Charlotte Malerich

Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance

mandy — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

You may already know (and I hope you do) that zoos and circuses aren't good places for animals. But how do we know? Jason Hribal's Fear of an Animal Planet argues that we only need listen to what the animals themselves are telling us. He fills the pages with story after story of animals who "misbehave": who escape, who refuse to perform and reproduce, who attack (and often kill) human handlers. After twenty years of circus life, Tyke the elephant kills one of her captors and runs wild through the streets of Honolulu. Kumang the orangutan grounds a hot wire surrounding her enclosure and climbs out using the porcelain insulators as hand-holds. None of the orca Corky's calves survive past forty-six days, apparently victims of maternal neglect. And so on.

Key themes emerge. One: captive animals are exploited, in the full-on Marxist sense of the word. Whether performing circus stunts, entertaining zoo visitors, or breeding the next generation of performers, they create value for their human owners, value the benefit of which the animals themselves never own. Sea World is a multimillion dollar business. But it isn't using those profits to feast its whales on tuna, expand the chlorine-saturated pools, or—most assuredly—release marine animals back to the ocean.

Two: other animals can resist exploitation and slavery very much like human workers, through refusals to work, sabotage, escapes, and physical attacks. If we dare to see past species difference, and accept that animals' actions have intent, we recognize these tactics.

Three: through their resistance, animals are agents in their own history. When Tyke, for instance, was fatally was shot by police after her escape, footage of her death spurred human witnesses into activism. Two established the Hohenwald Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, where elephants roam unchained and unsupervised. Protests, lawsuits, and investigations into the animal contracting company that leased Tyke followed, and most significantly, some of Tyke's fellow performers were released into the care of sanctuaries like Hohenwald. None of this could have happened without Tyke's actions.

Hribal is a student of the historian Peter Linebaugh (co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra), whose approach he shares. Instead of accepting official narratives, he inverts social hierarchies and tells history from the perspective of the oppressed and dispossessed. Here, we're seeing circuses, zoos, and aquariums from the animals' side. Alas, the accounts—taken, according to the prologue, from newspapers, government and legal documents, online databases, institutional archives and a handful of earlier histories—are not individually sourced by foot- or endnotes, which strikes me as sloppy scholarship, surprising considering the author's background. It's also a criticism I'm sure Hribal's opponents will raise.

The author also makes a brief mention of alcohol use among circus trainers. In the next breath, he describes the industry as morally bankrupt. He seems to mean that circus management is utterly irresponsible in letting intoxicated handlers have contact with animals, but the phrasing is easily misunderstood to blame alcoholics ("drunkards," he says) for their addiction. I hope later editions can amend these flaws.

I want these later editions because I want nothing to detract from the challenge Fear of an Animal Planet offers its human readers. Like the best scholarship, it invites us to reject standard narratives. Instead of chalking up their behavior to mechanistic instinct, to adolescence, gender, playfulness, or high spirits, Hribal asks us to take animals' actions seriously: to see deliberate and eminently understandable resistance to conditions that the animals themselves find unacceptable, and to recognize them as fellow sufferers in a profit-driven economy.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, March 10th 2011

Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent

payal — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By AK Thompson

AK Press

My fascination with the anti-globalization movement, like my own baby steps into activism, is a late bloomer. I came of age when my peers were shutting down Seattle. I was reading Marx for the first time in college when IMF protestors took to the streets in DC. Yet throughout my extended adolescence, radical politics was background noise. I never paused to find out why globalization made people so angry. Like a lot of people growing up white and middle class, militancy was excessive and embarrassing. Admirable in heroes of the past, the world is civil now (I felt), with no need for insurrections or rage against the machine.

Yet most of the activists in the streets of Seattle also came from nice, white, middle-class homes in suburbia. In fact, this was a common critique of the anti-globalization movement in North America. Instead of multiracial inclusion, the movement seems to reproduce the same racial and class privilege so abhorrent in global capitalism.

