media

Vag Magazine

mandy — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000

I didn’t think it was even figuratively possible to shoot yourself in the foot while disappearing up your own behind, but the characters in Vag Magazine have proven otherwise. This eerily well-observed sketch show from the women of the Upright Citizens Brigade is watchable and rewatchable by third wave feminists and those who love them—or who love to laugh at them—especially since every episode is available on the web.

The six-episode, internet-based series of shorts shows what happens when a trendy, glossy women's magazine is taken over by a group of hardcore third wave feminists who revamp it by firing all but one staff person then change its name to Vag Magazine. The newly minted mag is a hipster-heavy haven of hypocritical hilarity that describes itself as such: "Not your grandma's feminist magazine, though we support her as a woman."

I have to admit that, as the editor of a comedic zine about menstruation, I was terrified Vag Magazine would have me crying instead of cracking up. And I'm relieved to report that the show is really very funny. The humor is devised from improvisation at its finest. The overall concept covered all my pet peeves about feminism, an ideology to which I subscribe, despite the kind of annoying behaviour on display in Vag Magazine. I offer the following dialogue as evidence.

Hierarchical Hypocrisy: "We don’t believe in hierarchies, but we also don’t have time to get our own coffee."

Capitalist Conundrum: "I feel like the idea of advertisers is really un-feminist." Swiftly followed by, "It's just that we need advertising dollars if we’re gonna be able to tell women what to do."

The biting observations are dead-on, down to the last detail: roller derby, cloth maxipads, ironic bunting. The writers leave no handmade, vegan, Zapatista-solidarity stone unturned. You’ve gotta be in that scene, or very near to it, to be able to poke so much fun in such glorious detail, and to my satisfied delight.

How did these awesome comedians have time to spy on self-righteous feminists and put together an outstanding sketch comedy show? Perhaps a future season of Vag Magazine will tell us.

Written by: Chella Quint, April 16th 2011

The Reality Shows

tina — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Karen Finley

Feminist Press

Described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as someone with the “power to disturb,” Karen Finley is a woman with her finger on the pulse of America.

Renowned for her performance art, she is an underground favorite and a feminist idol. Her ability to tie satire, sex, and snappy political commentary into every aspect of her work is a brilliant, modern-day re-vamp of the “personal is political” mantra.

Finley’s most recent book, The Reality Shows, is a collection of transcripts from performances spanning the last decade. “Make Love” is an intimate recollection of the September 11 attacks and “The Passion of Teri Schiavo” is a biting and brilliant essay on America’s almost hysterical infatuation with the “victimized woman.”

Finley’s fictional portrayal of political and pop culture figureheads is challenging and at times, absurd. In “George & Martha” she describes, in great detail, a fictional affair between Martha Stewart and George W. Bush. Later on, the reader ventures inside the mind of Silda Spitzer in the days following the prostitution scandal that forced her husband Eliot to resign as the Governor of New York.

Finley’s plays, complex in nature, daunting, and a hotbed of controversy and debate, are simplistic at their core. Each essay, performance piece, and poem invites the audience to take an introspective look at the passions and insecurities that govern most actions. Finley has an incredible ability to peel back the layers of the world’s most powerful figureheads and reveal the fragility underneath. In a world driven by hysteria, misinformation, bias, and greed, this is a truly refreshing take on the American political landscape.

The Reality Shows is not a book that a large audience will appreciate, but that’s never been Finley’s style. It is a thought-provoking, laugh-producing read that will leave the reader wanting to see more of the world filtered through Finley’s eyes.

Written by: Cheryl Santa Maria, April 11th 2011

Scandalous Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the States

farhana — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Juliet F. Gainsborough

Georgetown University Press

Sixteen-month-old Amiya Brown died due to blunt force. Thirteen-month-old Christopher Thomas died and his two year-old sister. All under the auspices of child welfare. These and many other horrifying stories are the touchstones of Scandalous Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the States. A series of similar vignettes open the book with a jolt.

Meticulously structured, the book starts with a history of child welfare nationally before diving into the crux of the multi-pronged study featured. Though it clearly serves an academic purpose, it does so flawlessly. Scandalous Politics is incredibly well researched and could easily be mined for details for years to come. However, without my background in social science research it may have been a much more difficult read.

Gainsborough’s study supplements three different state case studies (Florida, Colorado, and New Jersey) with a regression analysis of how scandal influences funding and legislation around child welfare reform. She emphasizes the importance of media in highlighting child welfare atrocities in policy formation. Her regression analysis found a significant relationship between scandals and legislation, but not scandals and funding for child welfare program. Many of the bills came out within two weeks of a compelling story hitting the papers. Gainsborough recognizes the need for continued coverage and pressure from the media in order to create the funding base necessary to create systematic change instead of band-aid reform on a case-by-base basis, which is generally short term and not appropriately funded overtime.

