AM. He was 19 inches long. His Nigerian name is Emeka. Mark arrived weighing 6lbs. 5oz., at 8:18 AM. He was 18 inches long. His Nigerian name is Akholisa.

We made a video of their arrival. They may have broken the recorded for the loudest birth. The doctors and nurses were all laughing as were Dad and I. They screamed like this for the entire time it took to repair my my incision–I’m guessing about 30 minutes.

I often feel guilty about my silence on that topic. The silence is firmly founded on facts, however. The whole escapade is a clusterfuck. Once you swat a wasps' nest, the wasps come out and you can't just put them back, and interfering in the politics of a country without any real understanding of its history is very much like swatting a wasps' nest, without a backup plan about how to get the hell out of there.

In short, all avenues I can imagine are littered with bloody corpses, and the only workable solution is to pick the avenue with the fewest corpses, assuming that we can figure out which one that is.

And yes, women in Iraq have certainly not been liberated by the U.S. invasion, though many of them have been "liberated" from their husbands as there are now many, many widows there.

Sigh. I don't envy the U.S. administration which has the task of sorting it all out, assuming that the voters are wise enough to choose such an administration instead of one who wants to monger more war.

Apparently LG is trying to appeal to dudes who like to use their cellphone as a stalking device. (How convenient! A phone for men who don't want to bother with Maxim's DIY stalker tips.) Engaget calls this ad "creepy" and "early-90s softcore voodoo porn." I say it's stalkerrific:

Ugh. Hey, buddy! That’s your mom calling to remind you that stalking is illegal. Real women don't appreciate strange dudes standing outside their window and recording them on a cameraphone.

(Thanks to Courtney's pal Christopher for the link.)

She won a special election yesterday to become the first African-American woman from Maryland to serve in the U.S. Congress. What does that make the percentage of women in the Congress?

Her victory is good news, though.

(Via The Hand Mirror 2008-06-11, via The Hand Mirror 2008-06-17, via comments on feministe 2008-06-16.)

New Zealand’s abortion law, unlike, for example, the United States’s existing case law, does not recognize a basic privacy right to abort a pregnancy without government interference. The law is restrictive in theory, but applied fairly liberally in practice; like many abortion law reform proposals that were entertained in the United States in the years shortly before Roe v. Wade, it requires a woman to get permission from institutionally-privileged consultants before she can get an abortion, but the criteria for permitting a therapeutic abortion are broad enough (especially under the heading of the pregnant woman’s mental health) that they can be, and are, handed out pretty liberally. But as Cindy Cisler pointed out in 1969, no matter how superficially liberal an abortion law regime may be, these kind of requirements for mediating reproductive choice through politically-anointed medical experts are really a dangerous trap, just waiting to be sprung. Thus, witness Justice Forrest Miller’s recent ruling on the workings of the Kiwi Abortion Supervisory Committee:

In a review of the workings of the Abortion Supervisory Committee, initiated by Right To Life New Zealand, Justice Forrest Miller said there was a reason to doubt the lawfulness of many abortions.

Jusice Miller was delivering his judgment following a hearing at the High Court at Wellington in April.

Right to Life had claimed the Abortion Supervisory Committee had failed to properly interpret the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act, so full regard is given to the rights of unborn children.

It sought to find the committee had failed its statutory duty to review the procedure for abortions and enquire into the circumstances in which consultants authorised abortions on mental health grounds.

It said the committee had failed to seek proper information on the mental health grounds from consultants.

It also sought to find the committee had failed in its duty to ensure adequate counselling facilities were available.

A registered practitioner can only lawfully carry out an abortion if they act under a certificate issued by two certifying consultants.

The Abortion Supervisory Committee said it had no power to review or oversee the clinical decision-making process.

It denied New Zealand had abortion on request, and said there was no evidence of this.

In his judgment Justice Miller found the Abortion Supervisory Committee had applied the abortion law more liberally than Parliament had intended.

There is reason to doubt the lawfulness of many abortions authorised by certifying consultants, he said.

Justice Miller said the abortion law neither confers or recognises a legal right to life of the unborn child.

