Dominican American Junot Diaz, bestselling author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, talks fan girls, hyper masculinity and violence against women in the media with CBC Q host Jian Gomeshi.
(For some reason I can’t embed this, so you can watch it here).
Mother Art - Laundry Works, Poster Advertising Performances (1974)
Love this.
More here.
(Thanks blue milk).
Please reblog if you’d like to see a Parenting category in Tumblr’s Explore section.
(I’m tagging the editorial folks because I don’t actually know who’s in charge of this sort of thing.)
(via mammalingo)
I’m happy to see that among the features of the new maternity ward in Florence’s main hospital are proper chairs alongside the baby cots in the intensive care ward. At least future hobbling mums with fresh c-section scars will no longer have to scramble to find, and cradle their newborns in, those horrible plastic patio chairs like I did.
This whole post by G. Willow Wilson is amazing, but here are some golden nuggets:
But it’s the subtle stuff that really gets to me, because it’s the subtle stuff that gets passed off as normalcy. Last year there was a brouhaha in the comics world due to the lack of female writers and artists included in the DC reboot. This became a conversation about the gender-inclusivity of the comics industry as a whole. It rapidly became clear that the guys in charge, many of whom I’ve met and all of whom are very nice, simply had not noticed the imbalance. They looked around the room and never thought it odd that all the people in it were men. They blamed women for failing to submit their work for consideration. Never mind that neither DC nor Marvel has had an open submissions policy for years. (I have written for the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, the latter of which has some of the most intellectually rigorous standards in the periodical news industry, and I am here to tell you that that was easier than breaking into the comics industry. Easier by far.) It reminded me of nothing so much as certain all-male mosque boards who come up with arcane regulations to exclude women from community life and then blame women for their lack of interest.
So I learned to stop worrying and love feminists. Because you know what? Apparently, people need angry women shouting in their ears. Being nice hasn’t worked. Now when I read the feminist blogs dissecting and re-dissecting every little thing that’s wrong with primetime television or advertising or heck, the way groceries are bagged at the supermarket, I will bite my tongue. They are doing a public service. You need people on the periphery to show the middle where it’s headed. You need people to pay attention. And that’s what they’re doing.
(via bad domenicana)
What’s that? No honey, the fact that the okimâwastotin (that headdress worn by clueless hipster girls all the time) is generally reserved for males in Plains cultures is not sexist or patriarchal. You can stop trying to ‘save us from sexism’ thanks.
In fact, we were centuries ahead of you in the gender equality department. There are of course a great diversity of socio-political traditions in our various nations, but one thing comes through loud and clear…our women held positions of power. Not merely over hearth and home, but politically as well. In some nations, women run the roost, and this without denigrating or subjugating men (in case you were worried).
Centuries of racist and sexist interference by European powers has taken its toll. We do indeed face sexism in our communities, to an extent unthinkable before Contact. It is sadly the case that the oppressed often internalise their oppressor, and the oppressor for us has always been racist, and sexist.
To combat this, we look to our traditions, which are egalitarian. Where men and women are respected and venerated. We do not fumble towards equality as sameness, as so many settler feminists insist we should (in our context only, as they often recognise this is a ridiculous approach otherwise). We revive equity. We acknowledge different gender roles, and recognise that the female is not subservient in our cultures.
When we discuss ‘women’s power’ and ‘women’s roles’, you hear echoes of your history. But your history is not ours. Our history speaks proudly of the strength of our women and our men. Gender roles were not created in our societies to elevate men and turn women into chattel.
You settler women have much to overcome. Your history is fraught with inequality and abuses. I am sorry that you come from such twisted traditions.
Do not attempt to transplant your historical circumstances into our Nations. You have no idea what the headdress means in our cultures. To claim that the restrictions on who can wear it are ‘sexist’ merely highlights this ignorance…your inability to see outside your own cultural norms, outside your own sad, sexist cultural history.
Colonisers always believe they have the right to define reality, particularly for those they have colonised. What kind of feminist are you, when you take part in these inequalities of power, and proclaim for us the meaning of our own symbols and traditions?
In case you’re not sure, it makes you a racist feminist.
(via smaddox)
For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men.
Allende’s amazing TED talk (con sottotitoli in italiano!). An oldie but a goodie.
(Thanks Spare Change, who credits this talk with helping her call herself a feminist.)
(Source: bigpinkbunny, via lipstick-feminists)
This article by Anne Kingston in Macleans is one of two really cool recent articles I’ve read on the surprisingly antiquated ways we still approach women’s health. The other one is by Alessandra Lazzari in Il paese delle donne.