This is precisely the criticism AK Thompson tackles in Black Bloc, White Riot. His response is not a how-to for recruiting people of color and/or those lower on the socioeconomic scale. Instead, his aim is to analyze the anti-globalization movement in its white, middle-class character. I.e., rather than complain that the movement is too white so let's find some black and brown people, he wants to account for why young white people came to the movement at all. After locating it in the particular experience of whiteness, he can proceed to the limitations of the movement's politics (as well as its strengths).

Referencing radical favorites like Paulo Freire, Audre Lorde, and Fight Club, and full of phrases like "the white experience of constitutive lack," the book reads like many a lefty intellectual's work. Whether you find this annoying or exhilarating, the arguments boil down to a few simple ideas. A key theme is turning toward a politics of production rather than representation, by which Thompson means focusing on how to get things done, not the symbolic significance of objects and images. For instance, don't worry that gas masks look monstrous in the eyes of the media; focus on the fact that wearing them allows protesters to face tear-gas-hurling police. It's about what one does, not how one appears.

Thompson also emphasizes the importance of violence. Violence, he argues, is a productive force like labor, which puts one in direct material contact with the world and explodes the representational politics that are deadly to the soul (when nothing substantial is accomplished) and deadly to the body (when unjust social structures persist in creating poverty, illness, and climate change). As force is monopolized by governments, historically it is only when groups proved capable of violence that they received political recognition and agency: colonized peoples, immigrants, and women.

In Chapter Four: “You Can't Do Gender in a Riot,” Thompson anticipates criticism that advocating violence amounts to accepting a sexist, patriarchal model. He argues the material fact that women can and have engaged in violent political struggle. Furthermore, participation in violence is one arena that allows activists to transcend gender. He quotes a female Black Bloc member, who explains how the baggy clothes and black hooded sweatshirt allows her gendered identity to disappear—a perfect example of the politics of production.

I wouldn't recommend this book as a first introduction to the movement. But if you are familiar with the stakes and the story of anti-globalization, it's an analysis worth considering, regardless of race and class background.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, December 24th 2010

Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Bob Torres, Jenna Torres

PM Press

Wherever one falls on the meat-eater to vegan continuum, you need to make the Torres duo your truth-speaking, profanity-spewing, tough-loving pals. They will move you closer to ethical veganism. For the already-vegan, Bob and Jenna offer the rationale and the moral support to stay that way. For four years, these wacky Ph.D.s have provided social commentary and intellectual critique to and for vegans through their podcast, blog, online forum and publications. In so doing, they've created the Vegan Freak ethos: a celebration of the way vegans stand out in a society that normalizes brutality and exploitation.

Two years ago my younger brother lent me the first version of Vegan Freak, a colloquial and genuinely caring guide to going vegan—covering everything from basic animal rights theory to getting along with non-vegans to where and how to find vegan products. I'd gone vegan as a teenager, emotionally devastated by exposés of modern industrial agriculture. But with the onset of my adulthood, Whole Foods markets were popping up like dandelions, and no less than Peter Singer had given the seal of approval to "humanely" raised animal products. The ideology of mainstream animal advocates looked hopelessly confused, applauding vegan diets and marketing cage-free eggs in the same breath, and my own veganism needed a shot of re-commitment. Vegan Freak offered that. In its pages I found a consistent, insistent morality and a practical guide to living it.

Now, the new edition appears and, as promised, it's been rewritten from the ground up. A thicker book both in page count and ideas, Version 2.0 reflects the clarity and maturity the authors have developed through years of vegan outreach. It still covers surviving holiday dinners and finding vegan alternatives for the leather fetishist in your life. Bad puns, tangential rants, and non sequitur chapter titles preserve the fun of the original. But new sections address recent trends in the vegan world: environmental veganism, veganism-as-body-image complex (or the Skinny Bitch effect), Oprah's vegan cleanse—all are sliced with a scalpel of abolitionist rationale.