Separation of the research from the stories of children appears conscious. Unfortunately, the continuity of the stories is then lost in the research. It’s as if the stories run in parallel to the study, making the book a significantly less emotional read.

Child welfare issues are not easy, and Gainsborough gives much credence to that. But must we simply leave the fate of the most vulnerable children in this country to the whims of the news cycle?

Written by: Nicole Levitz, January 31st 2011

Words and Money

mandy — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

By André Schiffrin

Verso

The creative culture industries have always been, and will continue to be, an important arena of concern for feminist politics. This is not only because feminism has had to rigorously contest the regressive versions of femininity mass produced by these industries for mainstream audiences but also because feminism has challenged these perceptions by generating alternative media, literature, and film.

In this sense, André Schiffrin’s latest book, Words and Money, is an informative read for those employed in the culture industries who subscribe to feminist ideologies. Schiffrin’s primary concern is how the corporatisation of publishing, films and cinema houses, independent bookstores, and the press is destroying smaller, independent agents of cultural production, and, with them, the culturally and intellectually diverse material they bring into the public domain. Picking up where he left off with The Business of Books, which examines the corporatisation of the publishing industry, Words and Money sketches out the disastrous effects of the pursuit of profit within the creative industries, and makes a passionate and compelling case for their need to receive adequate support in order to continue producing the important analyses, literature, and film with which they enrich the public domain. What’s more, Schiffrin has suggestions for how this can be done, making Words and Money an essential ‘how-to’ manual for industry insiders who want to save the independent creative sectors.

Words and Money covers four different sectors—publishing, cinema, bookstores, and the press—but the message it delivers in each case is the same. For example, Schiffrin recounts how publishing, a profession that was once free of the pressures of profit-making, is being transformed by the demands of global conglomerates to promote what sells, rather than what makes important historical or cultural contributions available to the reading public. He cites how French publisher Les Prairies Ordinaires was given a small government grant to translate a number of academic works by authors such as feminist cultural and literary theorist Judith Butler into French. He points out, however, that such small publishers cannot outlive these grants because systematic financial support is withheld due to the perceived lack of demand or profitability of their books, irrespective of the social value of their content.

So, what is to be done? University presses could house and subsidise small independent publishers. A small local sales tax on cinema tickets could be used to support an independent cinema house. Local libraries could give independent bookstores the space to open their own sales counters. These are samplings of what is perhaps the most useful contribution of Schiffrin’s work—his practical suggestions about how to save the independent creative industries, instead of simply bemoaning their demise.

As the publisher of Pantheon Books for thirty years, Schiffrin’s intimate knowledge of the industries he interrogates makes for a fact-packed read that is probably more appealing to industry insiders than the average reader who, like me, may be more interested in the politics without the macro-economics. By expanding on the few interesting cross-regional examples like Butler, Words and Money could have better driven home the great intellectual and cultural loss that the disappearance of the independent publishing industry or the independent press actually signifies.

Interestingly, Schiffrin is credited with bringing French writer and intellectual Michel Foucault’s work to America. Foucault’s contribution to the analyses of relations of power, the body, and sexuality are widely considered gargantuan contributions to feminist theory and have generated volumes of lively debate within feminist scholarship and academia. To me, a Foucault-less world presents a far more compelling, if chilling, example of what everyone stands to lose without the gems of the independent publishing industry.

Written by: Kaavya Asoka, September 10th 2010

12th Annual Allied Media Conference (6/18 - 6/20/2010)

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Wayne State University

Detroit, Michigan

This weekend I attended my favorite conference: the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. This year was way more subdued than the last two years I’ve attended. There were fewer people of color present; I didn’t go to very many sessions; I was on my period, feeling real low energy; and it was still amazing and transformative, and once again reminded me of what I’m here to do in this world. Even with its challenges, the AMC is the kind of conference that has me checking the calendar to make sure I’ve got it on deck for next year.

The most powerful part of the conference for me was being connected to the Creating Collective Access folks, organized in less than a month by some of the fiercest people I know. I was reminded how conferences themselves create a non-sustainable way of folks relating to each other, to themselves, and to their own needs. On some days the conference schedule was filled from 8am-2am. Being connected to the Collective Access folks allowed me to give myself permission to chill, to not push through exhaustion and inattentiveness to be at every session, and to not sacrifice a really good slow conversation to make it to a panel presentation on listening. I felt more in my body, more aware of my needs.

