Natalie Ballard

Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock

tina — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

One of the best things about reviewing books is the exposure I get to the fabulous females in feminist history who would otherwise be consigned to the cobwebby corners of academic obscurity had some enterprising writer not plucked them from the depths and held them up for the delight of feminist history nerds. This was what I experienced with Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic, which is part biography and part collected works of Ida Craddock. The editor and biographer intersperses five (long) chapters of Craddock's own writings with well-written biographical detail explaining Craddock's often puzzling rhetoric.

Ida C. Craddock was a writer and teacher and at the age of twenty-five, she challenged the status quo by being the first woman to apply for admission to the University of Pennsylvania. She passed the entrance exam and was recommended for admission, but the board of trustees quickly passed a resolution barring women from attending the school. Her career as a teacher would be limited as a result of this setback. She spent the next several years traveling, teaching stenography, and studying spirituality, until 1893 when the Chicago World's Fair opened. The belly dancers imported from the Middle East scandalized America—and Anthony Comstock in particular. Comstock was a powerful proponent of “blue laws” (laws created to enforce strict moral and religious standards of behavior) and the self-appointed postal inspector. Craddock took advantage of the scandal by writing an editorial in the New York World defending the dancers and poking gentle fun at Comstock. It's what she said at the end of the piece; however, that caught the attention of the world: Craddock claimed she had a “spirit husband” named Soph, with whom she had sex nightly.

Craddock’s editorial and claims of spirit-world sexual relations aside, she made a powerful enemy of Comstock by publishing and distributing “sex manuals.” Craddock, though an ardent freethinker, was not a proponent of sex outside of marriage and her sex manuals were intended for married couples only, but this was not good enough for Comstock (or Ida's mother). Both sought to have her institutionalized and jailed. Avoiding the asylum but not an arrest, Craddock refused to plead insanity and was sentenced to five years in prison for distribution of obscene material. Viewing this as a life sentence (she was forty-five years old then), Craddock penned a lengthy suicide note condemning Comstock and the society that judged her and then killed herself. Comstock, for his part, merely added Ida's name to the list of fifteen persons whom he proudly claimed he had driven to suicide.

Craddock's personal writings read as completely lucid, intelligent, and intense; they are not the scribblings of a deranged mind. Whether her “spirit husband” was a hallucination, a tale to prod her enemies, or (who knows?) a real experience, is anyone's guess. Her work was important to feminism, spiritualism, religion, history, philosophy, freethinking, and social reform, and her name deserves to be better known. I'm personally not a religious/spiritual person, but I loved Ida's utter outrageousness in her public claims of “spirit sex” and her audacity in flouting convention in her writings and speech. Her pieces are long-winded and full of references to obscure academia, but they are entirely absorbing. Craddock was clearly a learned woman with plenty to say. I think her suicide note, the last piece of writing she left the world, is my favorite. It's a nice “you can't fire me—I quit” and a scathing indictment of Comstock as well. Read Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic so more people will know of Ida Craddock, and not just the warped ideas of Anthony Comstock.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, March 6th 2011

Solo

tina — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Rana Dasgupta

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Initially, it was the synoptic descriptions of Solo that drew me in. I saw phrases like “enigmatic,” “thought-provoking,” and “demanding,” along with geographical settings such as Berlin, Bulgaria, and New York City. The cover artwork interested me as well. It depicts the white silhouette of a man against a seafoam blue background; he has a cane and his upper body is dissolving into birds. I hadn't read much fiction in recent months, so I was eager to jump back into the storytelling pool with this book.

Solo begins sadly and remains sad throughout. Ulrich, an old Bulgarian man nearing his 100th birthday, is completely blind and relies on the charity of his neighbors to exist. He has nothing to do except relive his life, one memory at a time. Ulrich was born and raised alongside the timeline of the twentieth century and each of his dreams has been thwarted by the major events of the times. Even after managing to leave Bulgaria to study chemistry in Berlin, he is called back to his home country to face its ruin at the hands of Russian Communists. Ulrich never leaves the country again.

The second half of the novel concentrates on Ulrich's “dream children,” Bulgarian siblings Khatuna, Irakli, and Boris, an orphan and violin prodigy. Each has a sad beginning in their native Bulgaria and they find their respective ways to the United States (echoing Ulrich's own frustrated attempts to leave Bulgaria). In America, their lives entangle messily. Which of them will find happiness? Khatuna, Irakli, and Boris are Ulrich's dream of the twenty-first century, where there is no need for any of the old failures of twentieth century Bulgarian life.