For Bob and Jenna, there's no bad reason to go vegan, per se. Just inadequate reasons. Their goals—to help others go and stay vegan, to build a social movement recognizing animal rights—inform all their advice and criticism. Empathy bleeds through every sentence, but the Torreses treat their audience as responsible adults. They are not going to let us off the hook for failing to check if a soup is made with chicken stock or if our running shoes are all man-made materials. They are not content with vegetarians; cheese addicts get their own special page to bookmark and turn to whenever the craving strikes. Really, Bob and Jenna are sure we can make it through the traumatic dinner party with nothing but iceberg lettuce, and when we think about it, we are, too.

To their credit, the authors do not pretend to know what they don't. They frequently refer readers to other sources. The number of times they recommend Googling vegan product X will get tiresome if you read the book in one sitting. But for anyone attempting to make any kind of change, Vegan Freak is applicable and inspirational. The three-week, cold-tofu approach to personal lifestyle change worked for me when I decided to begin exercising regularly. And their thoughts about "impoverished veganism"—veganism that is only about what we consume and how we spend our money—encourages the already-vegan to think beyond personal choices. Most seriously, I credit my present involvement in any kind of activism, vegan-focused or not, to Bob and Jenna's inspiring, grassroots-y influence.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, May 31st 2010

Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard

New York University Press

Can African American liberation be understood without easy binaries: nonviolent civil disobedience vs. armed self-defense, integration vs. Black nationalism, MLK vs. Malcolm X? Can the history of feminism be written without effacing the contributions of Black feminists and other people of color? As Want to Start a Revolution? shows, foregrounding the work of women in Black liberation immediately problematizes these simple classifications. The cover photo of Rosa Parks admiring a poster of Malcolm X is, as the editors write, "an essay in and of itself." Although commonly associated with the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr., Parks supported both King and Malcolm, and her activism spanned decades before and after Montgomery.

By profiling several different activists in a series of fourteen essays, Want to Start a Revolution? builds a complex and fluid picture of Black women's activism. These women stood at the intersection of racial, sexual, and class oppression, and often devoted themselves to working on all three fronts. A chapter on Johnnie Tillmon and the welfare rights movement explores this theme of poor Black women's triple exploitation, and Esther Cooper Jackson, the subject of the first chapter, directly addressed this triad in her 1940 thesis, "The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism."

The editors set the goal of avoiding "dominance through mentioning," historiography that acknowledges the contributions of women and the relevance of feminism without offering serious consideration. On that goal, this book must be judged a success. We get history from the Black female point of view, and encounter famous Black men only through their associations with women of color, such as Cooper Jackson, Parks, and Yuri Kochiyama.

The editors arranged the essays to build off one another. A chapter on the Black Panthers' Oakland Community School, for instance, is followed by a chapter on Bambara's The Black Woman, an anthology that responded to the conceptualization of Black power as the re-masculation of Black men. Women within the Black power movement struggled with the sexism of fellow male activists, and the second half of the book is dominated by female activists' fraught relationship to Black nationalism.

Want to Start a Revolution? challenge gendered notions of what male and female activists do. The book demonstrates that plenty of women played roles typically occupied by men—charismatic leader, theorist, party official, politician, lawyer, revolutionary, and political prisoner—and the book questions a narrative of social change that privileges fiery speeches and flashy demonstrations over day-to-day educating, social service, and relationship nurturing done by both men and women.

Kochiyama, a Japanese American who organized for the Panthers, and Denise Oliver, an African American who rose to leadership positions among Puerto Rican militants, also complicate the supposed racial exclusivity of the movements, and further cross-pollination existed in the militancy and use of direct action tactics by Black nationalists and radical feminists. Fears of genocide and forced sterilization racialized debates around reproductive rights, and feminist ideals of self-love, self-determination, and self-sufficiency resonated with Black women.