Creating Collective Access also had me questioning what collective space looks like and what to do when access may be so different for different people. I went to one of the sessions that was part of the Indigenous Media and Technology track, and the presenters were using smoke as a tool in the workshop. I was thinking about folks with disabilities that need scent-free spaces and how you hold those things together or, if you can’t, what do you do? Are we willing to do what it takes to create or use tools to share across real boundaries?

I was amazed by Adrienne Marie Brown’s Octavia Butler Symposium, people’s overwhelming interest as well as her awesome awesome facilitation skills. Adrienne is so fierce she had the notes up later that day! I was once again struck by folks' reluctance, and perhaps inability, to talk about trauma in our movement and how we heal or don’t from all these –isms that impact our lives.

I feel softer now, and sharper at the same time. I am refined and focused, recommitted to kindness with direction, and more prepared to speak up as an ally for the disability justice movement and the rights of indigenous peoples. I’m full and content and feel myself coming into a new era of myself. I’m hopeful and it feels really good.

Cross-posted at Crunk Feminist Collective

Written by: Moya Bailey, July 21st 2010

Peepli Live

admin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Anusha Rizvi

UTV Motion Pictures

The women of Peepli… well, there are no women in Peepli. Yes, there are daughters and mothers and wives, and to them Natha is purportedly “son and brother.” Natha is in dire straits; he has taken a loan from the bank and now cannot repay it. In an attempt to keep their lands from being auctioned off, Natha and his brother, Budhia, go to the local strongman cum political candidate for advice.

The politician recommends that one of the brothers commit suicide, for while the government does not provide debt relief or agricultural subsidies for farmers, it will give a sizable payout to the family of a farmer who has committed suicide. And therein lays their salvation. The family will have money and what have the two brothers done with their lives anyway? Let one sacrifice himself for the greater good.

Natha is a simpleton and his somewhat more savvy brother convinces him that since Budhia is the one who has a family, Natha must be the one to commit suicide—only he can save them all. Obligingly, Natha agrees. Later on that evening, after the brothers have drunk themselves into a stupor, a visiting reporter hears their story. The following morning’s headline foretells the death of farmer Natha and a media circus (as well as a political one) descends onto Peepli. The various parties and partisans push and pull, and attempt to decide whether or not Natha should live.

The three female characters in the film are all shrews. From Natha’s wife, who badgers and assaults the brothers, to his mother who complains and swears, to the reporter who appears to be unconscionably chasing leads, there is not a single positive female figure in the film. Inflation herself is a witch, wreaking havoc and ruining the farmers’ lives, leading them to their early graves.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, July 3rd 2010

Creating Ourselves: African Americans and Hispanic Americans in Popular Culture and Religious Expression

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Edited by Anthony B. Pinn, Benjamin Valentin

Duke University Press

The topic of cross-cultural communication has fascinated me for a number of years, partly because of my own experiences in Latin America, and partly from observing the interaction between the Latino/a and African American communities. Watching these two groups interact has taught me a great deal about differences in the ways of communication, how what may be "appropriate" in one culture may not be in the other, and the need for discussion to avoid potential misunderstandings.

Therefore, it was with great interest that I read Creating Ourselves, a study on cross-cultural communication and collaboration between religious scholars of the two largest minority groups in the United States. The timing of the publication of this book is of great importance, as both groups have, to a certain extent, been viewed as "foreign elements" that might threaten the national identity of Americans, especially in the current economic climate. Scholars from both communities engage in a dialogue, an exchange of opinions, perspectives, and hopes, as their history and identity is linked through the cultural production via representations in popular culture.

I found the structure of the work innovative and very much needed in scholarly circles. The book consists of seven sections with two essays in each of them, one from each group. Every article is followed by a response written by a corresponding essayist from the opposite group, each contributor using their own personal experiences to further engage readers.

Teresa Delgado analyses the novel América’s Dream by Esmeralda Santiago, which delves into the life of América González, a single mother who takes a job as a maid in a hotel in New York after suffering abuse by her daughter's father in Puerto Rico. Although América finds freedom in New York, she remains isolated and silent, as she has not broken the dependency of oppression. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, in response, reflects on the "womanist theory" that calls for revolution in the ways of seeing, living, and being. The term "womanist," coined by Alice Walker, refers to women who are in charge, who champion freedom and who transform the oppressive forms affected by race, gender, and class domination. Kirk-Duggan uses hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill as an example of just one of these extraordinary women.

In "Television and Religion," Jonathan Walton analyses the dramatised faith in megachurch movements; the colossal buildings that house sanctuaries, gyms, daycare, bookstores, and more are especially attractive to African American communities, with their charismatic pastors who even hold worship through an electronic church. Another form of melodrama is found in the Latin telenovelas (soap operas) that have become extremely popular for millions around the world; Kassandra, a Venezuelan soap opera attracts people as far away as Serbia, while The Rich Also Cry is popular even in Moscow.