In an interview, author Rana Dasgupta (a British-Indian who has lived largely in the U.S. and India) referred to the “self-absorbed” nature of America and India, countries he believes behave as if they’re “the only countries in the world.” This is why the author chose Bulgaria, a small and “uninteresting” country, as the setting of his second novel. Small it may be, but the milieu is anything but uninteresting. The characters, down to those who make the briefest of appearances, are fully realized. More than once I became tearful at the transpiring events. The prose is fine, strong, and pretty. I enjoyed Solo very much and recommend it to any fan of literary fiction, history, or armchair travel.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, March 5th 2011

Hawk

payal — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Mark Lanegan, Isobel Campbell

Vanguard Records

Mark Lanegan—hey, I know that name.
You sure do. Mark Lanegan fronted Screaming Trees, one of the better bands to come out of the early '90s Seattle grunge scene. They never gained the attention or commercial success of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Nirvana, and their minor success was propelled mostly by “Nearly Lost You,” a track from the soundtrack for how-very-zeitgeisty film Singles. After grunge was discarded in favor of nu-metal, gangsta rap, boy bands, and factory pop, Mark Lanegan didn't remain with his old band churning out increasingly bad records or touring on nostalgia value. He joined Queens of the Stone Age, made music with Greg Dulli (of the Afghan Whigs) as the Twilight Singers and the Gutter Twins, and has released well-received solo records.

Isobel Campbell—that sounds pretty familiar, too.
Well, it should. Isobel Campbell was a member of indie darlings Belle and Sebastian from their inception in 1996 until her departure in 2002, as cellist, keyboardist, and backing vocals. She released two records under the name The Gentle Waves and has collaborated with Mark Lanegan for three albums, which is considered her breakout.

It's an odd pairing—the twee Scottish lass and the aging, rough-singing American troubadour, sounding here for all the world like a low-living Leonard Cohen. Campbell, who is credited with most of the songwriting and all of the producing and arranging, mostly sings backup or harmonizes with Lanegan throughout the record. She has a fine, serviceable, and lovely voice whose femininity works well with Lanegan's bluesy-grungy growl. Most of the record is a quiet hum, including a nice cover of Townes Van Zandt's “No Place To Fall,” but a New Orleans-style jazz/blues number (“Get Behind Me”) placed directly at track six cuts through the lull with all the subtlety of a brass band at an Ash Wednesday service.

Hawk is slightly uneven, but I don't find that to be a fault. It's a little piece of obscure southern-style Americana, with its jazz/blues/alt-country/gospel influences, and Isobel Campbell's voice is mellifluous enough to pass for any number of American female pop-rock singers pre-1980. I was fond of this record and it grew better and better with repeated spins.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, February 26th 2011

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945

caitlin — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Mark Driscoll

Duke University Press

Mark Driscoll, an associate professor of Japanese and International Studies at the University of North Carolina, here presents a very thorough reassessment of Japanese imperialism of Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Driscoll focuses his attention on the fringes of the colonized Asian peoples, writing about the Chinese coolies, Korean farmers, Japanese pimps and trafficked women of various Asian nationalities that moved Japan's empire along and provided the behind-the-scenes energy that created such an empire. Japan's rise to a capitalist power—and its expansion of its empire—is identified by Driscoll as happening in three distinct phases, each marked by exploitation of people, land, life, and labor: biopolitics, neuropolitics, and necropolitics.

Driscoll's reading of biopolitics as it applies to Japanese imperialism and capitalism is the same as Michel Foucault's: faire vivir (improving life) and laisser mourir (letting die off). Biopolitics most often involves public health, disease prevention, maternity clinics, and hygiene campaigns. It directly ties in to the concept of laissez-faire capitalism, its aim being for some lives to be improved and for others to be left to fare for themselves. In neuropolitics, the exploited worker in the capitalist society has a life that no longer belongs to him but to the object into which he puts his life (often his job); therefore, he must try to buy back his own life in the form of “commodity substitutes.” (Think of Fight Club and its message of “the things you own end up owning you.”) Citizens in a neuropolitical state are “shocked into stupefaction,” and then tricked into buying a “second life” back from the capitalist regime in the form of consumable goods. Necropolitics, the third phase of Japan's capitalist imperial expansion, is defined as the state in which workers, forced laborers, and colonized persons are aware of the constant threat of omnipresent death, and perceive life as a constant struggle against this threat of death. The imperialistic powers over the colonized peoples subjugate their lives with the power of death.

