Sunday, February 21, 2010

Mu Sochua

The NY Times just ran an article on Mu Sochua, a woman I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of before. She's a women's rights activist and political figure in Cambodia, and has accomplished a great deal over the last two decades, fighting against domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, child trafficking, and generally raising the profile of women's rights and gender issues in Cambodia.

Her work is limited, unfortunately, by - what else - politics.

The gist of the Times articles is that nobody, including other women in power, wants to have anything to do with Mu Sochua or her agenda, because she opposes the majority government. The majority, needless to say, has made little progress for women's rights, preferring to maintain the status quo. It seems the entire political culture of the country will have to be changed before any real progress is made.

And she's trying - taking on general interest issues, building a reputation for herself among the people. Perhaps someday, Mu Sochua will have the impact on Cambodia that she really ought to.

(Mu Sochua's Website)

(By the way - did anyone think that the title of the Times article was bizarre - "The Female Factor" - what's that supposed to be about?)

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Sweet dreams are made of this...

We were talking about gender roles and performative acts of gender constitution (from Joan Riviere's "Womanliness as a Masquerade" to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble) in class last week, and I decided to show a clip from Jennie Livingston's amazing 1990 documentary, Paris is Burning. In the film, Livingston showcases the underground, urban gay/drag club scene which popularized voguing (and, yes, it's this club scene that inspired Madonna).

Anyway, searching out a good clip to show from Livingston's film reminded me of my favorite 80s band, The Eurythmics, and their 1982 MTV scandal. In an interview I heard a while back, lead singer Annie Lennox explained that the still-relatively-new MTV banned the band's music video (for the song "Love is a Stranger, below) because they couldn't tell whether Lennox was really a woman or a man dressed in drag. Apparently gender ambiguity was not cool with MTV back in the early 80s; they obviously got over that pretty quickly.



Reminiscing about The Eurythmics sent me on a whirlwind trip down memory lane, which I thought I'd share with you here. Here's one of their most bizarre (and, in my opinion, awesome) videos, for their 1987 song "Beethoven (I Love To Listen To)":



And, because it would be severely remiss for me not to post this, especially relevant, video, here's Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox singing their 1985 hit "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves":

Sunday, February 14, 2010

RIP Lucille Clifton

Rest in Peace, Lucille Clifton, award-winning African American poet who died yesterday at age 76.

Here she is reading two poems at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2008:


And...
Homage to My Hips, by Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

Monday, February 8, 2010

The obligatory Superbowl ad post

This year's Superbowl Ads were pretty 'meh' and most of them were also (unsurprisingly) pretty sexist--but too boring to even get me remotely riled up , and that's saying something. Thankfully, the Focus on the Family ad that caused all the controversy was so short and understated that I barely noticed it before it was over. Of course, considering how many ads CBS aired for its own shows(!) there would certainly have been room for that gay dating site ad they refused to air. All that said, I was unimpressed and unmoved, for the most part.

There was, however, one ad that I absolutely hated:



Man's. Last. Stand. Indeed.

In other words: ARE WE BEING CLEAR ENOUGH FOR YOU WITH OUR BOLD, ALL CAPS FONT THAT THIS CAR WILL REINFORCE YOUR VIRILE MASCULINITY DESPITE THE FACT THAT YOU'RE COMPLETELY DOMINATED BY YOUR OVERBEARING WIFE WHO ASKS TOTALLY UNREASONABLE THINGS OF YOU LIKE SHARING IN THE HOUSEWORK AND CLEANING UP AFTER YOURSELF?

(This lovely message is further supplemented by Dodge's description for its posting of the ad on Youtube: "You've sacrificed a lot, but surely there is a limit to your chivalry. Drive the car you want to drive.")

Besides a lot of duds, there were a few (very few) good ads, some okay ads, and one great ad: Google's funny, thoughtful and understated vehicle for search engine wish fulfillment.



I have to say, though, for once the game was way more interesting than the advertisements.

What were your favorite and least favorite ads this year?

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Feminist Readings: Aristocratic Women in Medieval France

(Yes, it's a book reviewish column - see the end for rambling about what I think I'm doing.)

Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (1999), edited by Theodore Everglades is a collection of five pieces on, well, exactly those women mentioned in the title. The first concerns one particularly powerful individual, the remainder examines all the women of whom records remain in particular regions of France. It's quite narrow in scope, the intended purpose being to expand scholarship on women living in the 11th through 13th centuries.

In this it succeeds, but the real value of the book to the casual reader is that it provides real, non-trivial examples of important women in the Medieval Era. Let me explain:

'Women in History' v. Historical Women


From the book:
At this level of analysis, the sources often reveal that women who embodied the joining of two families through marriage and child bearing were not merely passive pawns in power relations among groups of men; rather, they were active participant whose actions could affect ... the course of politically significant events.