Overall, I enjoyed reading Creating Ourselves as the subject of creativity in all different forms, styles, colours, and shadows is part of our daily life.

Written by: Anna Hamling, April 30th 2010

Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Vivian Diller, Jill Muir-Sukenick

Hay House

As the authors of Face It explain in the preface to their book, women who came of age during and after feminism's second wave were brought up to believe our looks don’t have to define who we are or determine our possibilities. What mattered more in this 'enlightened' new age were our brains, our talents, our degrees, our abilities, and our ambition. The paradox is that women continue to receive conflicting messages from the media and our culture about the role appearance plays in our lives. Because many of us have never attempted to unravel our ambivalent feelings about our appearance, the way it impacts our self-esteem, and how we relate to our family and friends, we deny these feelings when we see the first signs of aging—or react with a vengeance to try to arrest the aging process.

Face It is all about guiding women through this potentially treacherous time, during which many of us feel the very ground shifting beneath us. Like many adolescent girls, aging women cling to what the authors describe as “masks” that take the form of "workaholism," addiction to cosmetic surgery, excessive exercise, and dieting to protect ourselves from the sadness and loss we feel at the change in our appearance. In this thoughtful and engaging book, the authors, both psychotherapists and former models, present the stories of how different women approached the aging process. Runway models, nurses, homemakers, and businesswomen, who range in age from early thirties to mid-sixties, tell us their stories.

Some women never felt their appearance played much of a role in their lives, and were taken by surprise when they felt a sense of loss, or even panic, about their changing looks. In contrast, the models interviewed for the book were aware of aging, given that it pushes them out of their profession at the youthful age of twenty-five, and experienced a range of feelings and emotions similar to what many women face when they enter midlife. For women who believed that their intelligence and ambition were their ticket to success, it was often embarrassing to admit to friends and family how their changing looks were impacting them, because it seemed frivolous or superficial.

The authors use the experiences of these different women successfully navigating this challenging time with the use of an innovative six-step program that forms a pathway to a new acceptance and understanding of the aging process. This program involves taking an honest inventory of one's experiences with beauty and acknowledging how family and culture shapes one's identity as a woman. While the authors stress that they aren’t against using plastic surgery to enhance one's appearance, they want to give women the tools to make decisions about it from a place of strength and appreciation for their unique attributes, not out of a panic to "stay in the game."

As a forty-something woman, I found this book intriguing and was pleased to discover that it lived up to its billing of helping women navigate such a challenging time in our lives. Face It helps women of any age to gain an understanding of how to fully own the aging process and not react out of fear to our changing looks and bodies, but to, instead, appreciate and learn from the journey.

Written by: Gita Tewari, April 23rd 2010

Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Alison Piepmeier

New York University Press

In Girl Zines, Alison Piepmeier elegantly chronicles the emergence in the early 1990s of zines: a complex, multifaceted phenomenon aligned with third wave feminism, and a powerful and unruly articulation of the same cultural moment that produced riot grrrls. It may also have been the last gasp of the manuscript culture—since, some would say, eclipsed by the blogosphere and electronic media—as a pervasive form of underground radical expression. This study skillfully employs post-structuralist feminist theory, along with the implicit collaboration of the author’s students—generations of whom have been rediscovering the excitement and raw force of these documents, adding their own interpretive spin, and reproducing the zine in their own cultural moments.

She traces the rough avant-garde artistry of Tobi Vail in her work on Jigsaw through well-established magazines like Bitch and the literally thousands of feminist blogs that have established themselves in cyberspace. She traces the origins of such zines as Sarah Dyer’s Action Girl Newsletter back through the mimeographed feminist manifestos of the mid-twentieth-century, and even back through women’s scrapbooks made in the nineteenth century and preserved as a deceptively rich collage of women’s interactions with their cultural milieu.

Girl Zines conveys the brazenness of the zines, their “rhetorical excess and flamboyance” still outrageous and shockingly liberating. A wonderful example, “The Splendiferous Oath of Riot Grrrls Outer Space,” illustrates the tone: “I riotously swear to rage in glorious anger against everything that even slightly pisses me off. I swear to be loud, vulgar, obnoxious, illogical, and emotional whenever I damn please. As an Outer Space Riot Grrrl I will dream of impossible utopias, make up wild political theories, laugh at people who oppose me, and as much as I can, be full of supreme confidence and hellacious egotism.” The loud ripping sounds you hear are conventional gender expectations and forms of institutional oppression being torn to shreds.