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque is a highly fascinating book, though occasionally dry and academic. This is no fault of the writer or subject matter, but simply my own Western/Caucasian mind not having these lingual-neural pathways, but I had trouble keeping up with the many Asian names sprinkled liberally throughout the text. There is plenty in here to intrigue those with an interest in twentieth century world politics, Marxism, sex workers, the failures of capitalism, the deplorable treatment of women in war conditions, poverty, gender, race, political corruption, and the swift rise and fall of empires. Driscoll also covers pornography and drugs in Japan's colonization of Asia, and includes some grisly photographs from “erotic-grotesque” magazines, the idea of these being that the two concepts were not so different from one another.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, December 4th 2010

Small Displacements

admin — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Vanessa Furse Jackson

Livingston Press

This tiny, obscure (I am the only person as of this writing to add and review it on Goodreads) volume of short stories by England native and Ohio resident writer Vanessa Furse Jackson ties together eleven tales into a loose theme: sudden changes in someone's life, whether major or minor, and the resulting shift felt afterward. Most of the stories are overtly sad, with others having just undercurrents of a sort of foreshadowed melancholy with abrupt endings. These lead the reader to hunt backwards over what was just read, looking for further clues to piece together some sort of denouement other than the insidious daylight gloom at story's end.

The titular “displacements” experienced by the stories' characters range from the prolonged deaths of spouses, the growing apart of spouses, and the chance meeting of unhappy strangers with something to offer the other. Children are not spared these wounds and scarifications of life, and instead seem to fare the worst in Jackson's stories. Prankster adolescents are thrust from their childhoods by a strange, menacing adult, a fourteen-year-old girl waits with her mother in an abortion clinic, and two young siblings are faced for the first time with the death of a friend and their uncertainty at how to grieve. Though all the stories are brief and the characters necessarily sketched as concisely, the reader can't help but feel emotionally invested in them nonetheless.

I think Vanessa Furse Jackson shows skill as a character artist; her detail and language is sparse, but it doesn't hurt her storytelling and writing prowess. She just doesn't engage in overly flowery or purple prose, preferring to concentrate instead on her characters and the situations and actions in which they find themselves. At 155 pages, Small Displacements is a quick, needle-sharp, and gut-punching read.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, August 21st 2010

Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Deborah M. Withers

HammerOn Press

Since the late 1970s, Kate Bush has been the original weirdchik in modern female pop music—press- and tour-shy, highly literate and culturally aware, witchy and Catholic, English and Eastern, masculine and high-femme. Above all, Kate has that voice, which she debuted at age nineteen with her song 'Wuthering Heights,' an eerie tale told from the point of view of Catherine Earnshaw's ghost. If there had been no Kate Bush, there would have been no Tori Amos, and most likely no PJ Harvey or Bjork either. Deborah M. Withers is unsurprisingly a big fan of Kate's body of work as well as a self-identified queer woman and academic who draws on Kate's music and the gender theories of Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Adriana Cavarero, and Donna Haraway to present feminist and queer interpretations of Kate Bush albums.

Normally, this is the kind of ambitious academic project that I love and that my friend Brendan calls 'grad school crap.' Withers applies her everything-but-the-kitchen-sink theories to all of Kate's albums and her film The Line, the Cross and the Curve, mostly by cherry-picking fairly obscure lyrics and describing musical beats that she believes support her particular idea for that song or album. Withers has created the idea of what she refers to as the 'Bushian Feminine Subject' or the BFS, which is the 'I' in all of Kate's songs; the BFS can be either male or female, of any race, and refers essentially to the character that Kate becomes for each song. It's an interesting interpretation since far too often the casual music fan thinks that every 'I' in a song refers to the musician herself. (For example: Kate's song 'Cloudbusting' is sung from the point of view of Wilhelm Reich's son.) Withers also wants to provide her own view into Kate's music since Kate has long been interpreted via the white, male, heterosexual music critics of the 1970s and 1980s. I am certain that Kate's occasionally difficult lyrics and complex musical arrangements point to something deeper than what is perceived superficially, but I am unconvinced by Withers' hodge-podge of queer, feminist, post-structuralist, and post-human (a new one to me) theories. She makes much of the Bushian Feminine Subject's putative queerness, racial appropriation, male and female performance, suicide, and rebirth.

At 157 pages, Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory seems more like a particularly ambitious college thesis than a book-length treatise on an important female artist with far-reaching cultural impact. It isn't poorly written, but it does appear to reach too far in its quest to assign theoretical meaning to Kate Bush's records. I was more curious to delve further into Withers' source materials than into the book itself. I might still recommend it to fans of Kate Bush and those who are into high theory; it is a short read and interesting and entertaining in its own right.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, June 17th 2010

Evelyn Evelyn

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Evelyn Evelyn

Eleven Records

“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.” —Susan Sontag

Evelyn Evelyn is the creation of Amanda Palmer (of the Dresden Dolls and lately a successful solo artist) and musician Jason Webley. Palmer and Webley have built a layered piece of art rather than simply a collaborative musical effort or side project. It includes an intricate back story in addition to its musical content: Evelyn Evelyn are conjoined twins, each one named Evelyn Neville (since neither they nor anyone else could keep straight their given names “Eva” and “Lyn”) who were purportedly discovered via MySpace by Palmer and Webley. Between them they have three legs, two arms, two hearts, three lungs, and a single liver. Born in 1985, there is little information known about the twins until 1996, when they appeared at Dillard and Fullerton's Traveling Circus. In 2007, Palmer and Webley “made contact” with Evelyn and Evelyn and encouraged them to make a studio record.