The influence of feminism on historical thought and history education over the last half-century is fairly obvious. There's been a real attempt to add women to textbooks and discussions, to consider women as historically important figures. There's been criticism of this - not just by those whose patriarchal ideals are being threatened, but by otherwise well-meaning feminists. They claim that women have been oppressed to the extent that they really haven't accomplished much of worth before, say, the 19th century or so, and that we shouldn't try and pretend otherwise.

There's something too this - who hasn't read a sidebar about some minor female figure in an otherwise male-oriented work and wondered why they bothered including it (other than being 'politically correct') It's saddening, really, that they can't find anything better.

And that's where works like Aristocratic Women in Medieval France come in. The work presents, in meticulous detail, the recorded activities of a number of powerful women whose actions had a real effect on lives and events. They disperse money, give legal judgment in disputes, and sign official documents. They act in place of their absent or deceased husbands, maintain a position of power over male relatives, and even hold property in cases where it was previously thought to be an exclusively male privilege. In short, these women were important entirely in their own right.

Now, this book make no connection to larger scale, more general history, but I have no doubt that such a connection could and will be made. But for the purposes of this book there can be no doubt that women played an important role in this period of time.

On the other hand...


There are a couple of things to note: first, the book is only about wealthy women from powerful families - it would be even more interesting to look at the average women (perhaps in relation to aristocratic women). Not the focus of the book, but something to think about. Second, the book itself states that this was a sort of high point for women - after the 13th century, power began to be gathered more an more into the hands of a few patriarchs, who kept their 'lines' intact by way of sole male heirs - effectively shutting women off from sources of societal power.

In the end...


It's easy to be erased. Adela of Blois (for instance) was one of the most well-known figures of her era and locale, but by the standards of patriarchal history, she is unknown and worthless.

And that's what we should learn here. Insisting that women are equally important has to be an ongoing work - and restoring women to their proper place in history (and they do have an important place, not just as side notes) is a vital part of this process.

--
(What's all this? Basically, I spend an inordinately large amount of time reading various feminist/womanist/related books, and I've always been disappointed that out of so much interesting feminist thought and research, so little is actually discussed or even heard of. So, each week I'll take a book at random and summarize it, hopefully both disseminating new ideas and keeping old ones alive. For the academics reading this - I'm not in Women's Studies, I'm just an academic (science, in particular) type with too much time on her hands, so if I get something technical wrong don't roast me, okay?)

Monday, February 1, 2010

Of Super Bowl Ads and Women

Ever since Focus on the Family announced their pro-life Super Bowl ad, there's been arguments and discussions all over. Should it be allowed by the network? Are feminists taking the wrong approach to criticizing it? (thanks, Sarah Palin!) And so on. One of the more interesting pieces was in the Washington Post - it basically suggests that feminists be, well, warmer and fuzzier and more appealing.

Echildne wrote a good (if very angry) bit about treating the pro-choice movement as if it was some sort of for-profit corporation, and loosing sight of well, a woman's right to choose.

I'm going to suggest a slightly different take; the problem is all in the framing.


Isn't it ironic that this is all about a Super Bowl ad? Think about it: the Super Bowl is, well, football. The game that consists of large, muscular men crashing into each other. The Super Bowl is perhaps the archetypal symbol of hyper-masculinity. And that's the context in which we're discussing women's rights.

This is a problem.

Now, I don't have and thing against men - or women - playing football. At the end of the day it's just another sport. But the sport has a long history of sheer hatred toward women, from the beer ads all the way down to the attitudes of the players and coaches (remember all those instances of college coaches hiring strippers with public money). That the Super Bowl is far and away the most watched sporting event - no, televised event period - in the United States says something very significant about our culture (for the record - the most watched event worldwide is the World Cup - that's no better. But I digress).

And here we are, arguing about an anti-abortion commercial which will be played during an overwhelmingly masculine, patriarchal event. So I'd like to suggest this: The commercial doesn't matter. While Kissling and Michelman suggestion for a counter-commercial is certainly apt, and would no doubt have a positive effect - so long as women's issues have to hitch a ride on bigger, more expensive, and more (in the public's mind) important, essentially masculine events, there something very, very wrong with the picture.

That's what we need to fix. As long as we look at this as some sort of big commercialized game (Oh dear - support for abortion rights is down slightly, but hey! Support for gay marriage is up! High fives all around!) we're simply doing it wrong. We need to be about cultural change and ideology, not politics, ads, and entertainment money.

(Crossposted @ Constant Thoughts)