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I just want to say that watching, on the one hand, a black city move toward gay marriage, and on the other hand, people blame Obama's inaction on black people is deeply disappointing. On gay rights, Obama hails from one of the most progressive black churches in the country. Moreover, there's been this ongoing narrative that Obama isn't afraid to tell black people hard truths. And yet when he comes up short, somehow it's because he's caving to the horrid blacks.
In everything else, Obama is postracial. In the matter of gay rights, he is truly black. -
The alterations needed in the language of a typical wedding ceremony in order to accommodate gay and lesbian marriages are so minor as to be utterly negligible, and comparable to the minor adjustments that are made these days in quite conservative heterosexual marriage services in churches all over America.
One technicality involving a subordinate clause functioning as adjunct to a performative clause provided the biggest departure from weddings I've seen in churches and courthouses. Performatives are utterances that, instead of merely saying something, do something. Conferring degrees, making promises, or causing people to be legally married, for example. The performative "I now pronounce you…" is normally preceded by an adjunct like "By the power vested in me by the City and County of San Francisco" or whatever, to make clear the source of the legal authority to marry people. And there was something of a problem about what to say there.
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The anti-abortion fight relies on people with voices speaking for the presumably voiceless. The anti-slavery fight relies, first and foremost, on the enslaved asserting their own freedom. The works and arguments of abolition don't mean much if the blacks, themselves, don't believe in their personhood. Indeed one of the great arguments for slavery was that the blacks actually liked it, that they wanted to be enslaved. As a pro-choicer, I don't think I'd argue that any child would "want" to have been aborted.
I haven't yet worked this out, but if you're looking for a moral corollary, it seems to me that the ethics of veganism are actually much closer, in that it involves two parties debating the rights of something that can barely conceive of the terms.
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It’s politically useful for pro-lifers to pretend that abortion and slavery were similar debates, and that the major argument for slavery was the claim that Africans were not people. But that’s simply not true.
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It wasn’t until ten years later that Jackson started talking about his own physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his father, about how it was so bad that he’d get sick and start to vomit at the sight of his father later in life. So many, maybe most survivors of abuse can recognize the pattern of alternating “nice, friendly comforter” and “violent monster” that permeate the Thriller video. I recognize my own father’s terrifying outbursts of rage in it too.
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What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think that “choice” is really the best framework for the conversations that we are trying to have. Of course, I believe that we should work to create conditions so that all people can wear the clothing that makes them feel comfortable. But I also think that it’s hard to have these conversations if we focus primarily on ideas of “choice,” which often ignore the complexity of the contexts in which all of our choices take place, and the many competing systems and structures in which we attempt to act.
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Over the weekend, a discussion about abortion reduction between Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman and Slate’s William Saletan at the New York Times Bloggingheads site demonstrated just how easily one can, perhaps wholly unintentionally, come off as a completely clueless middle-aged guy when discussing women’s pregnancies.
Archive for June, 2009
links for 2009-06-30
June 30, 2009
links for 2009-06-29
June 29, 2009-
Reluctance to be identified as someone who “dresses like a hooker” underscores an anti-sexworker stance. Number 1: There ain’t anything wrong with hookers so, Number 2: There ain’t anything wrong with “looking like” one. Can we please stop defining sex work within puritanical, patriarchal discourses of morality?
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This is not a social experiment that turns a child into a lab rat — it’s the undoing of a system that treats us all like lab rats and tries to constrain us into conformity no matter what our hearts feel. It gives Pop more choices to pick from.
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Personally, I don't think this tourism ban is a good idea. For me, it would be like finding a domestic abuse situation, and then cutting off food supply to everyone related to the couple until the abuser stops. If anything, this tactic would most likely escalate blame and abuse. Which is precisely what JFLAG, Jamaica's sole LGBTQ advocacy group feels. They have released an official statement rejecting the tourism bans. JFLAG essentially operates like an underground railroad for queer folks in Jamaica, and they state on the web page, "Due to the potential for violent retribution, we cannot publish the exact location [of our office]."
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To sum, when you don't think about intersectionality, you're running (at least!) two big risks:
1. You're building a system that is completely unable to assist most of the people it's supposed to assist. I.e., your system supposedly serves "women", but it really only serves white, straight, cis, middle/upper-class, able-bodied, neurotypical, English-speaking women.