I first heard about this project at an Amanda Palmer show and thought it was creative, interesting, and different. However, the feminist blogosphere went supernova with rage after the Evelyn Evelyn project became more widely known, claiming Palmer engaged in “crip drag,” and objecting to the idea that conjoined twins “need help” from two able-bodied people. To complicate matters more, the twins' background (as stated on the record) involves a history of sexual exploitation and abuse, which was further fuel for feminist media laser-sights. Afterward, Palmer seemed not to be able to do anything right in the eyes of Internet feminism, and a quick Google search will reveal headlines like “3 Reasons We're Over Amanda Palmer,” “Amanda Palmer Behaves Like An Asshole Part 37,” and “How Amanda Palmer Lost a Fan or, My Own Private Backlash.” (Interestingly, Jason Webley seemed largely spared from the backlash for a project he helped create.)

As for the music itself, the twelve songs on Evelyn Evelyn are catchy, almost jingle-like tunes that rely heavily on piano, accordion, ukulele, and violin, and Palmer and Webley harmonize wonderfully. “The Tragic Events of September” parts one, two, and three are spoken word over a spooky piano background in which the twins tell of their woe-filled life while speaking of themselves in the third person. Each one is punctuated with sound effects and lines spoken by the “characters” in the song. Other songs on the record, including “Sandy Fishnets,” “Elephant Elephant,” and “Chicken Man,” further detail events in the twins' lives.

“My Space,” which is a tribute to the social networking site on which the twins were supposedly discovered, was heralded as the singing debut of Frances Bean Cobain; her voice is layered over many other guest singers, however, and is impossible to distinguish. This song sounds like a parody of every bombastic '80s power ballad in memory, and includes drums and a lengthy guitar solo. The album ends with a very pretty ukulele cover of Joy Division's “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

This record is of interest to fans of show tunes, noir, cabaret, and Tin Pan Alley. The theatricality and operatic nature of the music and storyline will appeal to ex-drama students, and current fans of Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley will appreciate the interesting tangent in their respective current careers that still maintains the level of cleverness and originality fans have come to expect from each.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, May 7th 2010

Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By William T. Vollmann

Ecco

Full disclosure: I am an avid fan of William T. Vollmann's work and was excited to read this book. Vollmann often has strange and interesting things to say about women and gender relations, and his notorious interest in prostitutes (who feature prominently in both his fiction and non-fiction) may almost be labeled as an obsession. In his latest book, Kissing The Mask, Vollmann concentrates on the nature of femininity by viewing it primarily through the lens of the ancient, gorgeous masks of Japanese Noh theater. It is also a meditation on the idea of femininity as a staged performance.

Noh theater is far too complex to encapsulate in just a few sentences, and Vollmann himself often professes trouble in defining it thoroughly. At first glance, Noh seems a bizarre choice of medium through which to focus on femininity, as most Noh actors are male and men traditionally play the roles of women with the aid of costuming and masks. However, Vollmann directs his attention, and the readers', to the beautifully rendered Noh masks representing female characters. These become a metaphor for the “mask” of femininity that many women wear: makeup, jewelry, clothing, and other adornments that are more or less socially mandated.

Similarly, the elaborate and carefully orchestrated movements on the Noh stage are analogous to the “staged” femininity also involving complex, time-consuming, and money-burning ornamentation that often results in constricted and painful mobility. Vollmann is concerned with what “manifests” a woman as opposed to what a woman “is,” and in this endeavor he visits Japanese geishas and transvestites, both of whom could be said to wear the feminine mask. He digresses into history of what other cultures have traditionally considered “beautiful,” and manages to weave in thoughts about porn stars and artists' muses.

Vollmann readily admits that he perceives women as “the other,” and is fully aware of the fact that he is viewing women through the privilege of a male gaze. He waxes rhapsodic about female beauty throughout the text, basically elevating women on a very high and poetic pedestal, which made me slightly uncomfortable; when a person (or entire gender) is put up on a pedestal, it's a long way to fall. Vollmann appears to genuinely like and respect women, however, and my discomfort was minor and temporary. He also, as in his other nonfiction books, makes no pretense about being an objective observer; he is fully immersed as a character in his own true story.