As in any collection, the book's chapters are somewhat uneven. A few of the essays are more celebratory than analytic while others are too academic for a general audience or take on too much material for a twenty-page essay. All in all, the editors accomplish their goals to inform, inspire, and reconsider what we thought we knew about Black liberation and feminism.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, March 29th 2010

South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:04:00 +0000

By Jesook Song

Duke University Press

Having recently read Marxist scholar David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism, I was eager to dig into Jesook Song's explanation of how her own nation became a case study for the neoliberal state. Amid a worldwide economic crisis, now seems a fine time to explore the assumptions underpinning global capitalism. Harvey argues that neoliberalism, disguised as the liberation of populations and markets, is actually a reassertion of class power that redistributes wealth into the hands of an elite few. Yet how elites could perpetrate such a coup in the class war, with so little opposition, is difficult to demonstrate at a global level. Enter Song, an ethnographer who explicates the unique culture of South Korea, showing how neoliberalism took hold and developed in one exemplary country.

Neoliberalism took root in the late 1970s as a response to stagnant economies. In contrast to planned economies controlled by (often despotic) states, liberalization encouraged deregulation and the growth of financial rather than industrial capital, while discouraging collective activities like labor unions through a cult of personal choice and identity politics. As Song explains, South Korea first experienced government liberalization after thirty years of military dictatorship, and then economic liberalization through International Monetary Fund (IMF)-mandated restructuring and break-up of large conglomerates. After the Asian Debt Crisis of 1997, Song explores how neoliberal, free-market ideology combined with existing Korean concepts of family and gender as well as civil society movements. Strange bedfellows—activists, scholars, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—cooperated with the new liberal government in the delineation of deserving (those willing and able to sell their labor) from undeserving (those who cannot or do not), in the new welfare state. Song focuses primarily on the treatment of two demographics: unemployed youth and the homeless.

In Seoul in the wake of the debt crisis, Song worked in a public works program to assist shaping unemployment policy; there she was able to meet and interview city officials, scholars, NGO members, activists, and homeless and unemployed people themselves. These interviews are often illuminating. One city official clearly differentiated two categories: "IMF homeless are people who came to be homeless due to layoffs after the IMF crisis. They are normal people, not 'rootless vagabonds.' They have the intention to rehabilitate and the desire to work." One type of homeless person was normalized—a worker laid-off from the break-up of the conglomerates that had once provided job security and benefits—while others were marginalized. Women, not considered breadwinners, typically became homeless for reasons like domestic violence, not unemployment. Homeless women and their advocates either had to fit them into the script of a work-ready neoliberal subject, or give up even temporary assistance. Similarly, unemployed youth who received assistance were expected to be (paradoxically) self-sufficient and self-governing entrepreneurs. In the new economy based on finance and technology rather than industry, educated youth became commodities themselves, expected to sell their flexible labor and technical know-how.

Combining Marxist class theory and Michael Foucault's concept of governance, Song's analysis in South Koreans in the Debt Crisis_ _is densely academic; she wisely reviews key points at the beginning and end of each chapter. A larger weakness is the presentation of data. Much of the supporting evidence feels idiosyncratic—interviews, the summary of novels and popular movies, officials' speeches. While no doubt all of these are vehicles for ideology, they are not enough bricks to lay a solid foundation for Song's thesis of how NGOs, activists, and scholars were co-opted into the neoliberal project. This is disappointing, as her arguments make intuitive sense, and her critique of (neo)liberalism is timely, particularly for those of us who make activism and scholarship our lives.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, December 14th 2009

Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:33:00 +0000

By Edlie L. Wong

New York University Press

In this superb book, Edlie Wong analyzes the territorialization of freedom and slavery in the antebellum Atlantic. While reading it, I frequently recalled Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warning that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Yet Wong’s work also suggests the converse is true: the existence of free blacks threatened institutionalized slavery on practical and moral grounds, while the continuation of legal slavery in any jurisdiction challenged core notions of freedom, including freedom of movement and travel. This conflict played out in courtrooms and the court of public opinion as slaves sued for legal emancipation—a strategy fraught with its own contradictions.