Significantly, Piepmeier emphasizes the importance of the materiality of these artistic/political forms. Their textuality—the rebelliously crude printing and the hand-drawn visuals—conveys meaning. They are ephemeral—they share that feature with almost all newspapers and magazines from the time of their invention—but they are nonetheless tangible artifacts capable of being preserved, handed down, revisited, and revitalized. This materiality differentiates them from the creative work being done in the blogosphere, and it is a feature that still appeals to students newly introduced to them as physical representations of a spirit linking generations of women.

One wonders what these radical artists would make of finding themselves within the fairly conventional confines of a scholarly/academic history. And yet, clearly, they have generously supplied both material and narrative to the author, as she inscribes a thoroughly researched, tightly written, and highly respectful account of this phenomenon that needs to be a living part of a developing feminist legacy.

Written by: Rick Taylor, February 28th 2010

Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By G. Thomas Couser

University of Michigan Press

We live in an age in which the memoir has become the preeminent genre. Writers of the contemporary memoir are not required to be a “somebody” or famous personality before publication. This is the age of the “nobody” memoir—the writings of individuals who tell stories of lives that in previous ages would have remained untold. In his thought-provoking book, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing, author and professor of English at Hofstra University, G. Thomas Couser, argues that with these modern memoirs we have seen an astonishing proliferation of personal narratives about disability—from personal stories about illnesses like HIV/AIDS, or breast cancer, to accounts of mental illness, narratives by people living with physical disabilities such as blindness or mobility impairments, and accounts of addiction.

These “some body” writings, as Couser somewhat ironically terms them, have arisen in the wake of the civil rights movements of the last several decades. They not only provide a previously unknown level of visibility to people with non-normative bodies in our society, but they also provide a means for self-representation in which “disabled people counter their historical objectification (or even abjection) by occupying the subject position.” At the same time, Couser observes, these writings are largely mediated by publishers, the marketplace, and our collective preconceived notions of what constitutes acceptable narratives of disability. As such, they may play into stereotypes and reinforce our culture’s ableism. Thus, one extremely common pattern of the disability memoir is that of an individual who triumphs over adversity (think the amputee mountain climber, or the blind runner). In these stories, disability is a “problem” that must be “overcome” by a single, exceptional individual. These books contain no collective action, no political awareness of how our society is structured to marginalize people with disabilities, and no questioning of the status quo.

In a later chapter, Couser contrasts this kind of narrative to the work of memoirists like Anne Finger whose Elegy for a Disease goes beyond an individual account of her disability to include interviews with other survivors of polio and quotes from other memoirists. Says Finger, “I do not want to give you just my story…I also want to write about the social experience of disability.” Couser identifies Finger’s book as belonging to a set of new post-ADA disability memoirs in which authors consciously attempt to avoid the clichés of triumph over adversity, or providing a voyeuristic experience of “the other.” He also notes that these new memoirs come from a privileged group within the disability community itself—white professionals whose access to resources such as education has provided them with the means to understand and tell their stories within a larger social context.

In another chapter, Couser provides thought provoking discussions of documentary filmmaking about people with disabilities, discussing one film in particular—Face To Face: The Schappell Twins—as an example of an exceptional documentary that avoids freak show exploitation while pushing the audience to question notions of normality, individuality and privacy by taking them into the world of Reba and Lori Schappell, conjoined twins. He also examines Marjorie Wallace’s extraordinary biography of June and Jennifer Gibbons, The Silent Twins, who were elective mutes convicted of arson and confined indefinitely to Britain’s Broadmoor Hospital in the 1980s. Another chapter makes an argument that people with disabilities warrant the attention of ethnography, and engages in a thoughtful examination of the memoir, Riding the Bus with My Sister by Rachel Simon in which the author wrote about her sister Beth who has mild retardation.

Published by a university press, Couser’s book assumes a certain familiarity with the language of the academy. Yet it remains accessible and engaging, providing an intelligent examination of contemporary life writing within a framework that pushes readers to question basic assumptions about disability embedded in popular culture. Signifying Bodies offers a much needed contribution to discussion of the modern memoir by highlighting the contribution and representation of people with disabilities to the genre.

Written by: Elaine Beale, February 2nd 2010

Sexism in America: Alive, Well, and Ruining Our Future

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:07:00 +0000

By Barbara J. Berg, Ph.D.

Lawrence Hill Books

Barbara J. Berg and I have something in common—we both hate the term post-feminist. An omnipresent myth exists that ours is a post-feminist society in which women have achieved absolute parity with men economically, politically, and socially. Because of this, the myth states, there is no longer a need for a feminist movement, or feminist ideas, conversation, outrage, struggle, or participation in any national dialogue. Berg's book is an exhaustively researched screed that quite easily proves this to be patently untrue.