Kissing The Mask is highly valuable as a look into the secretive, baroque, and intricate Japanese subcultures of Noh theater and geisha teahouses, with the author's personal study of staged femininity mostly as a bonus. Furthermore, it's enriched with William Vollmann's gorgeous and almost lyrical prose, plenty of photographs and drawings, several appendices with notes and chronologies, and a glossary for the many Japanese words and phrases liberally sprinkled through the material.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, April 6th 2010

Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Rebecca J. Cook, Simone Cusack

University of Pennsylvania Press

Gender stereotypes are often studies in contradiction. They can be insidious or glaringly apparent; they are hostile, and occasionally operate out of “benign” sexism. The customs and mores of the society, the media that is consumed in that society, the predominant religion of a culture, and the family unit can all commingle in order to perpetuate gender stereotypes. Of course, a society's operative legal system can do this as well, which can do the most harm of all since the weight of law enforces entrenched gender stereotypes, often resulting in gender discrimination.

Women are most often burdened by the practice of stereotyping, since stereotyping is used to justify the subordination of women to men. Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives is an academic book that analyzes the worldwide practice of gender stereotyping and discrimination through the framework of the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), with an additional focus on the obligations of the law and state to avoid stereotyping and discrimination with the force of law.

Authors Rebecca J. Cook and Simone Cusack focus on both men and women in their study of stereotyping, and illustrate their points through international court cases in which gender stereotyping affected the verdict. While women are often the injured party, Cook and Cusack point out that harmful stereotypes about men can harm women as well, and vice versa. Stereotypes about men and women in fact are mutually reinforcing and end up as self-fulfilling prophecies. The solution to ridding society, media, law, and culture of stereotyping, the authors note, is by a process of Identification/Naming/Elimination/Remedy. It is necessary to both point to and give a name to the operative stereotype before it can be erased, and before reparations can be made to the injured party.

CEDAW and the protocols issued for the adoption of its ratifying countries are the focus for the book, but scant information is provided about the Convention itself. It is not indicated what countries and governments adopted its platform (presumably member nations of the U.N.), who was on the committee to draft its proposals, and who exactly is enforcing it outside of a nebulous “Women's Committee.” The governments targeted by CEDAW are referred to as “States Parties,” a term which is never clearly defined; from inference, I gathered that it is a combination of government, courts, and human rights treaties bodies. Furthermore, since several countries (Niger, Malaysia, and Israel are noted) have formally expressed reservations about several of CEDAW's articles for religious reasons, one wonders why they agreed to adopt CEDAW at all. CEDAW apparently also does not have the force of law behind it. Offending governments will be issued reports and recommendations, but there appears to be little impetus to follow CEDAW's instruction.

These are critiques of CEDAW, but several critiques may be noted about the book as well. The authors focus on only a handful of international cases that fall under CEDAW's jurisdiction, and no dates are given for any of these cases. Knowing the date might have provided an insight into sex and gender attitudes of the time. Furthermore, numerous commentators and scholars are quoted, but not named or sourced until the bibliography. Certain terms are used, but not defined (the most egregious being the “woman question.”) There are also far too many hypothetical “for examples,” especially for a book that deals in hard legal facts. The tone is dry and academic, but it is free of the subjectivity and injection of hyperbolic personal opinion that can accompany many feminist-related texts.

On the whole, though Gender Stereotyping handles its subject matter fairly well, it is not a terribly interesting read except perhaps to policy wonks and the legally-minded. It's always appreciated when subjects such as these are brought to the forefront for analysis, but I am not sure for what target audience the authors intended it.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, March 30th 2010

Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Edited by Margaret Killjoy

AK Press

When the term “anarchy” is heard, most people think of the “circle-A” graffiti on crumbling buildings and the T-shirts of punk rock kids, or else imagine a state of complete lawlessness and the breakdown of society. Popular culture does nothing to dispel these collective thoughts. In theory and philosophy, anarchy refers to the absence of a state or rulers and a society in which there is no vertical hierarchy of class, but instead a horizontal equality of societal participants. Margaret Killjoy, the editor of Steampunk Magazine and an avowed anarchist, collected fourteen interviews with varying writers in the compact book Mythmakers and Lawbreakers; the common thread between the featured writers is that each is a professed anarchist, writes positively about anarchist societies, or maintains anarchist sympathies.

Reading each of the interviews, I quickly learned that there are as many varying definitions of anarchy as there are practitioners and theorizers. There is a vague commonality of a desire to see an end to free-market capitalism and democracy (the writers interviewed are mostly American and British) and the desire for complete equality and a gift- or barter-based economy, but otherwise each author has his or her own personal philosophy as it ties in to the theory of anarchy. This is not a criticism, and it does not seem as if anarchists are so loosely connected as to not have any sense of community at all. Rather, it appears as if there are just factions within the anarchist community, perhaps comparable to American democracy's political parties. Each interview in its turn is wholly fascinating to read, as the subjects are certainly outside of the mainstream, literature-wise. The most recognizable names are feminist sci-fi author Ursula K. LeGuin, graphic novel writer Alan Moore, fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, and eco-feminist/neo-pagan author Starhawk.