However, he said the Bill of Rights, through the abortion law, had recognised the unborn child had a claim on the conscience of the community, and not merely that of the mother.

—stuff.co.nz (2008-06-10): Abortion law being used too liberally

Give me a call when the fetus has a claim on the bodies of the community, and not merely that of the mother.

Then maybe they can have something to say about it. In the meantime, though, as long as it’s just weighing on their consciences and not on their abdomens, it really is merely the mother, not the rest of the community, whose conscientious deliberation ought to matter when it comes to continuing the pregnancy. Of course, the bellowing busybody blowhard brigade has every right to be just as loudmouthed as they want to be, on their own time, in their own space, and on their own nickel, about what their consciences tell them ought to happen in other people’s wombs. But certainly neither they, nor the government, has any right to commandeer another woman’s reproductive system against her will, or to coerce her into even one more day of pregnancy or forced labor for the sake of satisfying their own qualms.

Abortion on demand and without apology.

See also:

• The Hand Mirror (2008-06-17): NZ’s abortion law: musings on the strategy from here
• The Hand Mirror (2008-06-11): Here we go again.
• GT 2006-02-16: Other people’s wombs
• GT 2008-03-08: Abortion on demand and without apology (Dakota Remix)
• GT 2007-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #34

Or what's in a name? Like in women changing their name when getting married. A couple of posts on this very old feminist topic turned up yesterday.

Matthew Yglesias thinks changing your name at marriage doesn't make much sense. Imagine if you had to change it every time you change your job, to match the name of the new firm, for instance. That is funny, because Finnish last names were originally often the names of farms, so you actually did change your last name when you moved to a new farm. But most people didn't have last names at all; they were just Someone's Daughter or Someone's Son, the "Someone" always being a man, of course.

Atrios also thinks that keeping your maiden name at marriage is quite all right, and that the whole question of names is not really worth thinking about. Do what you want.

It is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things, certainly falling far below saving the environment and stopping all wars. But it's an interesting feminist topic to address, for all sorts of historical reasons.

First, the custom of women taking their husband's last name is not a universal one. The Chinese didn't do it, and in many countries people just didn't have last names at all. But where "family names" became the norm those names were always the names of the man's family. Thus, whenever two people married, the woman moved from her family into his, initially physically but later at least in the terms of the last name she adopted at that moment.

For example, Elizabeth Jones became Mrs. John Smith, with just one stroke of a pen on the wedding certificate, and Elizabeth Jones died, to all practical purposes. If you study genealogical records it can be very hard to find out who some "Mrs. John Smith" once was, you know, except for being the wife of John Smith. In a sense, this erases women from much of history.

My guess is that many second wave feminists focused on this topic for the reason that name changes do tend to "disappear" the women from written history, not to mention the obvious imbalance in always expecting her to move to his family group and never the other way around. But then other feminists point out that all the woman is doing is moving from one man's (the father's) family group to another man's (the husband's) family group. The only way around that problem is to pick a brand new family name and to start your own family group.

Except that this seldom happens. Even in the cases where a woman keeps her family name at marriage, even in that case the children mostly get the father's surname. Unless hyphenation is used. But that just reintroduces the problem for the next generation, because at some point there will be too many names to connect together.

I think that viewing the name from the angle of perpetuating a family is the most useful one, and then we are faced with the question of asking whose family it is that is being perpetuated. There are practical solutions to this. For instance, every other child could be given the father's last name, every other the mother's last name, and both parents could keep their own names.

If you find that unappealing it's probably because many feel that families should all share the same last name. The easiest feminist solution to that is to decree that for the next hundred years it will be the men who change their name at marriage and that all children will get the mother's last name. Imagine proposing that. I'm sure that many men would not like it at all. Even if names in general are trivial things, your name is not. Right?

At the same time, the custom of changing your name at marriage has been given a romantic halo by the history, by old movies and books where some poor girl from not-much family becomes a countess by capturing the count's heart. Also, sacrificing your name is part of that gift of love for many women, even today, and the drawbacks of it seem acceptable, especially if you didn't like your original family name that much to begin with. The best way to see those drawbacks is to contemplate that reversal I proposed in the penultimate paragraph.