A veritable smorgasbord for you!
1. “Intimate Politics: A Roundtable”: a downloadable podcast of a panel of feminist scholars and their reactions (not book reviews, but further musings) to the book Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, by Bettina Aptheker.
2. “Who hates to hear they look great?”: amandaw on the “But you don’t look sick!” phenomenon and invisible disabilities.
3. “What are we doing here?”: magniloquence muses at length on the femisphere, its characters, and the dynamics of blogwars. Meta upon meta, lots to unpack here.
4. “Students use sex to promote healthy foods”: Two students in Canberra come up with the absolutely ground-breaking new idea of presenting scantily clad women’s bodies in order to promote a food group. Somehow, this is “Innovative!” national news.
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Filed under: Meta, Politics, Read 'ems, bigotry, birth, indigenous, interblog, language, racism
I have succumbed to the July lurgy, so today: an invitation to join me in Stuff I Have Been Reading. Don’t miss the stuff below the cut. Jane Simpson is amazing.
Aboriginal Poets
We are tired of the benches, our beds in the park,
We welcome the sundown that heralds the dark.
White Lady Methylate!
Keep us warm and from crying.
Hold back the hate
And hasten the dying.
The tribes are all gone,
The spears are all broken:
Once we had bread here,
You gave us stone
Jack Davis, ‘Desolation’, published in The First-born, p. 36. Sourced from “Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988″ , chapter 8, Adam Shoemaker. Go read the link, it’s worth it.
~~~
See plain the promise,
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over,
And though long the climb,
New rights will greet us,
New mateship meet us,
And joy complete us
In our new Dream Time.
To our father’s fathers
The pain, the sorrow;
To our children’s children
The glad tomorrow.
excerpt from Song of Hope by Oodgeroo Noonuccal.
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Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, racism
Read ‘Ems for today:
Sunday Telegraph: Quadriplegic left on train
Mark McCauley, a man with quadriplegia, was abandoned on a New South Wales CityRail train for four hours when the train lost power. The ambulatory passengers were all evacuated one hour into the debacle. Luckily, he had his mobile phone on him. His first call, to CityRail, wasn’t so helpful:
“I rang CityRail and told the lady I was stuck . . . and at the end of the conversation she said ‘That’s fine sir, somebody will get back to you in two or three days’.
His second call was to 000. They just rang CityRail and had a manager call him back. McCauley reports:
“She said we can’t get you off the train until we restore power – it could be in the early hours of the morning.”
Mr McCauley was in need of medication by then. Luckily, construction workers volunteered to remove him from the train with a forklift.
CityRail’s apology? Two one-day free rail passes.
~~
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Filed under: Read 'ems, disability, fat-hating, history, indigenous, moral panics
Feminist read ‘ems!
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“A Disincentive to the Female Voice Online”
Jenn talks about men who cyberharass bloggers who are women of colour. Her experiences are harrowing and revolting, but she vows to survive:
When I participated in a popular APIA forum, I was disheartened to watch as feminist voices were shot down by male participants who threw around words like “whore” and “slut” within their counterarguments. In another forum, men angry that I am unabashedly partnered in a stable, eight-year-long interracial relationship have accused me of “loving to suck White dick”, “daddy issues”, and worse. They re-posted photos of my loved ones (that I used to host on this site to share with real-life friends) and made racially and sexually derogatory remarks about the people in them, including mean-spirited mockery of my boyfriend’s mother. . I no longer host personal photos for this reason. Still others have emailed me hateful judgements and presuppositions of my personal life while assuming materialistic, superficial motivations for all Asian American women. In all these behaviours — commonly received by many women in cyberspace – it is the woman and her experience that becomes decentralized; even in assaulting us, male aggressors shift the focus from a female blogger’s feminism to a denial of her self-worth based exclusively upon the men in her life.
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From Diary of a Goldfish, “Paris Hilton and the Iconic Blonde”. The Goldfish takes a generational look, drawing parallels between the misogynistic media treatment of iconic blondes Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, and Paris Hilton:
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Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, blogging, celebritism, cyberbullying, racism
In today’s Read-’Ems, I’m taking a break from Aboriginal issues, and focusing on young feminists. Enjoy.
1. On the YP4 (“Young People For”) blog, ojgreer asks “Am I A Feminist?”, and details her feminist awakening from beginning:
As a young white woman growing up in New York City, my world was comfortable, it was integrated, and my feminism was without a name and assumed. It wasn’t until relatively late in high school that I began to understand the rarity of my experience. I don’t remember the exact details, but I recall a friend – male – saying incredulously, “what are you, some kind of feminist?” And I recall my boyfriend shooting back (not to my defense, mind you), “no, she’s a communist!”
to present-day:
The discovery I’ve made is that my fun, pink feminism is not meaningful or fulfilling unless fundamental to my definition of feminism is my commitment to work in solidarity with other women and men for the utter, no-holds-barred eradication of domination in human relationships, for the emancipation of all people, for safe bodies and safe communities, everywhere.