2. Not only does your system not assist most of the people you claim it assists, it worsens some other axis of oppression. I.e., not only is your group failing to be useful to women of color, to lesbians, to Spanish-speakers, it's actively stabbing them in the back.
links for 2009-06-28
June 28, 2009-
Don't agree with all of it, but it has very smart comments on Buffy (negative-ish) and Dollhouse (positive)
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The following list of books, short fiction, and film is small but choice. As Nicholls noted, Steampunk is "a subgenre to which some distinguished work attaches, though in no great quantity." Suggestions for further reading can be found in the Criticism section and Recommended Web Sites below.
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What began as the silliest gossip item of the week — irritating celebrity blogger Perez Hilton and overexposed Black-Eyed Pea will.i.am's brawl outside a Toronto hotel — has somehow transformed itself into an opportunity to discuss some of the biggest issues in feminism and gay rights.
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Excellent thoughtful post
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This is a combination of several things; the span tag, to style the text for the sighted, a color choice, because white on white and black on black are troublesome for Mac users, the title attribute, which adds illustrative information to links and spans on hover (for visual browsers) or as selected (for screenreaders), and anchors — the same tag that makes cuts work — so that screenreader users have a way to stop their screenreader from reading the text that is visually obscured. A screenreader won't have any trouble reading visually obscured text just like any other, so there has to be a way for the user to know that the warning/spoiler is coming up and a way for them to tell the screenreader to proceed to what comes after the warning/spoiler. It's not a whole lot of markup, but it's a little faffy, definitely something to keep somewhere to cut and paste. In the context of a complete header, it would look something like:
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When the DC metrorail crash occurred earlier this week, nine people lost their lives. When the list of the names of the dead was released, it contained the name of Ana Fernandez, a mother of six.
While the family has been "grateful for the genuine expressions of sympathy," they did not expect another effect.
Ana Fernandez's image and name have prompted hateful, harrassing calls from people demanding to know her immigration status.
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That shouldn’t be surprising. How could centuries of white supremacy simply disappear in 15 years? What did surprise me (as a white U.S. citizen) is how much discussions about race in South Africa sounded just like conversations in the United States.
links for 2009-06-25
June 25, 2009links for 2009-06-24
June 24, 2009-
This is a question that many a steampunk asks, even those who are white and descended from peoples that the Victorians oppressed. How do we take the trappings of the enemy and use it against them without simply assimilating into the imperialist’s culture?
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Lovely, uplifting post.
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85. "Have you tried camomile tea?"
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Patricia J. Williams on the use of DNA in (in this case) rape trials, why the Supreme Court ruled against new DNA tests on old evidence being used in appeals, and some of the dubious statements on race being made. Fascinating article with set of follow-up links at the end.
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There are those of us who suffer. But don’t speak of us as victims if we are not dead. Don’t deny the agency with which we become survivors and active shapers of our lives. Don’t ignore the fighting we do for ourselves.
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zohra asked if I could write about France’s project to launch a Parliamentary inquiry about the burqa from a French perspective. I write with two caveats: I am not a Muslim so I am wary not to take up space in the debate, and my position on the issue isn’t black or white: I supported the 2004 ban on all religious symbols in schools for example, but fail to see what good can come from a ban on burqas in the streets.
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Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”
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Despite this freewheeling approach to the facts, the resulting stories stick to a narrow range. Aniston must emerge with hope, the editor says: despondency must be short-lived, because it's depressing – and, just as importantly, dull. (It would be just as dull were Aniston to find lasting peace with being single or childless. Stable couples are boring, too, however great their Hollywood clout: Kate Winslet doesn't sell magazines, and neither do Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, so they rarely appear on covers.)
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Historian Peter Hennessy persuaded officials to release document kept ready for use from 1960s to 1990s
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Coming so soon after stoking anti-Gypsy feeling with it's wildly exaggerated 'story' about NHS provision and blaming the Belfast Roma for their plight because they're all criminals, the bile and hate in the Mail's agenda is sickening. As one of the comments left on the story says: 'So not only do these people get health service priority, they're using our money to give them a party. Come on for God's sake, something has to be done'. And that seems to be exactly what the Belfast hate mob thought and it's what the Mail thinks. If they knew how, they should be ashamed.
links for 2009-06-23
June 23, 2009-
Exhibition of Czechslovakian posters and fliers from November and December 1989 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.
