mssirpsycho

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Oh NYU, I love you again:

Bikini Kill lead singer and noted feminist Kathleen Hanna has just made a sizable donation to the NYU library. The library is referring to the donation as The Kathleen Hanna Papers and will make them a part of their newly announced Riot Grrrrl Collection. The “papers” are believed to contain her many zines, much of her correspondences and plenty of material pertaining to her time in Bikini Kill, as well as various other writings. This is cool for a number of obvious reasons.

The fact that we live in a world where “The Kathleen Hanna Papers” exist as part of a “Riot Grrrl Collection” in a major research library makes me happy to be alive. [I'm a little unclear why "papers" is in scare-quotes in the article, but I will overlook it because this brings me great joy that I do not want tarnished].

Time to get my Bobst alumni membership card.

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http://www.feministe.us/blog/?p=17293

I’ve been off Facebook today, but three people have now contacted me about this whole “women posting the color of their bra as their FB status” thing. Because I seem to be everyone’s go to social media maven, they’re all coming to me for answers or at least a reaction.

In case you don’t have Facebook or nobody you know is doing this or maybe you saw it and had no idea, women are changing their status to a color. Some of my friends have listed red, white, etc. Sometimes they say it’s their bra color, sometimes they just list a color with no explanation or anything.

I investigated and found that, indeed, some women were doing this. My friend and I further investigated and found some links stating it’s for breast cancer awareness. Here’s the text from Yahoo Answers:

this is the message all the girls are recieving on facebook:

Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men …. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha.

I found a few other links with similar supposed Facebook messages, but that’s the general idea.

I have to say, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of on earth. (Alright, that might be an exaggeration, but it’s pretty damn stupid!) For one, I don’t believe it has anything to do with breast cancer. I think it’s just some stupid prank to get people’s attention and have everyone on Facebook being all sexy and provocative and whatnot. And, of course, I’m just waiting for the “these girls are such sluts” comments that are sure to come.

Of course, I have to ask myself how stupid or smart this is if it is, in fact, for breast cancer awareness. And in that case, my answer is… the same. Still stupid. Perhaps even stupider. Because nobody is actually talking about breast cancer, or even mentioning it in their status. A lot of women probably don’t even know why their friends are doing it, they just see it as some Facebook meme and then deciding to taking part. So where on earth is all this awareness? A much better campaign would keep the whole bra color thing, but then instruct women to also leave a link to a breast cancer-related site, or a splash page or similar teaser that will eventually have breast cancer information.

In conclusion, if it’s just a prank: stupid and just having women look like idiots while trying to be all sexy and whatever. If it’s actual breast cancer awareness: a poorly constructed campaign that will have very little, if any, success.

ETA: My friend just got a message and hers says:

Write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to only gals no men…it will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color on their status! LOL!

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http://www.feministe.us/blog/?p=17291

So, Mary Daly died.

Huh.

Now, if you know about me, even a little, you will know I have a complicated relationship with the works of Mary Daly. At first, they were everything I embraced about feminism; then, they were everything I tried to reject. It seems selfish, when talking about a dead woman, to talk exclusively about what she meant to you; it’s laying a claim on the woman that you do not actually have. I wasn’t in her life; I didn’t know her. But we are selfish, about the dead – particularly when their work is all we really have of them. It’s hard to keep from injecting yourself into the conversation.

So: I was raised Catholic. Strictly Catholic, in point of fact; my mother converted, and she went at the religion with the zeal that only newcomers have, before they get that complex ambivalent family relationship to the faith. My father was Catholic because he was Catholic; it was a cultural identity, not necessarily a religious one. My mom, on the other hand, was Catholic because she believed in Catholicism. And she’s the one who raised me.

The Church was the most important thing in my young life, the center of moral and ontological authority, the thing that made the rules that made the world. So, when I started asking Questions – you know, the sort that girls ask, if they are of a certain bent – it was the Church I asked about. Did Mary ever get to have any other babies with her husband? Why not? How come Jesus was a boy, and all the Apostles were boys? How come all the priests were boys? How come God was a boy? What was this stuff about how women shouldn’t teach, and how they should submit to their husbands? Did God just basically like boys better? Why? Did God like boys better because God was a boy? Was that it? If so, why was God good? These were the questions. Not insignificant ones. And note that I did not go to “is God real,” or even “is God appropriately represented by the Church,” for quite some time; it was “is God good” that worried me. My path was blasphemy, not rejection; when a metaphysical or cultural framework is that powerful, you rebel against it instead of just walking away, because escaping the framework is more or less inconceivable. It permeates your entire understanding of the world; there’s no doing without it. Yelling at or about it, on the other hand, is pretty easy.