1. Over at All Girl Army, Irmelin cogitates on the myth that “Feminists Don’t Have Self-Esteem Problems”.
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Filed under: Read 'ems, reproductive freedoms
What I’m reading today:
1. The AMA call has come. Yesterday’s email brought a plea from the AMA to volunteer 2-4 weeks in a central Australian community to perform governmental health checks on children. The email opens with a big fat BLAME:
The Federal Government is currently implementing a reform package to modify behavioural patterns in Aboriginal communities that have over many years had a serious adverse impact on their health.
Given that the AMA Indigenous Health Report Cards have focussed over and over again on the role of colonialism in the indigenous health situation, why the stilted behaviourist blamefest? Is this a subtle back-handed stab at the government’s approach to black-blaming, or is the AMA swallowing this hook, line and sinker?
The email goes on:
In a matter of weeks, the Government is planning to deploy the ‘first wave’ of health teams to conduct health checks for children in the communities. The teams will comprise doctors, nurses, Aboriginal health workers, and social workers. The doctors who lead these teams will be made aware of the cultural and social sensitivities involved in this operation. If you have had previous experience with Indigenous communities, this would clearly be an asset.
I am writing to Australian doctors seeking expressions of interest from suitably skilled and committed doctors to lead these teams on this important mission.
No specific skills are requested, and the email recipients have clearly not been targeted in any way. The commitment requested is two weeks, with the possibility of extension to four weeks, so there will obviously be no opportunity for any comprehensive training or mentoring.
Lots more after the cut – reactions from the RACGP, an Aboriginal women’s group in Katherine, the ACT HREOC, Rex Wild, government hypocrisy in discontinuing funding for the CDEP employment plan in WA, and some fun with antifeminist conspiracy theory and a baby dwarf hamster.
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Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, authoritarianism, bigotry, fun, fundies, moral panics, racism
Further to tigtog’s post Howard’s Wedge, several blog posts that you may not have stumbled across on the usual round of Ozblogistan trackbacks and read ‘ems.
The fabulous brownfemipower cuts through all the bullshit in her post “abusing into goodness”:
No where in these “rules” is there any acknowledgment of the role the Australian government has had in creating the devastation in aboriginal communities. This lack of acknowledgment allows non-native people to hide behind the belief that Aboriginal peoples are alcoholic, drug using, porn watching, child abusing slime–because that’s in their nature! Because they make bad choices, because they are unable to control themselves, because there hasn’t been enough police in the community to keep the uncontrollable little beasts controlled!
Never mind that multiple generations of aboriginal peoples in Australia (and world wide), were kidnapped by the government and then taught how to be parents by unmonitored white citizens who beat, sexually violated, and outright tortured children from the time they were small children until they were no longer “wards of the state”. [...]
How does eliminating pornography teach a child to love her blood, her cells, her roots?
How does a ban on alcohol erase the desire to no longer be aboriginal?
How does controlling welfare payments teach aboriginal mothers to trust themselves and their love again?
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Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, moral panics, racism
Because victims can’t prevent crimes, so “prevention” strategies targeting potential victims are selling a crock. Crime prevention programs only work insofar as they persuade offenders not to commit crimes, which is a whole other story (one that is hardly ever discussed regarding rape because the media makes rapists “disappear” from case reports through the way rapes are reported using the passive voice).
Great link via The F-word Blog, a description of an education program for high school kids in Canada (May is Sexual Violence Awareness Month in Hamilton, Ontario and possibly nationwide). The program of Rape Resistance dovetails with JoAnne’s guest post a few weeks ago about rape misinformation regarding offender profiling and real risks:
It is more accurate to talk about rape resistance. The term rape “prevention” misleads women.
First, it gives women the false message that there is a way to “prevent” sexual assault from happening. There is no such guarantee.
Secondly, traditional “rape prevention” information leads women to believe that they are responsible for preventing sexual assault. Our culture encourages women to be careful about what they wear or what they do in order to stop it from happening. The focus is on women and, as a result, many survivors of sexual assault end up blaming themselves. Offenders, however, are always 100 per cent responsible.
The group pushing Rape Resistance talk of a resistance strategies “backpack” that up until now has been full of a mishmash of useful and useless “safety tips” based on the premise of Rape Prevention.
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Filed under: Read 'ems, education, relationships
Lauren is guest-blogging this week at Feministe. Her review of a book about marketing to children, and her discursion about her own rules for buying toys for her son, is a cracker of a post.
Filed under: Read 'ems, consumerism, family