Wong considers not only American struggles, but also how freedom on European soil and slavery in the West Indies influenced and was influenced by American slavery. Slave narratives, novels, popular press, and legal documents are the material from which Wong makes a dialectical critique of pro- and anti-slavery thought as it crystallized around legal cases. As befits her topic, she organizes the book locally rather than chronologically.

Chapter one deals with nationalistic British abolitionism, which championed freedom while confining it within British borders. Chapter two moves across the Atlantic to northern American free states, which offered southern slaves traveling there a choice: sever social ties and gain individual freedom, or return to home and slavery. Chapter three focuses on the Dred Scott decision and examines legal emancipation in the southwest U.S. Chapter five and the concluding chapter again take a transatlantic standpoint. The former examines the criminalization and de facto enslavement of free blacks—both American and foreign-born—who traveled into southern slave states as sailors. The latter briefly treats the question of American citizenship after emancipation and travel abroad.

Throughout, Wong sharply analyzes the rhetoric of pro- and anti-slavery literature. Whites on both sides generally acceded to the “chattel principle” that slaves are an extension of their masters' wills. Thus, unlike fugitive slaves, American slaves brought by their masters onto free soil might sue for their freedom precisely because the masters had made the decision, effectively consenting to their emancipation. Paradoxically, the movement onto free soil instilled slaves—now to be considered free agents—with their own wills, and any who returned with their masters to slave territory were argued to have chosen re-enslavement. Slaveholders, thus, saw their slaves as will-less objects, at the same time considering their enslaved status was the slaves' own choice. On the other side, White abolitionists constructed a rescue narrative in which they heroically spoke for slavery's helpless victims. Slaves whose active resistance challenged this gallantry were censored in the liberal media, or left out altogether.

Not surprisingly, Wong finds this paternalist viewpoint particularly strong where Black children and women are concerned. In the case of six-year-old Med, both lawyers claimed to speak for the girl, one presuming her desire to remain in free Massachusetts while the other argued her best interest was returning to Louisiana and her enslaved mother. Slaveholders vilified abolitionists for tearing apart families whose members were not all emancipated, while abolitionist literature suppressed the difficult decision of emancipated or escaping slaves to leave still-enslaved kin.

Wong seeks to restore the Black actors missing from these accounts. Some slaves turned the legal principle partus sequitur matrem (“the offspring follow the mother”) to establish emancipation for themselves and their children. Harriet Scott, for instance, wife of Dred, simultaneously sued for her own freedom and in so doing also established the legal emancipation of her two daughters. Thus matrilinear arguments could subvert paternalistic slave laws.

A foreknowledge of antebellum history and law would be helpful to the reader, but isn’t prerequisite. Including a timeline might have been useful, but that hardly detracts from the intelligence of the argument and the important recovery of overlooked source material. Though Wong refrains from drawing explicit connections to modern racial profiling, incarceration, migration, and an evermore tightly entwined global economy, the parallels lie on the page for any modern reader to draw.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, October 26th 2009

Plunt

admin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:14:00 +0000

By Plunt

Bongo Beat Records

From the get-go, Plunt prejudiced me in their favor. They dub themselves "Montreal indie pop punk"—all promising adjectives, even if "Montreal" isn't really an adjective, but a beautiful city filled with friendly people. Then the group adds adorable cover art, bilingual credits, and band photograph that's the very opposite of a glamour shot. Look, they didn't even comb their hair! The quartet is evenly divided male and female, giving both sexes a crack at vocals—yet another point in their favor.

Alas, the album doesn't quite live up to expectations. True, the songs are short and poppy, but the album feels almost schizoid. Many tracks feature a slow tempo and mellow mood. It's a matter of taste surely, but those tracks just did not grab me the way the faster, edgier songs did. "Rider," for instance, takes more from twangy country-western music than punk. The reverb on the vocals is interesting, but I am not sure what it ultimately adds to the song as a whole.

