...was outraged [about] this photo and initially dismissed the apologies as predictable non-apology apologies. But, upon reflection...this piece of art rather succinctly captures both the historical position of white women vis-a-vis black women and the current position of white feminism vis-a-vis feminists and womanists of color.
more.
The first lady can’t win. Last month, Michelle Obama was a “feminist nightmare.” Today she is angry and on the verge of losing her marriage. We can only imagine what tomorrow will bring.
more.
thesmithian-blog reblogged
Queer, non-binary, feminist Panameñ@. I’m a nineteen year old art student at the University of Georgia. Proud of all my other Latin@s bombing the Latina tag!
[meaningful glance]
I grew up in a very white town. I didn't have my world being reflected back at me. This is slow movement, it's not perfect, but I think the fact that you are seeing in bigger, traditional media discussions not just of women's issues or feminism, but issues of race, is very heartening. That doesn't mean that you can offer up your hands and say, 'Okay, we're done here.' Not at all.
Anna Holmes, founding editor, Jezebel
...we come from a...different history of experiences...For white women, Slut Walks are a demonstration in favor of women permitting themselves and demanding the room to be more sexual than their predecessors. Meanwhile, black women have spent the past few centuries struggling to do the opposite. Historically, black women are actively being hyper-sexualized; the black feminist struggle, then, is a fight to remove that hyper-sexual assumption from our bodies. Note, though, in light of the contrast, that both movements are indeed a struggle for all women to be allowed to express the full range of their sexuality. Autonomy is everything. It is one of, if the not the, ultimate freedom. But at the end of the day, the feminist movement is itself weakened by excluding the needs and concerns of women of color.
Jacqui Germaine at Racialicious
It's nice to say that working or not working is simply a matter of personal choice, but in reality it's a highly gendered one—and one that puts women at a disadvantage when it comes to stability...
...the emancipation of women is one of the glories of Western civ...one of the great chapters in the history of freedom. Why is the term that describes that heritage—[feminism] in such disrepute?
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[Nina Pillard] being shellacked for academic and litigation work devoted to pushing for basic women’s equality. These attacks are reminiscent of nothing so much as the vitriol and contempt directed at women like Sandra Fluke, who was an advocate of access to birth control—not a radical proposition—and Lilly Ledbetter, who has pushed for equal pay. These are not wackadoo “feminist” ideologies. These are not castrating, mommy-hating, end-of-men plans for world dominion. This is the stuff basic gender fairness is built on.
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Girls and women disproportionately are taught to be in denial about their own sexual urges, and yet rely inappropriately on their sex appeal. The denial occurs both ways: Women are expected to deny the presence of their sexual desire (to guard chastity), and to deny its absence (to be sexually responsive to men). In a world in which such denial is the norm, women will lack the kind of agency and responsibility needed to meet their own desires for pleasure, well-being, support, and meaning in their lives.
Professor Nina Pillard, Georgetown University
...few lawyers have done more to advance the cause of women’s equality than...Pillard—and few lawyers have been as successful in their efforts to do so. By confirming Pillard to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Senate will ensure that the...women’s perspective...will not be absent from the bench on the day the elderly Ginsburg retires. That is, of course, if Pillard is confirmed.
...the high road is overrated. It requires silence in the face of violent misogyny, and a turn-the-other cheek mentality that society has long demanded of women. A vibrant feminist movement has ensured women don’t take injustices laying down offline—so why would we acquiesce on the Internet?
...devotes chapters to the historical background of Asians immigrating to the United States, the two-edged sword of racism and sexism experienced by Asian American women, the use of compartmentalization and assimilation to navigate these waters, and the work of other theologians, especially other Asian American women and liberation theologians.
Beyoncé is a force of nature, she sang 'Independent Women' and 'Survivor' and 'Irreplaceable,' her band is all women, she's pro-gender equality and anti-gender wage gap, she supports women through charity work, she does things that people so often identify as feminist-y—and so we load her down with our own expectations and identify her as a feminist icon and then hold to her to arbitrary standards as if she signed up for them herself. And even when she comes out and says she's a feminist, she gets shit because she said it 'ambivalently.' The nerve! How dare she not perform as enthusiastically as we demand at the moment we demand it? At the risk of being one of those 'don't we have more important things to talk about' feminists… don't we? Not that anyone is beyond reproach, but God knows Beyoncé's been picking up reproach for every damn thing she does lately.
Caperton Gillett, at the Guardian
There are middle-class women who grew up in Europe or the U.S. which...ideologically indoctrinated them in elite universities to believe that the west implicitly led the world in progressiveness, even if in a rather tragically flawed way. (But hey, with basic liberal-democratic good intentions.) These are women who act or acted out the final and last phases of what Africans with amused indulgence define as the umlungu auntie complex: bossy white women engaging with black and brown women in the imperative, rather than the questioning and inquisitorial. Mostly they don’t recognize their insensitivity and political confusion. Due to a combination of European parochial cultural ignorance combined with the fact that under western capitalist patriarchy they are themselves second-class citizens, they misrecognize their own power—just like black and brown men misrecognize the imbalance between their powers as colonized or racialized subjects as excusing them from perpetuating oppressive patriarchy.
Rachel Holmes, co-editor, Fifty Shades of Feminism
We just would look at the board and say, ‘We already have too many white men. We can’t have more.’ Really, that was it...Always, constantly just counting. Monitoring the diversity of the guests along gender lines, and along race and ethnicity lines...A general rule is if there are four people sitting at table, only two of them can be white men...Often it would be less than that...The editorial decisions, the content we decided to pursue, also dovetailed with that...We had three Iraqis join us when we talked about the 10-year anniversary of the war. We did a full show about feminism. And so, part of it is that we weren’t talking about the Ryan budget every week. Often we were discussing topics on which there was a natural affinity between people of backgrounds different than the standard one that is often presented on television.”
MSNBC's Chris Hayes talking about
...quotas. Hard quotas.