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While I do think kids should have knowledge of saints, freedom fighters etc, I doubt that learning about Bhagat Singh will help the cause of abstinence any.
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Millions of words and a library full of books have been dedicated to trying to understand how Jobs did it. But two characteristics stand out beyond all others. First, Jobs is a man who does not suffer from self-doubt: everything he does is imbued with absolute self-confidence.
Second, he is obsessive about Apple and its products, which he engages with at a level of detail virtually unheard of among his fellow CEOs.
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Sacha Baron Cohen wants us to believe that Brüno isn't a central part of the joke, but he composed the character from spare parts of the worst gay stereotypes, promotes the film with images of the character that heavily rely on the premise that anything gay/feminine is inherently absurd, and shows up to public appearances dressed in ass-bearing glittery gold lederhosen.
If the character isn't a central part of the joke, then why is he so easy for homophobes to laugh at?
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[Warning: Very explicit discussion of sexual assault and the nature, anatomy, cause & effect of triggers. Is itself triggery.]
Triggering hurts. Not like a squick; not like a vague sense of discomfort or a brief flash of annoyance. It is long-term, it is difficult to deal with, and it is something that no one should have to go through if at all avoidable. -
Zombies represent a source of cheap labor and a particularly lucrative source being that they are infinitely undead. They don’t require any upkeep—no food to survive assuming the government has found a way to curb their hunger, no wages, no health care, no benefits, etc.
links for 2009-06-22
June 22, 2009-
With Remembrance Day approaching, it seems appropriate for us to commemorate all those South Asians who fought for Britain, not because they were forced to, but because they wanted to.
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incl claim that "Seeing as women in London who are raped or sexually assaulted are most likely to be victims of foreign criminals allowed into our country, then once we have deported most of them then all women of all races in our country will be far safer. "
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Recently the New York Times put a short documentary on their website as part of a new feature called Second Chances–and you guessed it, the first film is about a transsexual named Terry Cummings. It's actually a touching little piece that is very sweet and definitely well-intentioned. But it struck me immediately how even something well-intentioned could manage to pack inside of it so many typical trans-doco-cliches.
And then I realized, that not only are those cliches subtly disparaging to trans people, they're also (no!) not-so-subtly misogynist–allow me to demonstrate:
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The number of hate and terrorist websites has increased by a third in the past year, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
And the number of so-called hate sites is growing fast, while the use of social networks to push controversial messages is also on the rise. -
Yet for all their promise, there are sharp limits on what Twitter and other Web tools such as Facebook and blogs can do for citizens in authoritarian societies. The 140 characters allowed in a tweet are not the end of politics as we know it — and at times can even play into the hands of hard-line regimes. No amount of Twittering will force Iran's leaders to change course, as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made clear Friday with his rebuke of the protesters, reportedly followed by the security forces' use of tear gas, batons, water cannons and gunfire to break up demonstrations yesterday.
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And finally RACEFAIL BINGO!:
Special Spock/Uhura Editon
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Those are the grisly details of Angie's murder, the ones that made her family sob in the courtroom, that prosecutors diagrammed, that defense attorneys tried to rebut — that a jury used to convict Andrade of murder. But these details only describe the end of Angie's life. They don't reveal what she meant to friends and family or answer questions about who Angie was before she met Andrade and how she found herself with him.
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As the race to become the next Commons speaker intensifies, Deborah Summers takes a look at what is at stake and who is in the running
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Africa's longest-running civil war is over and a new country is supposed to grow out of it. But there are few schools or roads and the people live in fear of kidnap and death. Soon, Southern Sudan's humanitarian disaster could dwarf that of its neighbour Darfur
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"While his new liver may not have the exciting functionality and sleek user interface of an iPod, an iPhone or an iSpleen, it is quite good at plasma protein synthesis, hormone production and detoxification, which is pretty much what you want a liver to do."
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There's a quote commonly attributed to Margaret Atwood, though I'm failing on my Google-fu and can't seem to find a reference. Regardless:
"Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them,"
If I assume that any man I meet may rape me, the worst that happens to you, as a male, is that your feelings get hurt.
If I don't assume that any man I meet may rape me, I might get killed.