These slower songs do make the observational lyrics audible to the listener who has time to ponder them and respond to the images they evoke. References to the female singer's weight, for instance, and the mundane ("Do you want milk in your coffee?") paint a picture of average folks finding words for their music as they go. There is also wordplay that can be clever, such as in "Ménage-A-Trois," an English song using French loan-words, whose chorus asks the listener to "Pardon my French." Or it can be annoying, as in "Pointe," which seeks to use every possible connotation of "point," until I wanted to scream, "Ok, I get the point!" Ultimately, these tracks feel like intellectual experiments.

The faster, better tracks make known the group's punk influence, featuring jangling guitars and choruses half-shouted in unison. "Chapi Chapo" is an infectious homage to the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop." "Ho Hoho" is a near perfect bit of teenage angst laid over banging drums. My number one pick of the album, "Barbie," is a clever commentary on the marketing of political ideology to children. The song describes (fictional) Disaster Relief Barbie, who wears camo, drives a hummer, and dates Army Ken. Sure, Barbie is an easy target for dissidents, but you just try to keep from clapping along with the chorus. "Catfood Face" unites the two modes of the album: it moseys through an ode to the singer's cat, full of amusing observations and questions: "What have you done to the squirrel?" For the final chorus, the tempo and volume leap and the song becomes a headbanger. Entertaining, but inexplicable.

The album opens and closes with instrumental numbers, two variations on the same theme that make good use of horns and keyboard. Indeed, the overall instrumentation and arrangement throughout the album is skilled. I suspect that Plunt's second album, when they have had more time to settle on a persona and sound, will be well worth a listen.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, September 10th 2009

Jupiter

admin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:53:00 +0000

By Starfucker

Badman Recording

I don't dance. At least not well. So an evening of bopping or grinding or shaking (or whatever the kids are into these days) isn't my scene. But that's no excuse to excise whole genres from my potential music library, and more electronic acts are creeping in by the day. Some of this music is too overwrought and pretentious for my taste, but from a group like Starfucker, which doesn't take themselves too seriously, the music can be gosh darn fun.

The three-man group, based in Portland, Oregon, is comprised of Josh Hodges, Ryan Bjornstad, and Shawn Glassford. Hodges' career before forming Starfucker included an album of '80s covers. That background which shows itself here in a nifty cover of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," as well as in his songwriting on the seven other tracks, each an original composition. The first, aptly titled "Medicine," gives the listener an immediate dose of what Starfucker is all about: catchy hook, techno beats, and interesting samples. Tune out if you like and bob along without a thought, or tune in and muse about the androgynous vocals or the retro samples of a lecture expounding on the meanings of "philosophy" that weaves in and out of the music.

Techno pop is implicitly optimistic, celebrating better living through science, robots, and outer space. Even though I did not grow up on the genre, a childhood of Star Wars and video games prepped my ear to enjoy it. The synthesized music here is repetitive, like a video game's soundtrack, but never boring. The second track, "Boy Toy," could have been written and performed by a pining R2D2 or Mega Man. Again, it is instantly catchy, but more aggressively techno than the first song, utilizing a full range of beeps and whistles. The following "Dance Face 2000" continues in that direction with computerized vocals that teasingly sound almost like discernible human speech, but not quite. Track 5, "Biggie Smalls," stands out by using oriental scales behind a synthesized organ.

All of Starfucker's songs feel immediately familiar, so a song we are familiar with can hoodwink us. The sixth track brings us to the aforementioned cover of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." A listener who hadn't studied the title list beforehand might think it was another original composition until the recognizable lyrics kick in. If we'd been lulled by the album's listenability thus far, suddenly we are paying attention. Well-known lyrics like, "Oh Daddy dear, you know you're still number one," in a male voice are refreshing to both ear and mind, coyly forcing the listener to consider the ambiguity of gender. It seems that both girls and boys like to have fun.