Margaret Killjoy (who, despite his traditionally feminine moniker, is male) is mostly interested in learning from his interview subjects how they define the intersection of anarchy and fiction, or how anarchist sympathies have defined their writing. This may be considered the theme of the book, although each writer tends to wax tangential about choice pet subjects rather than directly answering the question asked. Killjoy is an obvious fan of each featured writer and brings his own knowledge of anarchy and literature to the fore in his prepared and improvised questions.

One common thread throughout the varying writers' remarks is anarchy and its benefit to feminism. Anarchy would necessitate a breakdown of the patriarchy and optimally result in full equality of citizens. This is a beautiful idea, but I'm perhaps too cynical to accept that this could be the case; I tend to believe that peoples' inherent prejudices would still rule the day, resulting in unequal divisions of labor and other gender discrimination. This and other queries and criticisms occurred to me while learning more about the varying schools of thought in anarchist philosophy. Its practitioners, at least within Killjoy's book, are very idealistic and enthusiastic about their ideas, but also seem to think that these ideas could easily be instituted as the prevailing societal norm. This to me seems hopelessly naive. However, the book itself, the interviewees, and Margaret Killjoy are all refreshingly intelligent and passionate about their work and politics.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, January 23rd 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

Zombies of Mass Destruction: A Political Zomedy

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:03:00 +0000

Directed by Kevin Hamedani

Typecast Pictures

Is there anything more delightful than a well-done zombie film? How about a well-done zombie film with an obvious 9/11 parallel and smart, witty female, minority, and gay protagonists? All this and more can be yours with Zombies of Mass Destruction, which is as much social satire and metaphor as a gory, jolly, bloody good undead time.

Zombies of Mass Destruction is set in idyllic Port Gamble, Washington, on the date of September 25th, 2003. The main characters are quickly introduced with few subtle nuances, since the film is as much about stereotypes as politics and zombies, and relies heavily on quick and dirty celluloid tropes. This isn't done to quickly get a point across in a white hat/black hat sense, but to poke gentle fun at the extremes of behavior in the age of the culture wars. The living dead take over Port Gamble as the apparent result of a terrorist attack; a swarthy, turbaned, Muslim man shown on a televised news broadcast claims credit for the zombie plague.

The town reverend hates everyone a stereotypically cinematic man of the church is expected to hate (“Unitarians, gays, and pro-choicers”) and has the town mayor on his side. There's an _au natural _quasi-hippie environmentalist who abhors violence (referred to as a “godless Jezebel” by the reverend), the jingoistic flag-waving Republican who is suspicious of and hateful to anyone perceived to be the Other, and the funny-accented, dark-skinned Iranian man who runs a restaurant in town. In between this stock character parade are the protagonists: Frida, the daughter of the Iranian restaurant owner, and Tom and Lance, a gay couple visiting Port Gamble to inform Tom's mother that he is homosexual.

Frida, Tom, and Lance are given more character shading than the other roles in the film. Frida, in particular, is smart, witty, and not the usual “last girl standing.” She shuts down her ignorant boyfriend when he, like most of the townspeople, mistakes her cultural identity as Iraqi rather than Iranian by cleverly telling him, “There's Norway you're getting into these panties.” (One particular detail that also struck me was the fact that she took off her high-heeled shoes to run once the zombies began swarming the town, hence avoiding any eye-rolling “watch the silly girl fall down and twist her ankle” moments.) Tom and Lance are also quick-witted and resourceful in fending off masses of attacking zombies (including Tom's own mother), and improvise well with available zombie-killing tools.

Meanwhile, the town reverend is ecstatic at the idea of Armageddon approaching, and is convinced the “war” will be won because “history's greatest zombie is on our side.” (As someone whose favorite exclamation of surprise is “Sweet Zombie Jesus!” this had me nearly in tears.) Taking sanctuary from the zombies in the town church, the reverend, the mayor, the hippie environmentalist, Tom, Lance, and various town churchgoers find themselves at odds politically and spiritually in a fine satire of the last eight years.