So, at about twelve or thirteen years old, I found out about feminism, and started to research it at the library. Unsurprisingly, many of the books I found were seminal second-wave books. And I tried to care, but they somehow didn’t reach me as deeply as I needed them to. They were about work, money, motherhood, sex – none of which I had access to. The Beauty Myth started to get at certain things, for me, but I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or provocative clothing or sexualize myself anyway, so I just ended up feeling superior to all those stupid slutty girls who did – a deeply misogynist reaction in the name of feminism, which it took me a good long while to get over.

And then there was Mary Daly. Beyond God the Father. BLAM. Right there, in the title, was the very particular revolution I needed. Daly argues, in that book, that to envision God as a man – and particularly a father – is to make men, and fathers, Gods on earth. I’d had some nasty experiences with fathers who thought they were Gods, and Gods of the wrathful, Old Testament variety at that, so I was deeply sympathetic to Daly’s argument. I kept the book secret, for a while, so that my mother wouldn’t take it away; then, I started carrying it around, daring her to try it, because wasn’t defiance what this was all about? She never did try; she’s a smart woman, and she knew better than to enable my particular need for martyrdom. And so, I read as much Daly as I could find.

Have you ever read Daly? I wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t; even back then, her work was difficult to find. And it’s not an easy read, either. The quotes that are going around, in most of the remembrances, are some of her more conventionally phrased. A lot of her work actually looks like this:

Reflecting upon my travels in the First Spiral Galaxy I Re-Call the experience of being pushed/directed by a Great Wind. Traveling in that early Time involved sailing the surface of the Subliminal Sea, Sensing its depths, while not being overtly conscious of the contents of those depths, at least not to a sustained degree. Occasionally I had conscious glimpses, and these were enough to keep me on Course. I could feel through my Craft the swishings and swirlings that rocked the boat, so to speak. Some of these, I think, were the result of E-motions and psychic sensations that smolder in Undersea Volcanoes, just under the threshold of conscious awareness. These eruptions were my Moments of Prophecy and Promise.

If you have any idea what the fuck she is talking about, on the first reading, congratulations. Granted, this is from an introduction to Gyn/Ecology, written in her later style, after she had gone full William Blake on us, but the rest of the book isn’t any easier. Daly essentially invented her own language, re-purposing words based on often dubious etymology, anthropology, and her own whims. By the end of her career, she often didn’t even bother to explain what her new words meant; you had to have been around for the first explanation in order to get it. (Also? If you have Ever Wondered where I picked up my habit of Misusing Capitalization in the name of Emphasis, or Just for Fun, this might be Your Answer.) Look at the above passage: if it weren’t for the “so to speak,” you wouldn’t even know that she was using metaphor. And maybe she wasn’t. Daly answered her more practical sisters in the movement with an entirely new approach: feminism as visionary spiritual experience. She sounds like a saint describing her visions, like St. John with his Revelations, like a mystic detailing journeys in the Otherworld. She also sounds completely loopy. But all of this was, in fact, deeply intentional. Compare, for example, this other passage, from the same introduction, which I will quote at length:

One of the responses to Gyn/Ecology was a personal letter from Audre Lorde, which was sent to me in May 1979. For deep and complex personal reasons I was unable to respond to this lengthy letter immediately. However, when Lorde came to Boston to give a poetry reading that summer, I made a point of attending it and spoke to her briefly. I told her that I would like to discuss her letter in person… Our meeting did in fact take place at the Simone de Beauvoir conference in New York on September 29, 1979… I explained my positions clearly, or so I thought. I pointed out, for example, in answer to Audre Lorde’s objection that I failed to name Black goddesses, that Gyn/Ecology is not a compendium of goddesses. Rather, it focuses primarily on myths and symbols which were direct sources of christian myth. Apparently Lorde was not satisfied, although she did not indicate this at the time. She later published and republished slightly altered versions of her original personal letter to me.

Well! Nothing vague or mystical there! Dates, names, locations: it’s all there. Well, all of it except for Mary Daly’s accountability, or any admission that she might have been wrong. Audre Lorde’s letter to Mary Daly, which you can find in Sister Outsider, continues to be a powerful and relevant critique of white privilege in radical feminism, which Daly misrepresents here so profoundly that one wonders if she even understood it in the first place. For starters, Lorde never asked for a compendium of goddesses: she mentioned them as part of an argument that Daly included African and black female suffering, but not African or black female experiences of mutual care and resistance. If Daly had anything to say to this, other than “it was so mean to publish that about me,” we don’t know: she maintained that “public response in kind would not be a fruitful direction.” Other than the public response that casts Lorde in the most unfavorable light and misrepresents the nature of their dispute, apparently.

