Tag: women

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Performativity · Social/Politics · Theory

Punk Anteriors: Genealogy, Theory, Performance.

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As punk reformulated topics and modes of resistance in the late 1970s, the impact of wars in Southeast Asia, as well as continuing histories of imperialist aggression elsewhere, served as a way for Los Angeles’s racially and sexually diverse punk scene to imagine itself as resistant through (sometimes simultaneous) affiliation with and disassociation from the state, military, and acts of capitalist violence. This article reimagines the context for punk’s politics by following racial, residential, and economic patterns, the influx of refugees, and the subsequent reimagination of punk spaces such as Hollywood, the Canterbury Apartments, and Chinatown to trace themes of race, sexuality, and violence.

Text via Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory – Volume 22.
See more HERE

www.womenandperformance.org

Fully free Issue HERE

Film/Video/New Media · Games/Play · Social/Politics

NFB International Women’s Day: A curated selection of films about women

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In celebration of International Women’s Day, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is streaming the full Karen Cho’s award-winning NFB feature documentary Status Quo? The Unfinished Business of Feminism in Canada, and many others until Sunday, 10 March. Click HERE to see them.

Human-ities · Science

Men and women are from Earth: Examining the latent structure of gender.

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In a recent study published at The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Bobbi J. Carothers of Washington University in St. Louis and Harry T. Reis of the University of Rochester say:

“Although gender differences on average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is. That is, there are not two distinct genders, but instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex, such as masculinity or intimacy, all of which are continuous.”

Analyzing 122 different characteristics from 13,301 individuals in 13 studies, the researchers concluded that differences between men and women were best seen as dimensional rather than categorical. In other words, the differences between men and women should be viewed as a matter of degree rather than a sign of consistent differences between two distinct groups.

Design · Human-ities

Visualizing Women as Academic Authors, 1665-2010.

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A visualization of women as academic authors over the years, based on the percentage of academic papers published on JSTOR, by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

See the full infograph HERE

Animalia · Bio · Human-ities · Science · Technology

Men, Who Needs Them?

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MAMMALS are named after their defining characteristic, the glands capable of sustaining a life for years after birth — glands that are functional only in the female. And yet while the term “mammal” is based on an objective analysis of shared traits, the genus name for human beings, Homo, reflects an 18th-century masculine bias in science.

That bias, however, is becoming harder to sustain, as men become less relevant to both reproduction and parenting. Women aren’t just becoming men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species.

The central behaviors of mammals revolve around how we bear and raise our young, and humans are the parenting champions of the class. In the United States, for nearly 20 percent of our life span we are considered the legal responsibility of our parents.

With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.

Excerpt from an article written by Greg Hampikian at NYT. Continue HERE

Human-ities · Social/Politics

Are we witnessing the decline and fall of men?

Sebastian Alvarez2 Comments

Ignore the hyperbolic title. Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and the Rise of Women is filled with worthwhile insights and raises serious questions about the meaning and implications of shifting gender roles. Rosin, an editor at the Atlantic and founder of Slate’s ‘DoubleX’, has emerged as one of only a handful of American writers who has understood the centrality of so-called ‘women’s issues’ to American culture.

Her thesis goes something like this: our society is in the midst of a whole host of social and economic changes that women are benefiting from more than men, and perhaps at the expense of men. It’s a compelling idea, not least because it seems to confirm what many people have observed in the course of their own experiences.

It is not simply that men have lost their jobs, or even that those jobs are gone for good, or that it is mainly women doing the jobs that are now being created. It is more a sense of creeping demoralisation and ambivalence about the future that is as much in evidence in Charles Murray’s discussion of the decline of marriage, in his book Coming Apart, as it is in ‘The Myth of Work/Life Balance’ debate that appeared in the Atlantic last summer.

Excerpt from an article written by Nancy McDermott ar SP!KED. Continue HERE

Education · Human-ities · Social/Politics

Eulogy for a Sex Radical: Shulamith Firestone’s Forgotten Feminism

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A utopia without pregnancy or childbearing? That was the dream of the controversial Dialectic of Sex author, who was found dead on Tuesday at 67.

It’s hard to imagine that Shulamith Firestone and Helen Gurley Brown thought very highly of each other. Gurley Brown wore immaculate make-up and had a driver. There were needlepoint pillows in her office. She had sex. She told other women that they should have sex, too.

Firestone, on the other hand, did not have sex. In fact, she was a political celibate. She encouraged other women to become celibate. Some of them did. She wore owl glasses; she looked like the 70s radical she was.

Firestone, whose death was reported yesterday, will not receive a fraction of the encomia Gurley Brown did after her death earlier this month. Why? Both women were feminist pioneers. Both wrote canonical feminist texts that became bestsellers when they were published about a half century ago. Both shaped absolutely the ways we think about gender, education, and the family today. Both put sex at the center of their analyses.

Excerpt of an article written by Emily Chertoff, at The Atlantic. Continue HERE

Human-ities · Social/Politics

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All

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It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

Excerpt from an article written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic. Continue HERE

Human-ities · Performativity · Social/Politics

Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

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Companies with women on their boards performed better in challenging markets than those with all-male boards in a study suggesting that mixing genders may temper risky investment moves and increase return on equity.