Without giving too much away, the film ends in a delightfully near-sacrilegious parody of the news footage Americans will recall seeing post-9/11: hand-drawn posters of memorials and missing loved ones and sales of tacky “I Remember” t-shirts. In a televised press conference, the remaining citizens of Port Gamble are admonished to remain “vigilant” and “report suspicious behavior.” Perhaps the over-the-top political parody combined with the stringy, graphic gore of the undead is not to everyone's taste. As a lifelong zombie fan, however, I was thrilled with the film's sympathetic, if somewhat humorous, portrayals of young minority women and gay couples.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, December 8th 2009

Pendant: Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:24:00 +0000

By 2-Mile Jewelry

Canadian artist Viki Ackland's handmade jewelry uses pop art, found art, and ransom-note style letters to create a visually appealing cut-and-paste aesthetic from 2-Mile Jewelry. Female pop icons such as Betty Boop, Marilyn Monroe, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer adorn her works (mostly necklaces), as do floral prints, pictures of seemingly random items such as pliers, and simple statements such as "Delectable," "Coffee," and "Heard of Me?" Among these declarations is a stylistically spartan piece adorned with Inez Milholland's famous battle cry of the women's suffrage movement: "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?"

There is no question mark at the end of this ostensibly interrogative statement on Ackland's pendant, rendering Milholland's appeal to then-President Woodrow Wilson a declaration rather than an inquiry. The text is simple black block lettering on a gray background, and the skewed edges of the piece, when viewed closely, reveal it to be a photograph in miniature of a protest sign. The back of the pendant displays a silver heart over more pieced-together text, which appears to be from a newspaper article, but does not cohere into a decipherable statement; it is purely for visual appeal. The metal loop at the top of the pendant will allow for a relatively thick chain or other necklace on which to string the drop.

Most of the pieces on 2-Mile Jewelry are priced at $20 to $25 (Canadian dollars) and come with a choice of wire or leather chain with a default length of 15". Longer lengths may be chosen, if specified at checkout. 2-Mile Jewelry will ship outside of Canada, with special shipping rates applied.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, October 13th 2009

Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950 – 1980

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:09:00 +0000

By Rebecca Kluchin

Rutgers University Press

In 2004, at the age of twenty-three, I entered my gynecologist's office to request permanent sterilization. My doctor repeatedly refused my request, and would not honor my alternate request for an IUD. I tried changing doctors, but still encountered severe resistance to my wish to be permanently sterilized. Now that the IUD I did eventually obtain will be ready to come out at age thirty, my doctor has still indicated that she will not perform the procedure.

After reading Rebecca Kluchin's Fit to Be Tied, I am left wondering if my doctors' refusals to honor my wishes are, consciously or not, vestigial traces of America's bleak history involving positive and negative eugenics—separate categories for "fit" and "unfit" women. From the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1970s, social, legal, and medical authoritarianism and paternalism combined with white anxiety over losing social dominance in America to result in extraordinarily skewed, disparate policies of reproductive "rights" for white middle class women and poor women of color.

In the post-WWII era, concerns were raised about the population "explosion" and the resulting fear that poor, uneducated immigrants and people of color were "outbreeding" the white middle and upper classes. Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing contraception for married couples, would not be decided until 1965, and few if any women had access to contraception at all. The solution put into effect by medical and legal authorities was to adopt a policy of eugenics: the undesirable minorities, often unwed, sunken into poverty, and with little to no recourse, were aggressively encouraged and often forced into unwanted sterilizations. Women were deceived, lied to, and even legally sentenced to sterilization under the white- and male-dominated cultural paradigm. The worst of these forced sterilization cases were known colloquially in the South as "Mississippi appendectomies," in which women deemed "unfit" to reproduce by physicians entered hospitals for routine surgeries (such as appendix removal) only to later find that their ovaries and uterus had been taken out as well.

Meanwhile, advances in sterilization procedures made the operation quite attractive to middle class white women who wanted to take control of their reproductive destiny. These women appealed to physicians and hospitals in order to obtain tubal ligations, only to find themselves rebuffed. Educated white women of privilege were denied sterilization because it was believed that they should give birth to as many children as possible, despite their own feelings on the matter. Many hospitals developed what was known as the "120 rule" of age/parity: if a reproductively "fit" woman's age multiplied by the number of children she had added up to 120, a sterilization was provided.

Sterilization for men is also touched upon in Fit to Be Tied. Infuriatingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, vasectomies have historically been provided on demand for men with little to no trepidation on the part of medical professionals.