Like Starfucker's first album, Jupiter was recorded with Dylan Magierek. There is nothing "indie" about the flawless production. My only complaint is that the album is too short.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, July 17th 2009

No Girls in the Clubhouse: The Exclusion of Women from Baseball

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:40:00 +0000

By Marilyn Cohen

MacFarland & Company

The premise of No Girls in the Clubhouse is that baseball could be successfully gender-integrated at all levels with no disadvantage to either side, but social expectations—not biological deficiency—exclude women from full participation in the sport. Feminists won't be surprised to learn how, in anthropologist Marilyn Cohen's analysis, the historical achievements of female baseball players have been obscured. Cohen writes that harassment, stereotyping, and social isolation have pressured women to stay out of baseball, while stigmatizing those women who do play. It is an old story, repeated in every designated male realm women have dared to enter.

Yet it is heartening to see this story told by a scholar as sharp as Cohen, and to find that the book's premise—intuitively felt by radical feminists—has the support of history and baseball professionals. No less than Hank Aaron, quoted by Cohen, asserts, "there is no logical reason why [women] shouldn't play baseball," a game that relies on timing and coordination, not pure physical strength.

Part I of the book tackles the history of female professional baseball players. These include Jackie Mitchell, who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game; Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson, and Connie Morgan, who played major league baseball in the Negro American League (NAL); and Julie Croteau, the first woman to coach men's college baseball, who played on a winter league team. Cohen also devotes a chapter to the WWII-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL)—popularly known from the film A League of Their Own—as well as a chapter to the barnstorming Bloomer Girl teams of the decades before. These working-class teams, usually all-female except for male pitchers and catchers, played against male teams. Cohen cites male supporters of female baseball, like promoter Bob Hope (not the comedian), who in the '80s and '90s attempted to field an all-female minor league team that would play in the men's leagues.

Rather than chronicling an alternative herstory, the book's goal is to analyze the social world of female players—relationships to teammates, coaches, fans, opponents, and the media—and the construction of gender identity. Cohen is sensitive to race and class as well, factors that allowed some women to play while excluding others. The all-white AAGPBL did draft fair-skinned Latinas, but ignored black prospects like Stone, Johnson, and Morgan. Racial integration temporarily opened doors to these women, as black male players signed with Major League Baseball, and Negro American League teams sought new ticket draws. But both the AAGPBL and the NAL folded in the '50s, effectively closing professional baseball for women—the unfortunate outcome of dividing marginalized groups.

Part II is devoted to amateur baseball, inextricably linked to professional, as Cohen shows. Today, Little League teams are often gender-mixed—legally required by Title IX—but with puberty girls meet social pressure to switch to softball. Differences in field dimensions, ball size, and pitching mean that softball demands different skills. The result is that young women who want professional careers, groomed as softball players in their formative years, are disadvantaged beside young men who have had five to ten more years playing baseball. This deficit in skill-development, Cohen writes, accounts for a lack of qualified professional female baseball players. With the same training, some women surely could play co-ed baseball at every level—a provocative suggestion in a book well-worth reading.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, June 8th 2009

Sea Sew

admin — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:58:00 +0000

By Lisa Hannigan

ATO Records

Ah, the curse of cuteness. Lisa Hannigan must know it better than many. Her voice is as prettily breathy as Norah Jones', as warm and comforting as a teddy bear under an electronic blanket, and as sweet as the spun sugar she sings of in "Pistachio." Her voice, in short, is the essence of what one might call "feminine." Hannigan played and sang with Damien Rice for six years; you may also know her duet "Some Surprise" with Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol. Here, on her first solo album, she proves she can more than hold her own—in the bashful way a butterfly might.

