Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
A woman in the US military is more likely to be raped or sexually harassed by a fellow serviceman, CO, or even a military doctor than she is to be killed in Iraq…
…reported Keith Olbermann tonight.
Horrifying, and backed up by Jane Harman in The LA Times.
Now you can go vote for me, since I made the Top 10. Thanks to all who nominated me!
For your amusement, or edification, I’ve been putting together a list of terms & concepts students of my Intro to Gender Studies class are required to know – for exams & that sort of thing. I thought some of you might want to ‘check in’ to see how many you could define or explain (extra points if you can name the author/article we were teaching the concepts with!): Continue reading “Gender Studies 101”
Today is International Women’s Day. Find an event near you or watch some cool clips by and about women.
It’s a good day to maybe make a donation to a group that provides services to women, or to read something written by a woman, or view some art by one.
Hoo boy, is this guy worried. Pretty soon women’ll want equal pay for equal work, too.
I was once again poking around about how the law may or may not try to define “woman” when it comes to marriage, but instead the only governmental definition I found defines “woman” viz child-bearing. According to the Senate version(s) of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act (of 2005, 2006, &2007):
(6) WOMAN- The term `woman’ means a female human being who is capable of becoming pregnant, whether or not she has reached the age of majority.
That is just damned scary. For starters, they precisely don’t mention women who have passed child-bearing age, or women who are for one reason or another unable to become pregnant, or women for whom getting pregnant could cause their death. That is, lots of kinds of women are left out of that definition. Yet I think there’s going to be more of this essentialism as the same sex marriage debate comes into contact with the anti-Choice crowd.
A great, much-needed and overdue article on the intersections of transness and race by Daisy Hernandez at ColorLines:
Louis Mitchell expected a lot of change when he began taking injections of hormones eight years ago to transition from a female body to a male one. He anticipated that he’d grow a beard, which he eventually did and enjoys now. He knew his voice would deepen and that his relationship with his partner, family and friends would change in subtle and, he hoped, good ways, all of which happened.
What he had not counted on was changing the way he drove.
Within months of starting male hormones, “I got pulled over 300 percent more than I had in the previous 23 years of driving, almost immediately. It was astounding,†says Mitchell, who is Black and transitioned while living in the San Francisco area and now resides in Springfield, Massachusetts.
This essay might be an interesting read to compare to Jacob Anderson Minshall‘s essay in “The Enemy Within: Becoming a Straight White Guy” which details what it’s been like for a feminist to transition to male. It’s in the new anthology Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power.
(via Feministing, where you will also currently see a blog ad for She’s Not the Man I Married)
I didn’t know she died last year. I’m feeling a bit like a door just hit me in the face. I came to know her through her work at CUNY’s Feminist Press, and it was like a revelation: a working class white woman writer, brilliant and often neglected. Her book Silences was then, & is now, a revelation.
The NYT notes, in her obituary, that when Margaret Atwood reviewed it when it came out, she said:
“It begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence,” Ms. Atwood wrote. “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”
The books she helped bring back – like Life in the Iron Mills and Daughter of Earth (Agnes Smedley’s autobiography) were some of the first reflections of where my people came from I’d ever read.
How frustrating not to have known.
We’re covering this in GEST 100 tomorrow, and I think it’s always the kind of piece that’s worth re-reading:
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain’t I A Woman?
Delivered 1851, Women’s Convention, Akron, OhioWell, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.
(We’re reading it with some Angela Davis.)
What a fracas: NOW-NY issued a press release yesterday roasting Ted Kennedy for endorsing Obama, and did so with some of the most extravagant language I’ve read in a while. “Betrayal” seems a little much, but “ultimate betrayal”? Yikes.
But NOW National has stepped in like a calm, protective aunt whose niece has just thrown a shit-fit.
This whole “you’re not a good feminist unless you vote for the woman” stuff is just so tired – as if most women need one more voice in the world telling them how to be good feminists (or good women, for that matter). The other assumption – that men aren’t feminists, and therefore need not be loyal to a feminist candidate – also tires me.