It wasn’t the end of the problems with Daly. For starters: Daly hated on trans people something fierce. This has been sort of lightly mentioned and hinted at elsewhere, but I have to tell you this in plain language: MARY. DALY. HATED. TRANS. PEOPLE. Particularly trans women. She intimated, at times, that they were part of a plot to eliminate “real” women, and to assign “men” all “authentic” female functions. She also said that they were like whites putting on blackface (yeah: Lorde might have been right, about the whole appropriating-other-people’s-oppression thing?) and implied that they should have bodily violence done to them, or at least should be physically intimidated, by “real” feminists, so that they could not enter the feminist movement or feminist space. Let’s not be coy, here: no matter whether she believed this for her entire life, no matter whether she privately got over it later, she published it, without apparently ever publishing a retraction, as far as I can tell. This is hate. This is privilege. This, right here, is the face of the oppressor.

And I’m not saying this to defile Mary Daly’s grave. I’m not saying it because I get a dirty little thrill out of tarnishing the legacy of a fallen feminist. I’m not saying it because I want to start a fight. I’m saying it because, for much of my young life, Mary Daly was my favorite feminist author, meaning that I believed this shit, too. There are still women who believe this, and these women often call themselves “radical feminists.” Because queer-bashing and misogyny are just so fucking threatening to the Patriarchy, apparently. I believed it, because Mary Daly published it, and I believed in her. And, let me tell you, I have worked like Hell Itself to get over that, and to get over the privilege that allowed me to place such emphasis on my own oppression that I could go around blithely oppressing other folks because clearly I had won the Whose Suffering Is Most Important game, and to be an actual functioning ally. Some encouragement from Mary Daly – some retraction, some statement of accountability – would have helped. It would have slapped me out of this unbelievably gross way of thinking with one blow, rather than making me go through life hurting people and being an asshole and having to receive many, many less powerful slaps until I got my shit straight.

Daly and I were both Catholics, at one point, so I know both of us understand the power of Confession – not the version handed out by the church, where you say it and apologize for it and have all your guilt magically wiped away by the hand of God, but the version that actually works in the real live world, where you admit to being wrong and you take your consequences like a grown woman and you do your acts of contrition and your assigned penance, for the rest of your life, by living with those consequences and not repeating the actions that caused them in the first place. People might forgive you; they might not. The point is to value doing the right thing, for the sake of the right thing, more than you value your own personal comfort. If you’re only apologizing so that people will forgive you, it’s not an apology; it’s an act of selfishness, an attempt to evade accountability. And if you never make Confession, and volunteer to be held accountable, you ultimately deprive yourself of any chance that you will be absolved.

And, unless a published retraction of her transphobia and other acts of privilege manages to surface, absolution will not come to the legacy of Mary Daly. None of this means that she was not important, or that she didn’t have anything to say: she was, she did, and it is a damn shame that her work is currently so obscure. She was important to me: I probably wouldn’t be a feminist without her influence. But I probably wouldn’t have been such a bad feminist without her influence, either. Like many people before her, she’s left the world as a human being, and remains with us now only as a legacy. It’s an important legacy – because of its accomplishment, because of its uniqueness, because of its tremendous potential to harm – that we cannot, and should not, ignore.

[Cross-posted at Tiger Beatdown.]

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http://www.feministe.us/blog/?p=17292

Besides the fact that they engage in some of the worst factory farming practices around, KFC is also in the habit of making really racist television ads. A recent one out of Australia:

[Video description: The video opens with a logo reading "KFC's Cricket Survival Guide." A white guy sits in what appear to be sports arena bleachers, surrounded by cricket fans, all of whom appear to be non-white. They are dancing, playing instruments and singing. He looks annoyed, rubbing his face and looking around like he's confused. He says, "Need a tip when you're stuck in an awkward situation?" Then he hands out a bucket of fried chicken and everyone goes silent and you can hear the game in the background. He says, "Too easy," which is followed by the formal KFC pitch.]