The first several chapters of Sexism in America detail women's struggles throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and the rise of second wave feminism. The ground lost in the Reagan years is covered extensively. Ronald Reagan often espoused the myth of the “welfare queen,” slashed many social programs that benefited lower-income women and their families, and used rhetoric in his speeches connecting the pro-choice movement with infanticide, pornography, drugs, adultery, and teenage sex. The media (an ongoing problem for and frequent enemy of women's progress, as noted throughout the book) did its best in the Reagan era to push women out of the workplace and back into their homes. Magazines and newspapers often published unfounded articles with shoddy research and questionable sources indicating that women themselves were unhappy in their jobs; scare pieces about children growing up essentially motherless due to women being in the workplace were also _de rigueur. _

Women as a whole made much more progress under President Bill Clinton, and the double-edged sword of the media became more female-friendly as well, carving out niches for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and making room for the riot grrrl movement. The tragic election of George W. Bush, decided by a Supreme Court decision in 2000, proved disastrous for women over the eight years he held office, and a complicit and compliant media rolled over and reverted back to its prior winking and outright misogynist behaviors.

Where we previously had Buffy, we now had dating/courtship reality shows in which women humiliated themselves for a chance to marry a virtual stranger, as well as competitions like America's Next Top Model, Beauty and the Geek (hint: the titular “Geek” is not a woman), and _Pussycat Dolls Present: __The Search for the Next Doll._ Police procedural shows such as _CSI_, _Criminal Minds_, and _Killer Instinct_ compete with one another to see who can outdo whom in a battle of “Mutilated Dead Woman of the Week.” Women are rarely if ever featured as leads in prominent Hollywood films without the movie being derided as a “chick flick.” The Disney Princess brand is a billion-dollar industry, as is plastic surgery, since the “ideal” body image, weight, and shape to which women must aspire is a goal with ever-moving posts. We know more about women who are beautiful than women who are activists.

Sexism in America is an often infuriating book to read, and serves as a fantastic primer for young women and those either suspicious of or new to feminist ideas. Barbara J. Berg handily documents the last sixty years of American history to state her case that ours is most definitely not a post-feminist society, that women's voices are being drowned out in a chorus of media backlash and right-wing ire, and that there are still plenty of men who'd rather we be decorative objects rather than fully realized, actualized persons.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, December 10th 2009

Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility

admin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:59:00 +0000

By Monica J. Casper, Lisa Jean Moore

New York University Press

It is hard to deny the creeping, theatrical aspect that seems to permeate every mode of information and method of exposure we are subjected to daily. While once relegated to advertisements, television, and movies, the careful craft of showcasing and presenting certain bodies is now seen in governments, military, and the health industry. Why some bodies are overexposed while others are seemingly non-existent is useful in determining the underpinnings of American society and agenda. Monica Casper and Lisa Jena Moore explore these politics behind the visibility of certain bodies in Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility.

Upon first thought, this book might appear to be a critique of the media, a poignant peek into the ways in which the use of stereotype highlights certain bodies at the expense of others—but that topic is one that is otherwise understood, and largely written about. Casper and Moore delve deeper than that. They are concerned with the bodies that appear and disappear in much less talked about fields, such as female soldiers, people living and dying with HIV/AIDS, and infant mortality. With almost the same tools the media use to derive entertainment from everyday life, political institutions are doing the same to real lives and human suffering—and with graver consequences. The bodies of dead infants, those stricken with AIDS, and female soldiers are masked by numbers, lies, and underreporting. So how do real care, understanding, healing, and prevention begin when those bodies are erased in the first place?

At the root of the analysis is the preservation of Western ideals and agendas. By switching the concern of HIV/AIDS from a public health crisis to statistical, epidemiological data that helps manage government and secure the status of the state, there is a displacement of pain, suffering and death. The public has a harder time envisioning real people living with this disease amidst the quantitative numbers than they do erroneously understanding that HIV/AIDS is more of a disease that plagues other nations. Similarly, framing the release story of Jessica Lynch, a female prisoner of war in Iraq, as one of feminine passivity and rescue bolsters America’s dependency on gender dichotomies which fuels wars. While Lynch’s story is ultimately lost and retold as untrue, Lynch herself, and other female soldiers that suffer sexual discrimination are rendered invisible.

Lyrical, engaging, and encompassing, this book raises important and timely questions about the construction of identity and visibility in a post-9/11 landscape. In this fast-paced, technological world, others will readily construct our stories before us for benefits that are not our own. This book urges readers to question the sources, framing, methods, and presentation of information and tragedy so that we may recover the truth behind missing bodies.