This album is at its finest when the lyrics and music are as cuddly and subtle as the vocals are. Songs like "Splishy Splashy," "Pistachio," and "Lillie" exemplify this best. "I Don't Know," my favorite pick of the album, is a "list song" par excellence, enumerating all that the singer does not yet know about a potential paramour, but would like to: "I don't know if you write letters/or panic on the phone." The lyrics are endearing in their simplicity and the character is so appealing in her uncertainty. The listener has to love this woman because she's so sweet and adorable. You can practically see her toying with her hair and staring at her feet like a teenager. An accompanying horn section, violin, and background vocals add pleasant depth to the song, which otherwise might prove too cotton-candy-fluffy for most audiences.

Yet for a listener who identifies as a feminist, such tracks feel like guilty pleasures. Shouldn't I expect more self-assertion from female artists? Or at least want them to transcend a pretty-girl vision of femininity? Never fear. Other songs, like “Keep it All” and “Courting Blues” on Sea Sew are darker and more intense. The latter begins with mournful, sawing strings, yet the vocals come in as gently as on the precious "Splishy Splashy." What is going on here? The melody and ambiguous lyrics ("Don't you be afraid tonight/Your father will not know") evoke something ineffably disquieting and seductively sinister, which is something you might expect from Rufus Wainwright or The Phantom of the Opera. We suddenly realize that the possession of a sweet singing voice can no more define Lisa Hannigan than the possession of a vagina or mammary glands.

And yet, I keep listening to the album for the pretty songs. When Sea Sew embraces its sweetness instead of fighting against it, the album truly displays how very lovely and powerful it can be.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, May 7th 2009

Nocturnal Drifter

admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:50:00 +0000

By Jessie Kilguss

"I consider all of the arts to be interconnected," writes Jessie Kilguss, who began a career as a film actor before shifting media to become a singer. Indeed, this album reflects a cinematic aesthetic; each track is a story, what an independent movie would sound like if you could capture it in a three-minute song.

Listening to Nocturnal Drifter, one senses there is no more honest lyric than "I like the perspective/from outside looking in" on "Something About Lonely." Even when the songs are introspective, they remain observational, detached from the action, framing events and feelings with a filmmaker's eye.

Most deal with male-female relationships (what else is new?), often pleas from the woman to get the boy-man to stick around, but this is balanced with an accepting self-awareness. "This Time," practically a monologue set to piano, is addressed to an old acquaintance and potential lover, asking for another chance.

At the same time, the chorus has a meta-song quality as the singer acknowledges that she would like to mold the addressee's character with some "artistic license"—this isn't an out-and-out surrender, a take-me-back-I'll-do-anything plea. There are conditions. But this sort of transformation, one person rearranging another to suit her own needs, can only take place within a song, a fact that is also acknowledged acceptingly in the lyrics. "Well hey man/We do what we can," the song ends.

"31" celebrates the surprise and maturity of being, well, thirty-one: "…My body is catching up to my old soul…" Although each track is a stand-alone song, common themes emerge, and by the time we reach "Something About Lonely," second to last on the album, we understand that earlier songs seeking out a lover were not the pitiful hopes of a girl who does not know who she is without a man, but the considered decision of a woman who would now like the companionship she formerly rejected: "This solitude isn't as romantic as it was/when I was twenty one." She admits to liking the outsider role, but she is willing to make an exception for the right person.

Kilguss worked with the duo Charlie Nieland and Barb Morrison, who make up the production team Super Buddha, on her debut album as well as this one, her second. Super Buddha has such impressive credits as work with Blondie and Rufus Wainwright, but often this album could benefit from a less slick production. Kilguss' voice is a pleasantly raw alto, an everywoman voice that matches the observational you-know-what-I-mean? quality of the lyrics. That down-to-earthiness isn't enhanced by overly synthesized beats and back-up, as on "A Little Place Behind My Eyes," for example. So here's hoping Kilguss goes for a more stripped-down sound on her next album, to match the simplicity and wisdom of the songs.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, March 16th 2009