KFC has pulled the ad, but a spokesperson nonetheless defends it, basically saying that it’s only causing an uproar because it was reproduced in the United States where people are racist, when it was really just intended for not-racist Australians:

It is a light-hearted reference to the West Indian cricket team. The ad was reproduced online in the US without KFC’s permission, where we are told a culturally-based stereotype exists, leading to the incorrect assertion of racism. We unequivocally condemn discrimination of any type and have a proud history as one of the world’s leading employers for diversity.

Perhaps it is true that the “black people just love fried chicken!” stereotype isn’t as prevalent in Australia as it is in the United States; I’ll buy that. But even if you replace the fried chicken with something else, the commercial is still… troubling. The fried chicken makes it worse, but even if it was a box of jelly beans, the message is still “Oh jeez, this white guy is surrounded by loud-ass black people but if he gives them something nice they will calm down and not be so noisy!”

I don’t doubt that Australia has a different context for this ad than the United States does, but I have a hard time believing that it would only be considered racist over in my corner of the world. Aussie readers, am I wrong?

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012094.html

Short version: The local Humane Society's shelter burned.

Three links to LJ for this one. 05Jan10, 06Jan10, 07Jan10.

If you want to read the story (with photo) at the Colebrook News and Sentinel, look fast. It'll vanish when the new edition comes out next Wednesday.

Tip jar for donations here.

Pass it on.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012091.html

A few lines from Wikipedia’s summary of the anime film TAMALA2010: A Punk Cat in Space:

The film is in a large part a cartoon cat version of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 […] It begins in Meguro City, Tokyo, Cat Earth, a world of corporations and commercialism, where a giant mechanical Colonel Sanders wanders through streets with an axe embedded in its head repeating an advertisement for meat over a loudspeaker.

(via Calamity Jon)

Also, looking over Pynchon’s page on Wikiquote has me determined to finally get around to reading Gravity’s Rainbow. Might need new glasses for Against the Day, though.

And hey, look:

“If America was a person, — and it sat down, — Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.” — Mason & Dixon (1997)

“If the U.S. was a person,” he later became fond of saying, “and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness” — Against the Day (2006)

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012090.html

As further proof of Jim Henley’s boast that SF&F geek culture is the new mainstream, the NY Times has run an article about something bored role-playing gamers have been doing ever since the white box days: Packing dice together in odd configurations.

I look forward to the upcoming five-part series investigating the world of doodling on graph paper and quoting Monty Python.

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http://www.feministe.us/blog/?p=17289

So read this from The Guardian: ‘Career women make bad mothers’ billboards pulled.

The Outdoor Advertising Association has ordered the withdrawal of controversial billboard ad which read “Career women make bad mothers” following an outcry from working mothers.

The ads, which were part of an OAA campaign designed to promote the effectiveness of billboard advertising, started appearing on the side of buses and on an estimated 11,000 billboard sites this week and were due to run for two weeks in total.

Just as you would expect, rather than an apology we get a “we totes didn’t mean it!” moment:

The strategy head of Beta, Sharon Johnson, said: “There has been a misunderstanding with an important mothers’ forum about this campaign which is about sparking a debate. It is not what the campaign thinks. But rather than offend people the decision has been taken to replace the posters saying ‘Working women make bad mothers’ with other slogans which work just as effectively.”

Yeah, those Internet people have the wrong end of the stick. (And there’s a nice touch at the end of the article with gratuitous ha ha look at those silly hysterical Internet wimminz, in case you missed it.) Gee, ladies, did you have to get all offended? Couldn’t you rather appreciate our super clever campaign? We’re, uh, playing devil’s advocate, or, um, sparking a debate, yeah, that’s it! This was, what’s that phrase, designed to further public discourse!

No no, Ms Johnson. We understand perfectly. Some people thought it perfectly okay to take something for which women are time and again shamed and use it in their charming demonstration of the power of advertising.

What debate is this meant to be sparking, anyway; whether women ought to be allowed to work? Whether women who choose to do so are bad mothers? You know what? We’ve had this debate, such as it is. It’s been done. It’s silly, and it’s offensive. The thing is, the people who feel comfortable plastering this sentiment all over the public spaces of the United Kingdom haven’t given a great deal of consideration to the actual lives of the real live women they’re talking about.

Because that kind of sentiment? Is classist as all get out. It reeks of the notion that women engaging in paid work are selfish where it’s a very very small percentage of women who have the choice as to whether to do so. The idea that women working to support their children are bad parents because of that just doesn’t compute. Of course, this is in a much bigger context of marginalizing poor mothers. This is a world in which poor women have been sterilized, in which people are blamed for being bad parents because they can’t afford to feed their kids optimally, in which poor people’s children have been taken away and sold to rich people and they’ve had no form of recourse. There are real problems for parents who are poor, but they come from a marginalizing system: poverty does not determine whether one is a dedicated parent or not. It is some breathtaking head-in-sand burying that allows anyone to tie paid work with bad parenting. What on earth more should we require of these women?