Written by: Krista Ciminera, October 30th 2009

New York Times 'Half The Sky' Issue

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:42:00 +0000

Edited by Nicholas Kristof

New York Times

In July, I wrote a post about Nicholas D. Kristof's announcing a "special issue" of the New York Times Sunday Magazine that would cover women in the developing world. Well, that issue is now available online, and will be arriving to the doorsteps of NYT subscribers in a few days. While this issue would have felt more authentic had the Times solicited pieces written by women from the Majority World, there is still much to be gleaned from this weekend's glossy.

As I anticipated it would be, the artwork is fantastic. In "A Powerful Truth," a five-minute audio slideshow, Kristof briefly tells the stories of six women--Saima Muhammad, Goretti Nyabenda, Claudine Mukakarisa, Edna Adan, and Abbas Be--while Katy Grannan's photos supplement the words by geographically gliding one homeland to the next: Pakistan, Burundi, Rwanda, Somaliland, and India. Saima's and Abbas' stories are further detailed in "The Women’s Crusade," which explores the myriad challenges women face around the globe; examines the positive role microfinance, foreign aid, US policy, and NGOs play on bettering women's individual conditions; and positions women's collective empowerment squarely at the center of solving global ills--including human rights violations, poverty, war, heath crises, and modern day slavery.

Another feature piece is "A New Gender Agenda," in which Mark Landler interviews Hillary Clinton on which foreign policy issues will be prioritized in the Obama administration. While some of the questions Landler asks are bold, and he should be applauded for having asked them, Clinton consistently sidesteps, leaving much to be desired. "A School Bus for Shamsia"is a feel-good piece with many moments that don't feel so great. At its core, it's about the progress of girls' education in Afghanistan, and one journalist's accidental transformation into an activist. Despite acid attacks and other forms of intimidation, the girls who attend Mirwais Mena School in Kandahar are determined to complete their studies--even if it results in their death.

On the topic of girls' death, "The Daughter Deficit" outlines the cultural factors behind daughter deaths and sex-selective abortions in India and China--an ironical twist to how increasing development can backfire if not coupled with an increase in women's status. Some of you may remember Ellen Johnson Sirleaf from her appearance on The Daily Show a few months ago. In "Madame President", Deborah Solomon speaks to the only female head of state in Africa in what, ultimately and unfortunately, is a lackluster interview.

"The Feminist Hawks" is one of the more interesting articles here, as it deconstructs the use of feminist rhetoric ("women's empowerment") as it is applied by conservative "hawks" (or those who gun for military intervention), particularly with respect to the post-9/11 paternalistic focus on Muslim women's rights (a la "to hijab or not hijab"). Writer Virginia Heffernan further complicates this discussion by considering the effect the Internet has on disseminating and manipulating the message.

In addition to the content, this issue has two "Half the Sky" contests for artists and activists: 1) photographers can submit pictures that exemplify the theme of women and girls' empowerment and 2) those with personal stories regarding work done to empower women and girls (in the US and abroad) can post a comment on the contest's page. Winners chosen will receive a signed copy of Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's newly published book called, as you might have guessed, Half the Sky.

Perhaps the most important parts of this issue are the "Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid" and "Organizations Supporting Women in Developing Countries" pieces, accompanied by Lisa Belkin's explanation of gendered giving in "The Power of the Purse." Audre Lorde wrote, "The essence of a truly global feminism is the recognition of connection." The struggles of women around the globe are the struggles of women everywhere; as women in the Western world and women of means in the Global South, we must find a way to wield the privilege we possess in order to dismantle systems of oppression which keep other women's needs from being met. Problems are not monolithic, and neither are solutions. The only thing that is not an option is failing to act.

Cross-posted to Bitch Magazine's On the Map blog

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, August 20th 2009

admin — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:39:00 +0000

By Cory Doctorow

Tachyon Publications

He’s been dubbed the “William Gibson of his generation,” but Cory Doctorow is more than a cyberpunk novelist or futurist. He’s an activist, a Creative Commons advocate, tech blogger, and journalist. I don’t come to Doctorow’s non-fiction work by way of his sci-fi novels. In fact, I only know the Doc as a gizmo and copyright guru famous for sites like Boing Boing and essays in Wired and Salon.

A book like ©ontent is an excellent case study in the impermanence of information. In a world where technology can evolve in a day, Doctorow’s work is both informative and outdated. The book begins with multiple essays about the failures of DRM—digital rights management, which is that obnoxious anti-piracy copyright code that makes it impossible to share downloaded files—but anyone who follows headlines about the issue knows that in the past year, the DRM battle has largely been won by laypeople; Apple has ceased selling DRM tracks in iTunes, for example. That isn’t to say Doctorow’s analysis isn’t useful. His now two-year-old essays serve largely as historical information in an era of meteoric technological and ethical shifts.