On another personal note, I discussed this book with a friend of mine, who said it sounded interesting but "suspect." He did not know that eugenics was practiced openly in America for many decades, and believed that Kluchin's book was essentially feminist conspiracy theory. This sort of troubling ignorance of history only deepens the importance and necessitates the knowledge of medico-legal authoritarianism over women in America's past. Kluchin's work is straightforward, factual, academic, and exhaustively researched, but not intimidatingly so. It is a highly absorbing read and an incisive, grim but eminently necessary look into pre-Roe v. Wade America.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, October 11th 2009

Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:55:00 +0000

By Billy Wayne Sinclair, Jodie Sinclair

Arcade Publishing

In 1965, Billy Wayne Sinclair accidentally killed a store clerk with a shot fired aimlessly into the dark after a robbery he had committed. One year later, at the age of twenty-one, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair for his crime, however unintentional. Sinclair initially dealt with his death sentence through denial, swallowing the tranquilizers the guards on death row dispensed to keep the inmates pacified. Thankfully, Sinclair became curious about the system that intended to kill him and the methods it had at its disposal to do so.

In 1972, the Supreme Court decided the case of Furman v. Georgia, effectively striking down the death penalty nationwide. Billy Wayne Sinclair’s sentence was commuted to life without parole. Over the next forty years that Sinclair spent in prison, he became a respected, award-winning writer and jailhouse lawyer. Since winning his freedom in 2006, Sinclair has established himself as a senior paralegal in a Houston law firm. Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor is Sinclair’s second book. The death penalty being the divisive issue that it is, it’s not likely that Capital Punishment will change many minds. The tales of miscarriages of justice, dirty politics, and DNA exonerations abounding throughout Sinclair’s book are enough to make one’s jaw drop in utter outrage. (Sinclair is fervently anti-death penalty, as might be inferred from past bitter experience.) However, that’s until Sinclair details the despicable crimes that led to the inmates’ death-row sentences in the first place, which generally caused me to lose any trace of pity I might have held. Perhaps Sinclair himself even realizes this, because the instances in which he actually discusses the crimes committed in a particular inmate’s case study are few and far between.

Sinclair is at his best when discussing in graphic detail America's present methods of executing condemned prisoners. Sinclair presents plenty of interesting anecdotes about the American way of death, past and present. For example, when Mary Surratt was hanged as a co-conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, several people held her legs so that her undergarments wouldn’t “immodestly” show in her death throes. The sight of a woman’s underwear was more shocking to the public than the sight of that same woman dying painfully and publicly.

Thanks to several victim-blaming statements early in the book, I was not terribly impressed with Billy Wayne Sinclair's gender sympathies. He regained some ground in a later chapter titled “The Killers of Women” in which he discusses the disparity in the sentences given to those who kill women versus those who kill "real" people. Men who kill women are almost a legal anomaly. Two-thirds of all violent incidents against women in the United States involve a relative or an intimate, and six times as many women are the victims of violence at the hands of intimate partners as by strangers. However, men who kill intimate female partners are rarely if ever charged with first-degree or even second-degree murder. Generally, they plea-bargain down to lesser charges such as manslaughter and can serve even less time than automobile thieves. Capital punishment is rarely handed down in cases involving intimate partner murders. Sinclair makes the compelling argument that the murdered women are not viewed as "crime victims," but simply as victims of "domestic violence." Domestic violence victims, says Sinclair, do not receive the societal benefit of the justice of capital punishment when they are killed by rejected lovers and husbands. Of course, it doesn't help that socially, historically, and legally, women have been viewed as the property of men, to be disposed of as seen fit by her owner.

Female perpetrators of crimes serious enough to warrant the death penalty are extraordinarily rare. As of January 1, 2008, women made up only 1.5 percent of the United States' death row population. Because of this anomaly, and because Sinclair focuses mostly on Texas and Louisiana in his research, and furthermore because of his prior focus on disparate gender issues, I expected Sinclair to bring up the famous case of Karla Faye Tucker's execution in Texas in 1998. However, it merits only a one-line mention in an appendix of statistics. Karla Faye Tucker would have beautifully illustrated the hypocrisy inherent in America's thirst for blood vengeance, so long as that blood comes from the wounds of the public's image of a lower-class black male perpetrator. Tucker, however, was an attractive white female who had converted to fervent Christianity while imprisoned on death row for a brutal ax murder, thus contradicting in almost every way possible the "ideal" capital punishment candidate. Many at the time called for leniency for Tucker, who also begged for her life, but then-governor George Bush would not grant a stay of execution. The lesson here, one may surmise, is that women are treated more delicately and with more sympathy as convicted murderers (out of quaint ideas about the infirmities and inherent passivity and pacifism of women) than they are as the victims of brutality.

I'd liked to have known more about Sinclair's own life on death row, and I did have a few quibbles with his editing and facts, but on the whole I found this to be an exhaustively researched and well-written book, and perhaps enlightening and inspiring to others who have found themselves back outside after years in the penal system. Those who are staunchly and unflinchingly on one side or the other of the capital punishment debate will not likely be swayed to change their position, but there are plenty of facts, case studies, statistics, and anecdotes to make the undecided and the fence-sitters fall to one side.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, July 20th 2009