Sorry, folks, I'll keep up the vigilance.
links for 2009-06-21
June 21, 2009-
Native American and Alaska Native women are more than 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than other women in the United States in general. A complex maze of tribal, state and federal jurisdictions allows perpetrators to rape with impunity and in some cases even encourages assaults.
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Excerpted From "Women, Race, & Class" [parts 2 and 3 linked]
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I do not intend to deny the horrible reality of rape for any white woman.
I do intend to say that white women who are ignorant (as I was for decades) of the patterns of rape and oppression of Black women in U.S. history are thus not aware of the complicity of white women in the oppression of Black men and women. Being aware of historical complicity is not the same thing as "you are guilty for what dead people did."
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How many people have heard about my stomach problems? A lot of people. ..Out of the dozens of people who've heard about my stomach problem, and know about the drugs I take for it, how many have lectured me about how I shouldn't take those nasty drugs? Zero. No one has ever even made a comment about how I shouldn't be taking medications for something that's just uncomfortable. Even knowing that some of the stuff I take for it is addictive, no one, not one single person has ever told me that I didn't need my medication. No one would even consider it.
But depression? It's a very different story.
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If Dr. Tiller’s murder has become the issue, instead of the service he provided to women (and for which he as murdered), the opponents of legal abortion have only themselves to blame for making or allowing others in their movement to go on making service providers like Dr. Tiller the focus. Maybe that makes it easier to ignore the rest of the story — of both Dr. Tiller and the women who found themselves in need of his services — and over simplify both his reason for providing the service and women’s reasons for seeking it.
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This is how the patriarchy and the beauty ideal collude: we are supposed to see these women and be so stunned that they aren’t thin, white, blonde, able-bodied, and perfectly symmetrical that we can only call them ugly. We’re supposed to look at these pictures and say “At least I’m prettier than her.” We’re supposed to view our female friends as accessories in our true life goal, which is to look hot for men.
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At the same time, I'm also appalled (though, sadly, hardly surprised) by the conservative myth-making that's going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. So it's obviously time to pull together another "Firing Back" piece to give progressives what they need to separate fact from fiction when these talking points start flying.
links for 2009-06-20
June 20, 2009-
Next week, David Cameron will unveil the Conservative Party's new right-wing allies in the European Parliament. To the dismay of pro-European Tories, they include parties accused of being anti-women, racist, homophobic and in denial about climate change.
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Larry Wilmore and Jon get the magic back by apologizing for what blacks and Jews have done to each other.
links for 2009-06-19
June 19, 2009-
This article was written by a student in Iran who, for reasons of safety, did not want to be identified by his full name.
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Explanation: This ancient Chinese map of planet Earth's northern sky is part of the Dunhuang Star Atlas, one of the most impressive documents in the history of astronomy. The oldest complete star atlas known, it dates to the years 649 to 684, discovered at the Silk Road town of Dunhuang in 1907. A recent analysis that examines the accuracy and projections used to make it notes the atlas marks positions of over 1,300 stars and outlines 257 Chinese star groups or asterisms. The star positions in the hand drawn atlas were found to be accurate to within a few degrees. In this example showing the north polar region, a very recognizable Big Dipper, part of the modern constellation Ursa Major, lies along the bottom of the chart. An additional 12 charts depict equatorial regions in 30 degree sections and also include a grouping resembling the modern constellation Orion. The atlas is on display at the British Library in London to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy.
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The recovery from the Depression is often described as slow because America did not return to full employment until after the outbreak of the second world war. But the truth is the recovery in the four years after Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 was incredibly rapid. Annual real GDP growth averaged over 9%. Unemployment fell from 25% to 14%. The second world war aside, the United States has never experienced such sustained, rapid growth.
However, that growth was halted by a second severe downturn in 1937-38, when unemployment surged again to 19% (see chart). The fundamental cause of this second recession was an unfortunate, and largely inadvertent, switch to contractionary fiscal and monetary policy.
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An apparently rigged election is shaking the fragile pillars on which the Iranian republic rests
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Barack Obama’s fiercest opponent has become one of his most solid allies
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On the whole, I found that young people, pious and secular alike, were profoundly alienated from politics. They seemed more concerned with their immediate personal freedoms than in risking anything for political change.
Four years on, however, young Iranians have sloughed off that apathy and headed into the streets in their thousands, to wage passionate protest against an election they consider fraudulent.