Doctorow is often too much of a technophile, incompatible with my own neo-Luddite tendencies; but I nevertheless respect his outlook and options. I suspect his work is most accessible to folks already engaged in analysis of copyright and new media. I’m most fond of his love of relaxed copyright regulation—though whether or not I think his theories are plausible is another matter. As a man who gives away his own ebooks, his early distaste of Amazon.com’s Kindle is charming. When he spends four pages defending fan fiction, it is in part because of his own history writing the genre. I love anyone who practices what they preach.

Doctorow also makes one sizable contribution to misinformation that I’d be remiss to not mention. In his essay “Why Is Hollywood Making a Sequel to the Napster Wars?” he mentions in passing that YouTube was founded by “two guys in a garage.” One of the largest myths of tech start-ups, the men in the garage story is not only an overused cliché; in this case, it is categorically untrue. YouTube was founded by three San Francisco PayPal veterans, supposedly at a dinner party, but despite widespread reports to the contrary, the idea grew over time and was not conceived in one evening of eating and drinking with friends. It may seem small, but when it comes to avoiding such blatant fact-checking mistakes, I expect more from an expert like Doctorow.

His largest contribution as a writer—both as a freelancer and a novelist—is his unrepentant championing of free books. ©ontent has been simultaneously released as a free ebook, so while I held a hard copy in my hands because I don’t personally believe tangible books are a dying medium, I respect Doctorow’s commitment to accessible media. I also happen to believe people like him when they say, “Giving away my books has made me a bunch of money.” Making yourself valuable and indispensable, in whatever form, is something for which we can all strive.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, July 23rd 2009

Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Emotions

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:28:00 +0000

By Kathleen Woodward

Duke University Press

When I finished Statistical Panic I was left mulling over the ideas presented in the book for the next few days. A deeply theoretical exploration of the emotional landscape, Kathleen Woodward frames her book in American culture over the past fifty years, revealing the political, social, and cultural power that emotions have in our lives. She argues that emotions are largely undervalued in the social sciences, and that conveying emotional experiences can be a powerful form of communication, organizing and socializing.

An avid reader, Woodward allows personal narratives to help her navigate this exploration. Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and many other writers infuse Woodward’s theory with personal experience and literary sensibility that bring her text to life. Woodward also does an impeccable job of mapping out emotional outlets in the media from tabloids to politics and, in doing so, we begin to see why her incorporation of narratives allows for a more thorough conveyance of emotions in our media driven world.

Statistical Panic offers a thorough examination of the political aspects of emotions, something that contrasts with twenty-four-hour news cycles, Twitter, and other media outlets that rely on shock and the quick turnover of emotional response. From shame to compassion, Woodward’s analysis bridges the emotional with the social and political, critically assessing emotions in a way validates their importance. Using Freud and Virginia Woolf, Woodward scrutinizes anger. She ties this to the social implications of experiencing anger as a woman and moves into a discussion on the uses of anger in feminist writings. Jean-Paul Sartre and Toni Morrison help guide Woodward’s understanding of shame and how it operates in a society wrought with sexism and racism. Part of what makes _Statistical Panic _such a powerful read is Woodward’s insistence on including “experts” like Sartre and Freud, while at the same time refusing to examine emotions in the vacuum of white male privilege. As a result, the scope of Woodward’s work is immense, offering the reader an enormous wealth of theory, social analysis and of course, literature.

When Woodward’s analysis moves to the political realm we begin to understand the tangible consequences of what she calls “statistical panic,” and how this has legislative and bureaucratic repercussions. First Woodward discusses compassion, both analyzing liberal guilt and compassionate conservatism (something the George W. Bush familiarized the nation with) as tools of organizing. Woodward also covers bureaucratic rage, a growing phenomenon due to the horrendous state of health care and finally, statistical panic, a feeling that Americans have been inundated with over the past fifty years, and even more so since September 11th.

Statistical Panic offers a critical exploration of emotions, how they are used for political gain, how they normatively reinforce social inequality, and how their subversion can combat the same inequalities. Woodward offers emotions as a source of political and social mobility, and her writing challenges us to be critical of the way statistical panic is used. She urges us complicate our understanding of our own emotional responses to everything from personal relationships to Twitter feeds.

Written by: Lizzy Shramko, July 13th 2009

media

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Words and Money

12th Annual Allied Media Conference (6/18 - 6/20/2010)

Peepli Live

Creating Ourselves: African Americans and Hispanic Americans in Popular Culture and Religious Expression

Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change

Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing

Sexism in America: Alive, Well, and Ruining Our Future

Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility

New York Times 'Half The Sky' Issue

©ontent: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future

Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Emotions