Shares of companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion and with women board members outperformed comparable businesses with all-male boards by 26 percent worldwide over a period of six years, according to a report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, created in 2008 to analyze trends expected to affect global markets.

Excerpt from an article written by Heather Perlberg, Bloomberg. Continue HERE

Bio · Design · Human-ities · Science · Social/Politics · Vital-Edible-Health

How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women’s Bodies

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Chikako Takeshita’s The Global Biopolitics of the IUD traces the scientific and political history of the intrauterine device (IUD) from the 1960s through today. This birth control device, Takeshita writes in this contribution to The MIT Press’s Inside Technology series, may have been employed to reinforce patriarchal ideals that deny women agency—but even in these cases, women have often converted it into an instrument of individual power, in part because the IUD can allow a woman to keep her birth control method hidden. The device thus has at times been associated with efforts to inflict control on the womb, but women also have used it as a method of exerting control in cultural or personal milieus that otherwise may not allow it. Given the current political climate, a book about how a “simple” piece of plastic both controls women and allows them control is timely.

Social context, Takeshita says, not only influences the design of IUDs themselves and how they are marketed and used, but also shapes the conduct of scientific work about them. She begins with the assumption that any such technology will involve “webs of state and nonstate investments” in the bodies, health, sexuality and reproduction of women. The medical researchers who have developed IUDs, along with the organizations that back them, she argues, grasp these varying interests and have made and marketed IUDs based on prevailing social climate, ultimately centering on the white, middle-class Western woman as a target user.

Excerpt from a review written by Emily Willingham, at American Scientist. Continue HERE

Image via the History of Medicine (NLM): The History of Contraception Museum

Bio · Book-Text-Read-Zines · Human-ities · Vital-Edible-Health

Your Breasts Are Trying To Kill You

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Lindy West: I don’t have any children yet, so my breasts are still more aesthetic than functional. I mostly use them as a food shelf, a cellphone case, and an in-flight pillow. When I was young and single and had less self-esteem, I used to joke that my breasts were “all I had” (good one, unhappy baby self!), but now that I’m older, I don’t have to rely on them to feel beautiful—for the time being, they’re just parts of me that fill my clothes and make my back hurt and, sure, make me feel pretty sometimes. I just don’t think about them that much anymore. Thanks to Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, a surprisingly emotional book by Florence Williams, though, that’s all changing. All of a sudden I can’t stop thinking about my breasts. Because it turns out they are total jerks.

In Breasts, Williams, a contributing editor for Outside magazine, attempts to offer a comprehensive social, cultural, medical, and scientific history of the human breast, a la single-word-titled best-sellers like Cod or Salt or Stiff—though not, alas, Balls. (In an act of one-word-wonder solidarity, Stiff author Mary Roach blurbed Breasts, citing Williams’ “double-D talents.”) Though that genre of sweeping, single-topic histories can wind up feeling hasty and reductive (it’s hard to write the history of one thing without touching on the history of all other things), Williams’ writing is scientifically detailed yet warm and accessible. She also stays firmly away from the juvenile (BOOOOOOOOO!!!) and isn’t afraid to delve into her personal life, making Breasts a smart and relatable, if occasionally dry, read.

Excerpt of an article written by Lindy West, at Slate. Continue HERE

Eco/Adaptable · Paint/Illust./Mix-Media · Projects · Social/Politics

Roots to Resistance: Stories of courage from 12 remarkable women

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“Roots To Resistance is an Art and Activism Project in which I am painting twelve Women Activists on a large scale, doing groundbreaking, risky and extremely important work here on the planet. In addition to the portraits, the Roots Project has created a Global Postering and Postcard Campaign that displays each of the Women Activists and the issues they fight for and against, and sends them across the world via global partnerships with organizations and individuals. These Campaigns seek to build social engagement and support systems through international and local partnerships, working together to empower people and communities. People are Postering and passing out Postcards in Kenya, Russia, Guatemala, Australia, South Africa, Afghanistan, New Zealand and across Europe and the United States. A School in Portland Oregon is using the Postcards and posters as part of its curriculum and Prison Book Projects across the U.S. are partnering with the Roots Project to bring the postcards to folks living inside of the prison system. It is so deeply inspiring to see that people out there in our communities care about these issues, and so powerful to raise our voices together in support of these women and in support of each other as we engage in such profoundly important resistance work on the planet!

I am remembering that while we are helping to share the histories of these women, the present times we are living in like many times past, will be the histories of the future. As we watch entire countries and communities around the globe risking so much to rise against oppression, I am reminded that in these times we are writing our histories and the histories of others with what we do and say and with our actions vs. inactions. I give profound thanks for the work that these 12 women are engaged in, under tremendous pressures and at great risk to themselves, and I encourage everyone to consider the histories we are each writing here today. With our support of and partnership with each other, we will help to lift up the voices of many as they continue to lift us up. Thank you!”