And the focus is specifically on mothers, of course. No one else could possibly be a proper parent with valuable contributions to make to their children’s lives. That sort of thing is for women only, and if they’re parenting with a man, the burden and blame around caring for children still rests on them, because that’s the proper place for a woman, right?

It is very harmful indeed to say that particular types of women, as a group, make bad mothers. This kind of thing gets thrown at non-white women all the time, and it is heartbreaking. Fat women are told the same, as though they are unhealthy and disgusting and will infect their children with their shameful horrid fatness. Something that’s been coming up a fair bit recently (as though it isn’t being brought up all the time!) is the astoundingly damaging meme that disabled women aren’t fit to parent. I’m sure many of you saw Cara’s recent piece on Kaney O’Neill, which is an excellent takedown of this trope. And Anna’s got a conversation going on reproductive rights and feminist discussions.

Lastly, the OAA/Beta advertisement plays into the construction of all valuable work as paid work. Mothering women are working women, irrespective of whether they engage in paid work or not. Parenting is hard work, valuable work, work that receives too little recognition as such. Stay at home mothers are doing some of the most excellent and substantial work around, and it’s not right to devalue that as no work at all.

Whether the OAA and Beta endorse the idea that ‘working women make bad mothers’ or not is largely irrelevant. Though frankly, if you’re going to spend £1.25m on a campaign, I’m going to think you might be invested in what you say. The heart of it is that they stuck up the message that women engaging in paid work are bad mothers, no question marks, no room for doubt, bright and bold and public. It must be a horrible thing to have to go past on your way to work, and worse when with your children. And as ever, a tighter hold is taken of those women at the intersections of oppressions.

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http://www.feministe.us/blog/?p=17287

Mary Daly, an influential feminist theologian, passed away on January 3 at the age of 81. She was a controversial figure, penning incredible works on feminism and religion and refusing to allow male students into her class; she also fell out of favor with many feminists (myself included) who read and enjoyed her early works but were appalled when we discovered her transphobia in later writings, and when we learned that she refused to publicly engage the criticisms of women of color, including Audre Lorde’s generous Open Letter.

Mary Daly’s life, in a lot of ways, is a microcosm of the public face of late 20th century second-wave feminism — a woman-centered radical movement that had (refreshingly, for some) little place for men, but that later found itself tripping over its narrowly-imposed definition of “woman.” She was a foremother, but one who eventually revealed herself unprepared (or unwilling) to embrace all of her children — especially the ones who failed to look or think like her. Her writings on religion were powerful and original and her thoughts and academic contributions certainly shaped the face of feminism today (in good ways and bad), but her particular brand of feminism has been, for good reason, rejected by many women, myself included. May her family and loved ones be at peace, and may the rest of us learn from her good works and leave her bad ones to dust.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/01/home-again-with-additional-dog-pictures.html

I'm home.

This is the weather the dog likes: crisp, cold, weather that puts him in mind of wolfish ancestors hunting on the steppes.

Me, I put on long underwear and dozens of layers over that, and top it off with the sheepskin Uigur hat I haggled for in Xinjiang, and trudge in the snow behind him. It's frozen on top, so you crunch and rock and hunt for ruts that already exist as you walk, or you teeter-totter across the surface, half-falling at every second step. While Cabal is happy in a world filled with sharp smells and frozen rivers, and he bounces over the ice and snow with joy.





Many years ago I discovered (via the currently hiatus-bound Fabulist) Jason Webley. I posted this a link to this song, Eleven Saints, a song Jason Webley wrote and performed with Jay Thompson...



Jason was pleased, and wrote to me to say thanks, and then, a couple of years ago, introduced me in email to his friend Amanda Palmer, with whom he was working on a project, as they worked to bring the music of two conjoined twin sisters they had discovered on the internet to the world. There were two songs out on the internet by the mysterious pair for a long time, but a new song, " A Campaign of Shock and Awe", crept out today: you can hear it at http://www.myspace.com/evelynevelyn. Highly recommended, and not just because of the, y'know, family connections.

...

Right. I do not want to be disturbed tonight. Maddy and I will be beginning our New Year's catch-up by watching the first part of Doctor Who 'The End of Time'.