—Denise Beaudet

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Human-ities · Social/Politics

Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry

Sebastian Alvarez2 Comments

Saheera Sharif, the founder of Mirman Baheer (upper center); Ogai Amail, a poet and member of the group (bottom left); also pictured are other members of the poets’ group.

In a private house in a quiet university neighborhood of Kabul, Ogai Amail waited for the phone to ring. Through a plate-glass window, she watched the sinking sun turn the courtyard the color of eggplant. The electricity wasn’t working and the room was unheated, a few floor cushions the only furnishings. Amail tucked her bare feet underneath her and pulled up the collar of her puffy black coat. Her dark hair was tied in a ponytail, and her eyelids were coated in metallic blue powder. In the green glare of the mobile phone’s screen, her face looked wan and worried. When the phone finally bleeped, Amail shrieked with joy and put on the speakerphone. A teenage girl’s voice tumbled into the room. “I’m freezing,” the girl said. Her voice was husky with cold. To make this call, she’d sneaked out of her father’s mud house without her coat.

Like many of the rural members of Mirman Baheer, a women’s literary society based in Kabul, the girl calls whenever she can, typically in secret. She reads her poems aloud to Amail, who transcribes them line by line. To conceal her poetry writing from her family, the girl relies on a pen name, Meena Muska. (Meena means “love” in the Pashto language; muska means “smile.”)

Meena lost her fiancé last year, when a land mine exploded. According to Pashtun tradition, she must marry one of his brothers, which she doesn’t want to do. She doesn’t dare protest directly, but reciting poetry to Amail allows her to speak out against her lot. When I asked how old she was, Meena responded in a proverb: “I am like a tulip in the desert. I die before I open, and the waves of desert breeze blow my petals away.” She wasn’t sure of her age but thought she was 17. “Because I am a girl, no one knows my birthday,” she said.

Excerpt of an article written by ELIZA GRISWOLD, NYT. Continue HERE

Art/Aesthetics · Digital Media · Education · Human-ities · Social/Politics · Technology · Videos

Unexpected Development: Decolonial Media Aesthetics and Women’s ICT4D Video

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ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development) powerfully frames women’s grassroots video production in the Global South, much of which is distributed widely through YouTube. Often, these videos reproduce racialized and gendered discourses – legacies of colonialism – in their narratives of economic, social, and technological progress. However, there are also videos by women’s groups that defy both the historical linearity and spatial fragmentation of the ICT4D framework. These videos instead remix, reclassify, and globally reconnect women’s experiences in the contemporary moment. Culled from hundreds of online videos produced by ICT4D programs, including those in countries classified as having “Low Human Development” according to the Gender Inequality Index of the United Nations Development Program, these media represent powerful instances of a decolonial aesthetics, an altogether unexpected development. These ICT4D videos make compelling claims for other historical narratives and visions for women’s future lives, identities, and uses of information communication technologies.

Unexpected Development: Decolonial Media Aesthetics and Women’s ICT4D Video
Dalida Maria Benfield, Berkman Center Fellow
This event will be webcast Tuesday, April 17, live at 12:30 pm ET.
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor

About Dalida:

Dalida María Benfield’s research addresses artists’ and activists’ creative uses of video and other networked digital media towards social justice projects. Her work is focused on the transformational capacities of media art across different scales. As an artist and activist, she has developed production, education, exhibition, and distribution initiatives focused on youth, women, people of color in the U.S., and local and transnational social movements, including co-founding the media collective Video Machete. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California-Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now, chaired by Trinh T. Minh-ha, considers contemporary media art theory and practice, including work by Cao Fei, Michelle Dizon, and the Raqs Media Collective, in relation to the Third Cinema movement. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center, she is studying race and gender in the online presence of ICT4D programs, as well as working on collaborative projects with the Networked Cultures Working Group, the Cyberscholars Working Group, and metaLAB(at)Harvard.

Text via Berkman Center

Art/Aesthetics · Human-ities · Philosophy · Social/Politics · Theory

Why is feminism out of fashion in contemporary art?

Sebastian Alvarez1 Comment

High-profile exhibitions on surrealism and abstract expressionism rarely resurrect debates about the validity of Freudian psychoanalytic theory or Clement Greenberg’s rejection of representation. So it might be germane to ask why the current resurgence of institutional, critical and media attention on feminist art has sparked impassioned discussions about the relevance of feminism in today’s allegedly “post-feminist” art world?

The answer is not only because women of all generations remain conflicted about feminism, but because art is arguably the most appropriate medium to represent feminism’s complex history, meaning and purpose. As the best of the recent feminist art survey shows demonstrate, “feminism” is far from a fixed term. Putting aside feminist theory’s distracting obsession with semantics, the term still encompasses too many and too varied ideological factions, political agendas, identities and histories to fit any single definition that is not troublingly essentialist, reductivist or vague.

One proof of gender equality might be that the feminist movement’s history has played out like other revolutions by splintering into a host of militant and mutually antagonistic subgroups. Yet in spite of divisiveness within the active feminism movement, the revolution’s salient principle – that women are intelligent, capable people – has saturated our culture at large to the point of being taken for granted.

Written by Ana Finel Honigman at The Guardian. Continue HERE

Image above: Art work by the Guerilla Girls. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi