12/18/07

i havent much to say but for the consistency's sake, i figured i would throw a post out there. ive been thinking about how feminism can be used monolitically as a crutch, maybe like most -isms get used as crutches to an over-simplification. this maybe not sound coherent, but hear me out. those who stride forth and proclaim ardently their affiliation and dedication to feminism (myself included) find a hard time understanding when women (and men for that matter) do not take on the same points of view. and furthermore, it can be those who are so resolute in their beliefs that fail to effectively translate the theoretical and discursive underpinnings of their stances. extremists, though not radicals, can be bad news bears when it comes to a productive conversation. advocates of feminism who fail to recognize the vitality of different feminisms make coalitions impossible.

now i am not just speaking of the obvious tensions that evoke broad discussions multiculturalism vs. universalism. i mean to look more specifically at how my own opinions and beliefs have evolved on a very personal level. i think its valid to say that people can identify with parties and movements and theories that have a definite and concrete set of questions and answers. example : the democratic party is like a tangible entity, hence the availbility of such a party base. its like subscribing to the template. i see this as the most flagrant failure of those who claim their 'liberal' status. maybe that is what im talking about, im thinking about the ways in which we subscribe to the templates of 'American' feminism without turning the critical lens on the racism and classism that pervades it. but then we get back into the world of isms and ists. i need a means of conceptualization that does not find itself stuck in poststructuralism or feminism or socialism etc. etc. i guess my problem is that its so easy to espose something as doctrine without even needing to understand more than its basic pillars. but maybe thats what makes things reachable. and then we have to include the ideas of agency and access.

yea, this post isnt coherent at all. itd do us better to have a conversation. i guess my point is that in my younger days i found strength in the title of a feminist but more recently, i find more solace in the notion that feminism and feminists are hardly coherent and collectively consolidated.

just something ive been thinking about. hope all is well rounding out '07!

trading cards.

Theory.org.uk has a set of 21 trading cards for some popular theorists throughout the ages. Some of them are quite funny. Its also a pretty cool website that has info about media studies, critical studies, resources, projects, etc etc. check it out if you feel compelled...

trading cards: http://www.theorycards.org.uk/main.htm



main index: http://www.theory.org.uk/index.htm

nussbaum vs. butler round 1

martha nussbaum, the universalist HR philosopher takes a few hits at judith butler. and by a few hits, i mean she attacks her entire philosophical approach. a good read, but take it with a grain of salt.

make sure to check the letters to editor section after her piece. Gayatri Spivak, Joan Scott, Nancy Fraser chime in amongst others. Nussbaum replies.

http://www.arlindo-correia.com/100702.html

a letter.

dear gay and lesbian rights activists,

i hate you. and you know what else, i dont really like Ellen either. She's not really that funny and shes sterilized herself of sexuality via NBC (or whatever network it is that shes sold out to). I don't really find much liberation in Miller Light floats in gay pride parades while there are still Man Law commericals out there. Fuck you, Advocate magazine. Hear me out, corporate homos and power lesbians suck. The L Word is blatantly racist (yet i still watch it). Gay marriage will not solve all your problems. I want to be with the freaks. I want to be a freak. Don't get me wrong, I understand from where you are coming, but what is it really going to do? Will we be further entrenched in the quagmire of liberal politics that fail time and time again to recognize the structural and institutional problems within the discourse of 'sexual freedom'? Where is the queer? I understand that there are a multitude of areas for subversion even within the liberal gay and les politics, but it doesnt impress me.

Single gender education

I know I'm not technically a U of I GWS major any more (though I think it's a lifelong title, really). But here's a GWS related conflict for you. I'm teaching in a coed high school now, and the other day, a teacher who was using my classroom made the comment that he thought all high school should be separated by gender. He used to work at an all boys' high school. Having attended an all girls' high school myself (which I loved) I tend to agree with him. I don't specifically track how often students of different genders raise their hands or do any other behavior. but I do notice that they spend a LOT of time during the day discussing who is dating whom, who is eyeing whom across the room, who is passing notes to whom during class, who is paying extra careful attention to their appearance for whom, etc. The whole environment is very heteronormative (though I suppose dividing anything into two genders would be heteronormative, too) and very different from how I went through my four years of high school. So, one part of me knows that my high school experience played a major role in cultivating a lot of the things I like about myself now. And the other part of me says that treating people differently or separately based on gender only reinforcees the dichotomy and naturalizes the social construct. I've been telling myself that gender divided schools are an appropriate response to the fact that we can't avoid that boys and girls are raised differently and therefore may need different things. But it seems like that just feeds into the cycle rather than interrupting it. Thoughts? Does anyone even still read this thing?

Speak out for sexual assault survivors

Here's a quick petition to sign. I think someone posted about this case below... or perhaps I read about it somewhere else. Either way, it's apalling and could set a dangerous precedent. Basically it's a rape case in which the words "rape" and "sexual assault kit" are not allowed to be used in the courtroom. You can read more about it by clicking the links on the petition page.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/freespeechforsurvivors/

How To Tame Your Liberal Husband

Hey, this was a video that we made for our sketch comedy group The Other Other Guys. I figured I'd post it and see what everyone thought. We have other sketches under the same username if you find this one funny, although they have no right being posted on this blog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMGlI6JX1eo

Its too long to post, but i read this article on recommendation by Bess via gws470 (i think)

check this out if youve got a chance...

The "Empire" Strikes Back: The Post-Transsexual Manifesto
By: Sandy Stone
http://www.sterneck.net/cybertribe/gender/stone-posttranssexuel/index.php

On Love of The Neighbor- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part

YOU CROWD around your neighbor, and have fine words for it. But I say to you: your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves.
You flee to your neighbor from yourselves, and would rather make a virtue of it: but I fathom your "unselfishness."
The you is older than the I; the you has been consecrated, but not yet the I: so man presses near to his neighbor.
Do I advise you to love of the neighbor? Rather do I advise you to flight from the neighbor and to love of the farthest!
Higher than love of your neighbor is love of the farthest and future ones; higher still than love to men, is love to things and phantoms.
The phantom that runs on before you, my brother, is fairer than you; why do you not give to it your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid, and run to your neighbor.
You cannot endure yourselves and do not love yourselves sufficiently: so you seek to mislead your neighbor into love, to gild yourselves with his error.
If only you could not endure any kinds of neighbors; then you would have to create your friend and his overflowing heart out of yourselves.
You call in a witness when you want to speak well of yourselves; and when you have misled him to think well of you, you also think well of yourselves.
Not only does he lie, who speaks when he knows better, but more so, he who speaks when he knows nothing. And thus you speak of yourselves, and lie to your neighbor with yourselves.
Thus says the fool: "Association with men spoils the character, especially when one has none."
The one goes to his neighbor because he seeks himself, and the other because he would rather lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.
It is the farthest ones who pay for your love to the near ones; and even when there are five of you together, there is always a sixth who must die.
I do not love your festivals either: I found too many actors there, and even the spectators often behaved like actors.
Not the neighbor do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman.
I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must know how to be a sponge, if one would be loved by over-flowing hearts.
I teach you the friend in whom the world stands complete, a capsule of the good,- the creating friend, who always has a complete world to give away.
And as the world unrolled itself for him, so rolls it together again for him in rings, as the becoming of good through evil, as the becoming of purpose out of chance.
Let the future and the farthest be the motive of your today; in your friend you shall love the overman as your motive.
My brothers, I advise you not to love of the neighbor- I advise you to love of the farthest!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Hello! Hello! As school has winded down and the first few weeks of summer have now settled themselves....we can all get back to the bloggy-bloggy goodness! Recently, Ive been reading a bit of Nietzsche. Some would call him the father of the geneaology and I would go as far to say that he had some major major influence on our old pal Michel Foucault. So I figured, if Im down with Foucault it would be a good idea to take a look at who he was down with. Right yo! But more to the point, this exerpt above struck me so as an allusion to what we would now call the problem of "self/other" dichotomy. We love our neighbors in the way that allows us to construct the other in opposition to ourselves. So as our neighbors become the self, we enlist those in closest proximity to ourselves whether that be locational, idealogical, etc. We do so sometimes at the expense of a difficult and sometimes contradictary and complex coalition. on a more global scale its the difference between what we call Western feminist neo-imperialism and a transnational feminist politics.

We enlist ourselves under a binary system that fails to address the problems with how and why we construct a 'common identity'. So instead of a coalitional (is that a word?) identity politics, we have the bastardization/demonization/pathologization of the "other" that can parade under the guise of the arrogant self-righteousness of what I see as modern day missionary sensibilities of those who call themselve allies to feminist causes or it can parade under liberal humanist notions of authority and agency backed by science and reason.

So we use our neighbors and the love of our neighbors as a replacement for the love of the the farthest and the future. Even further along, he goes into the idea that higher than the love of the farthest and the future is the love of phatoms and things. In my version that line was translated as...."I esteem the love of things and ghosts." Might this read as a what we can call a post-structuralist account of our histories...much like a genealogy? A love of those ghosts which still present themselves and have a hand in the construction of the languages and discourses which constitute our identities.

And so he goes on to preach the teaching of the friend, love of the friend with the overflowing heart. To be a sponge to such overflow...to learn, to be open to learning, to be open to the furtherst. Now Nietzsche was definitely not a feminist, but he exhibits a degree of honesty throughout what Ive read thus far. He is not afraid to take the polemic stance, and to deconstruct what we take blindly as morality or common sense. And maybe thats where Foucault and others have picked up (non-linearly of course). Maybe the friend with the overflowing heart and the sponge is symbolic of what a transnational politics can look like. Sponges....yea for real yo....sponges-you can get all kinds of nice symbolism of them.

Word. I may be wrong, a high probability. But, I was reading this passage today and I thought it was rather lovely and I wanted to share...

ps- the exerpt i included isnt exactly the same as the translated version ive got, but its fairely close.

Mary Jane... what the fuck are you doing?

O MJ... so beautiful with your thong hanging out and your breasts popping out of your shirt while you work hard to wash spiderman's clothes.... how rediculous is this? AWEFUL!!!! i tell you... and this is a real figurine? HA! Comments.... you can also check out the LJ that girl posted this on and others comments...

http://devildoll.livejournal.com/750924.html

My Family

I always tell stories about my niece and how she is being raised and how I always feel like I have to go home and "fix" all the things she has learned about gender in 4 years. Well, after seeing this picture, my work is going to be infinitely harder than I had imagined.

a tale of my sorrows...

so yesterday i lost my wallet. i am rather distraught over it, but it wasnt my fault. it the fault of american gender roles in fashion! i was wearing womens pants. i do not carry a purse (though itd be funny if i did). but anyway, womens pant pockets are nowhere as deep as mens! in fact, i would go as far as to say they are lackluster in depth!! the bane of my existence! these pants are very soft, in fact the softest. but those darn pockets have led me down a path of lost wallets, lost keys, and lost dignity. such distress! such sorrow!

why cant we have unisex pants. well we do, but why don't i own them? well i do i think, but why wasnt i wearing them at the time of the forementioned incident....life's questions still yet to be answered.

so im bumming bout the wallet, but not too much...i just hope i can find the lil thing before i need any of its contents for anything specific. holler.

and in other news,

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3162120
a courthouse ruling denies sex obtained by fraud as rape...what do you think?

a lil mothers day trivia: you are connected to all the women in your family through your mitochondrial DNA ( or aleast from what i can recall from previous biology classes, but i might have just made that up)

good evening friends.

yo! i know everyone is busy doing all kinds of great feminist research/analyze/critiques this time of the year, so why not post your papers, projects, etc. if you get a chance. you know you want to.

for those of you who missed the daily show segment on this university's previous mascot:
http://www.muscoop.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=3aabe115ed8dcbf4e4ee01e071cf8375&action=tpmod;blog=view;cont=38;uid=5

I want to read this summer and i therefore i submit a request for some good feminist recommendations (essays/articles/books). holler.

hope all fares well on the report cards......please remember that your self worth as a person IS completely dependent on your relative successes or failures in terms of an oversimplified 6-letter value system of personal growth and knowledge.

Hi!

Hey everyone...kind of strange question, but who started this blog? It seems to be on the same account as our blog for International Impact? I was just wondering if someone in here is affiliated somehow with I-i and maybe our accounts got intertwined?
~Miriam :-)

Lessons from GWS

It just struck me just now, out of nowhere, how very arrogant it is to assume god is male. It's not something I've thought about in probably 5 or more years, since I decided early on in Catholic high school to simply use gender neutral pronouns anywhere it was necessary. But it's amazing to me how much deeper my understanding is now of something I understood superficially way back then. It's a happy feeling about a frustrating topic

came about this today. it made me feel a bit downtrodden, but then i realized that there are a number of people committed to their own noble endeavors and for this i am very very thankful. they deserve more credit. holler.

Higher Education Conformity
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com. Posted May 2, 2007. (via Alternet.org)

Can you be fired for doing a great job, year after year, and in fact becoming nationally known for your insight and performance? Yes, as in the case of Marilee Jones, who was the dean of admissions at MIT until her dismissal last week, when it was discovered that she had lied about her academic credentials 28 years ago. She had claimed three degrees, although she had none. If she had done a miserable job as dean, MIT might have been more forgiving, but her very success has to be threatening to an institution of higher learning: What good are educational credentials anyway?

Jones is hardly the only academic fraud. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimates that 10-30 percent of resumes include distortions if not outright lies. In the last couple of weeks, for example, "Dr. Denis Waitley Ph.D." -- as he is redundantly listed in the bestselling self-help book The Secret, where he appears as a spiritual teacher -- has confessed to not having his claimed master's degree, and the multi-level vitamin marketing firm he worked for admits that it can't confirm the Ph.D. either.

All right, lying is a grievous sin, as everyone outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue knows. And we wouldn't want a lot of fake MIT engineering graduates designing our bridges. But there are ways in which the higher education industry is becoming a racket: Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000.

The pundits keep chanting that we need a more highly skilled workforce, by which they mean more college graduates, although the connection between college and skills is not always crystal clear. Jones, for example, was performing a complex job requiring considerable judgment, experience and sensitivity without the benefit of any college degree. And how about all those business majors -- business being the most popular undergraduate major in America? It seems to me that a two-year course in math and writing skills should be more than sufficient to prepare someone for a career in banking, marketing, or management. Most of what you need to know you're going to learn on the job anyway.

But in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket. A resume without a college degree is never going to get past the computer programs that screen applications. Why? Certainly it's not because most corporate employers possess a deep affinity for the life of the mind. In fact in his book Executive Blues G. J. Meyers warned of the "academic stench" that can sink a career: That master's degree in English? Better not mention it.

My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end -- whether in library carrels or office cubicles -- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned -- although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.

Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel.

College can be the most amazingly enlightening experience of a lifetime. I loved almost every minute of it, from St. Augustine to organic chemistry, from Chaucer to electricity and magnetism. But we need a distinguished blue ribbon commission to investigate its role as a toll booth on the road to employment, and the obvious person to head up this commission is Marilee Jones.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article makes me so sad as the throng of business majors plod past me at the library. Is it true? Has college become a four year preparation for the bureacracy of a capitalist self-serving society. Please tell me that some of us really enjoy learning. I do not view the cultivation of intellect to be an exercise in my "ability to obey and conform". Why do we look for the end-product? What about the inquiries, the adventure of it all, the pure joy in the ability to access information and wield ourselves about it. Or on the other side, what about the access to other kinds of information that don't get valued by this society. If the university is not a space for the pursuit of knowledge, but an assembly line of docile employees, what are we left with? A generation that capitulates to administrations, boardrooms, and corner offices?

Why not herald those who pursue a different path? Exalt your GWS majors! Find solace in those who are just resolute enough to see that they can not pursue a life that speaks in terms of utilitarian benefits and losses, those of us who find no solace in using an education solely as a means to a strategic employment end, but who seek virtue and promise in the notion that education can provoke those potentials within ourselves to make change, and to transform ruminations into realities.

"Polygamous Lesbians Flee Sharia"

From the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6599437.stm?lsf):

Polygamous lesbians flee Sharia

A Nigerian lesbian who "married" four women last weekend in Kano State has gone into hiding from the Islamic police, with her partners.
Under Sharia law, adopted in the state seven years ago, homosexuality and same-sex marriages are outlawed and considered very serious offences.
The theatre where the elaborate wedding celebration was held on Sunday has been demolished by Kano city's authorities.
Lesbianism is also illegal under Nigeria's national penal code.
Nigeria's parliament is considering tightening its laws on homosexuality.

Stoning

Kano's Hisbah board, which uses volunteers to enforce Islamic law, told the BBC that the women's marriage was "unacceptable".
The BBC's Bala Ibrahim in Kano says Aunty Maiduguri and her four "wives" are thought to have gone into hiding the day after they married.
All five women, who are believed to be film actresses in the local home-video industry, were born Muslims, otherwise they would not be covered by Sharia law.

Hisbah volunteers enforce Islamic law in Kano State
Islam says a man can take up to four wives if he is able to support them.
"As defenders of the Sharia laws, we shall not allow this unhealthy development to take root in the state," the Hisbah's deputy commander Ustaz Abubakar Rabo told Nigeria's This Day newspaper.
Mr Rabo told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme that if the women were found guilty of lesbianism they faced one of two punishments.
For a married woman the offence would be considered adultery for which the punishment is death by stoning. A single woman would be caned.

Large turnout

Our correspondent says the theatre where the colourful wedding ceremony was held was flattened earlier this week.
Several reasons were given for the demolition, including the discovery that it was built on wrongly allocated land.
Eyewitnesses say there was a large turnout for the marriage and guests were given leaflets as a souvenir showing Aunty Maiduguri surrounded by her "brides".
A Kano police spokesman told the BBC that his officers were not actively looking for the women, but would arrest them if need be.
The Hisbah group, which is run separately from the police, receives state government support.
Two years ago, a Sharia court sentenced a man to six months in prison and fined him $38 for living as a woman for seven years in Kano.
Eleven other states in mostly Muslim northern Nigeria have adopted Sharia law.

Really?

So I went to MC Sports yesterday. I like sports stores. They give me hope for the world when I see an equal amount of women's sports gear and men's. Sports are one of those interesting arenas where gender rules are...different.

Until now.

Wilson has unleashed a line of gear labeled "It's a girl thing."

For awhile looking around at the line and thinking, "Why does everything have to be PINK?"

My roommate, who knows my GWS ways, said, "You and your friends would have a field day in here with your analysis."

We would have.

Why does something have to be pink for girls and women to enjoy it? Or for it to be OKAY for them to enjoy it? I had blue softball bats and a black mitt when I grew up. My sliding shorts were black. Not hot pink. My volleyballs were white and so were my kneepads. No pink, and I was a fine athlete.

It gets worse, though.

Right before we left we noticed something. There was a pink softball mitt and a pink and purple ball INSIDE OF A PINK AND PURPLE PURSE. Necessary?? I don't think so.

Thinking about it more, I realized that the only two pink things I own are a track jacket and gym shoes, both by NIKE . I don't know what to make of that.

Conference this Saturday!

I am in Amnesty International, and we're putting on a conference this Saturday.
The focus is about the trafficking of women and the femicides of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Here's all the information if any of you are interested. It should be really intense and thought-provoking, since it's addressing many of today's hotbutton topics:

STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACTIVISTS' CONFERENCE hosted by Amnesty International on Saturday, April 28 at the University YMCA. In Juarez, over three hundred women have been raped, mutilated and murdered, while the perpetrators remain at large. Every year, millions of women and girls are trafficked across international borders and forced or coerced into prostitution. This culture of abuse extends even to our own campus, where every year female students are raped and assaulted. Meanwhile, women and men everywhere are taking action to stop the violence. Hosted by Amnesty International 124, a program of the University YMCA, this conference will include workshops designed to raise awareness about these current issues, and to teach important skills for engaging in women’s rights activism, including fundraising, outreach and publicity, and how to organize effectively on a college campus.Amanda Flott, Field Organizer for the Amnesty International Midwest Regional Office, will be delivering the opening plenary, unveiling a new report by Amnesty International, "Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA." Dr. Karen Flynn, professor of African-American studies here at UIUC, will be presenting "Sex Trafficking: Making the Global Connection" at the closing plenary.Whether you have signed a petition once in your life, or you are a seasoned activist, this conference is for you! This event will be held on Saturday, April 28th at the University YMCA, located at 1001 South Wright Street across from Lincoln Hall. Come at 10:30am for breakfast, we will begin at 11am and adjourn at 3:30. This conference is free and open to everyone!

yooooo. how are we all doing on this absolutely wonderful friday afternoon? i have been thinking about courses lately..whats offered, what should be offered, etc. etc.

i would absolutely love to see atleast an undergrad intro class to critical whiteness studies. wouldnt that be kinda cool? id also like to see a few more classes that take the intro to queer studies topics into greater detail. maybe a queer studies minor option....maybe a major option. and what about a class that looks at masculinity more specifically, that be pretty cool. i would also orgasm at the sight of a feminist philosophy class. word. wouldnt that be so cool! my brain would probably explode with happiness. lets see what else....there could be more feminist theory classes that could elaborate more on the topics discussed in intro to feminist theory. I think that a course on women and the law would also be pretty interesting where you could have an opportunity to turn an analytical lens on the legislative and judicial practices in this country. it could look at reproductive rights, health policy, etc. etc.

obviously it takes work on a number of levels in order to have more courses offered, but hey we should start taking a more influential role in GWS cultivation so we can bring the noise to the people. holler.

and so, i pose the question....what would you like to see offered?

have a wonderful weekend, my friends.

Alright, I just felt the need to say that I really think the focus should be on OUR blog as GWS interested people, not on people's individual blogs. We created this blog as a forum both for people to share ideas and rants, as well as to continue some of the discussions we have at our FIST meetings. If you have something to share, share it here instead of referring us to other links to read what you have to say. This is about a GWS-supportive community being built here, not about self promotion.

ay ay ay

mo's cello is a lil fucked up, otherwise we would have a cello-piano jam session. shes got a keboard you could play. its about 15 years old...its under my bed. right on.
love us.

Rape Survivors Tell Their Stories

Tonight the documentary Survivors Speak will be shown at 7 pm in room 160 of the English building. Four survivors of sexual assault tell their stories, along with answering questions about their experiences. My friend Dan is the director of this documentary, and you can read more about it here. Rumor has it that there will be wine at the reception following the screening. Please feel free to pass on this information to anyone :-)

http://media.www.dailyillini.com/media/storage/paper736/news/2007/04/23/OpinionColumns/Rape-Survivors.Speak.Out.Tonight-2873177.shtml

i meant to post about this earlier but have been unable to reach internet for a few days...

from alternet.org:
"Supreme Court Ruling Threatens Women's Health"

The Supreme Court handing down what's being called one of the biggest setbacks for the abortion rights movement in years. On Wednesday, the court voted 5-4 to uphold a ban on late-term abortion. The so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was signed into law in 2003, but it had been held up by rulings from lower courts. The Supreme Court ruling marks the first time justices have agreed a specific abortion procedure can be banned. It's also the first time since Roe v. Wade that justices approved an abortion restriction that does not contain an exception for the health of the mother.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision "alarming" and "irrational." She said, "[The ruling] tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists." She later continues, "[It] cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court -- and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives."

Amy Goodman discusses the implications of the ruling with Louise Melling, director of the Reproductive Freedom Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. As an attorney, Melling has appeared in federal and state courts around the country to challenge laws that restrict reproductive rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Louise Melling, welcome to Democracy Now!

LOUISE MELLING: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of this ruling.

LOUISE MELLING: This decision, as you said, is devastating. It's incredibly significant. This is, as you commented on, the first time the court has upheld a restriction on abortion that lacks protections for women's health. This is the first time -- this is the first-ever federal law banning certain abortions, and the court has upheld that. This really is a decision that undermines a core principle of Roe that's been in place since 1973, that women's health must remain paramount.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance also of this majority, the 5-4 majority. with the new Chief Justice, John Roberts, with Samuel Alito, the two George W. Bush nominees to the Supreme Court, ruling with a majority against late-term abortion.

LOUISE MELLING: Well, what you see is a real shift right. In 2000, the Supreme Court considered a law that was also called a partial-birth abortion law, and the court struck that law. And in striking that law, what the court did was, there, as it had always, recognized women's health to be paramount. What the court did in 2000 was also say, we're going to listen to doctors, and where some doctors say that procedures that might be banned here are the safest for women's health, we will defer to those doctors, and there has to be a health exception to ensure that women's health is protected. And in that decision, the court also looked to, as you said, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists view. ACOG is the leading medical organization for physicians who care for women during pregnancies. Now -- and that decision was 5-4 also, with O'Connor, Justice O'Connor, in the majority.
Now, seven years later, what's really different is you have two new members of the court. This is the first decision of the court on abortion since Justice O'Connor resigned, and you have a very, very significantly different holding.

AMY GOODMAN: So what are you planning? What is the ACLU, what are reproductive rights groups planning right now? Where do you see this going from here?

LOUISE MELLING: Well, I think, you know, first of all, it's alarming that the court isn't protecting women's health, so we're concerned about women's health. What's also alarming is that the court's decision has language that's so broad that it really does constitute an invitation to legislatures to further restrict abortions. It sends a signal that in many respects the court thinks that legislators, not doctors, may be the ones best positioned to make decisions about our most fundamental options.
So, you know, of course, what we're going to be concerned about is figuring out how to best continue to protect women's health and to continue to protect the ability of women to decide, as we've been able to for over three decades, to end pregnancies when we, in consultation with our doctors and whoever else we think is appropriate, decide that's the best course for us.

AMY GOODMAN: And in terms of doctors or women who have abortions being criminally charged, can you elaborate on this?

LOUISE MELLING: Well, this is a federal law. This is a law that reaches, you know, doctors who provide abortions in every state, all across the country. And if a doctor performs any procedure that's viewed as prohibited by this law, the doctor is at risk of prosecution, and, if convicted, this would be a federal crime. I mean, again, this is unprecedented. For the first time ever, you have a federal law making certain abortions a crime, a law that would say that doctors can be prosecuted for federal violations, for performing abortions that the doctor believes -- and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists support it -- would be best for a woman's health.

AMY GOODMAN: And what are the future cases that you see most significant coming up around the country?

LOUISE MELLING: Well, I think what will be most significant is to see what happens in response to this decision. I mean, I think if you're looking at the press, you already see that anti-choice activists feel emboldened by this decision. I think what's incredibly important is that those of us who really care about abortion and protecting access to abortion and protecting women's health take action and are active in the political process, including in the legislative process, to ensure continued constitutional protection, continued legislative protection, for what is important for women's health and women's equality.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for joining us, and we will, of course, continue to cover the significance of this. Louise Melling, our guest, with the American Civil Liberties Union.

(http://alternet.org/rights/50781/?page=2)

Day of Silence

I feel the need to give you the back story to this. I’m taking a class right now that is all about oppression and activism. It’s an amazing class, in part because many of the most recognizable campus activists are in it this semester. And I was so excited that it fell on a Wednesday. In fact, secretly, it was the one thing I was looking forward to most about Day of Silence this year. I announced the day of silence events twice in class in the last week, and we watched a video in class last week in which June Jordan railed against all those people who will protest racism, but not homophobia. The timing was perfect.

I eagerly awaited class today, imagining the silence as those who most often participate were silent, hoping that for the first time in four years, I might have a class where I wasn’t one of a small handful in black, but part of a collective majority. I was so excited in fact, that I got there early. And as one after another they walked in chattering and wearing blue, pink, red, green, yellow clothing, my heart slowly sank. As I sat in class today, instead of taking notes, I wrote this.

An Open Letter to Student Activists at the University of Illinois
As I went through my day on this Day of Silence, I was profoundly sad. If people who call themselves anti-oppression, anti-chief, anti-racism, anti-sexism, against the racist, imperialist war on Iraq, or activists for justice and equality really were all those things, the whole campus should have been filled with people dressed in black the same way Foellinger was filled with people fed up with the racism, abuses of power, and unacknowledged privilege rampant on this campus. This was a singular opportunity to easily and visibly unite around a cause that affects members of all our communities, and it was missed.

I suppose it was naïve of me to have so much faith in other people. But these are not my enemies. These are MY people. They are my friends, my classmates, my, dare I say it, comrades in the struggle. They are those who nod in agreement when I question sexist attitudes, who smile and compliment my anti-chief t-shirt, who march with me when I protest the war. And I feel betrayed.

All that we asked was that you put on black clothing this morning. Silence was highly encouraged, but left to your discretion. And you chose not to participate. You chose not to take a stand against violence and oppression when doing so would have meant no inconvenience to you.

None of us is perfect, of course. We forget, we rush around without thinking, we get distracted. And if you were not aware of what today was, then I apologize. Our hours of chalking, hundreds of fliers, thousands of facebook ads and tens of profile pictures, our letters to the editor, weeks of quad tabling, and numerous class announcements went unnoticed.

But when such a huge proportion of a group shows such ambivalence, that is no accident. This speaks to me as the clearest evidence of what is wrong with this campus. Your complacency implicates you, and your silence on this issue speaks louder than the silence that we gave this campus today. And now, even as I am surrounded by those who chose to take a stand, I am profoundly sad.


In peace,

Bridget

some lectures going on this week...

Thursday at 4pm, Education Building Room 2: A Global Perspective on Socially Responsible Entrepreneurship
"Professor Wu Qing's dedication to social activism has won her world acclaim and in 2001 the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, considered the "Asian Nobel Prize." She is the first woman to receive the honor and has also been selected to join the Schwab Foundation network of exemplary social entrepreneurs. Join Professor Wu Qing in discussing how socially responsible entrepreneurship can dramatically impact societies and economies around the world."
http://webtools.uiuc.edu/calendar/Calendar?ACTION=VIEW_EVENT&calId=7&eventId=58875

Thursday at 7:30pm, Alice Campbell Alumni Center Ballroom: 16th Annual Daniel S. Sanders Peace and Social Justice Lecture given by Larry Cox (exec. director-Amnesty International)
http://webtools.uiuc.edu/calendar/Calendar?ACTION=VIEW_EVENT&calId=7&eventId=58514

Friday at 4pm, Illini Union 314B: MillerComm Lecture Series "Humanities in Post-human Times"
"The goal of the conference is to explore the interfaces between the humanities and high technology with talks by specialists in these areas from the U. of I. and from other institutions. Speakers will explore how the humanities and technology meet now and can meet in the future. Talks will look at how the humanities pursue traditional and not-so-traditional subjects. Speakers will also examine how emerging technologies illuminate and illustrate cultural artifacts. Visualization and virtual reality look at text-based objects of culture, and facilitate and add to interpretation and reading. Talks will also look at the repercussions of emerging "post-human" paradigms by examining new ways of thinking and models of the post-modern. This conference not only produces new knowledge, but also develops innovative approaches to these issues and problems that are central to having an on-going dialog at the U. of I. and elsewhere. The keynote lecture is by Professor Alan Liu (University of California-Santa Barbara) as a MillerComm talk, on Friday, April 20, in 314B, Illini Union at 4 p.m."

I won't be in town for the Friday one, but it sounds pretty cool. definitely relative to post-modernist feminism and queer theory. if you by chance get to attend it, i would love to hear a run down of how it went.

ok. peace out.

The Prospect of All-Female Conception

The prospect of all-female conception
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 13 April 2007

Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.
Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman's bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.

The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.

But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons. The latest research brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer.

"Theoretically is it possible," Professor Nayernia said. "The problem is whether the sperm cells are functional or not. I don't think there is an ethical barrier, so long as it's safe. We are in the process of applying for ethical approval. We are preparing now to apply to use the existing bone marrow stem cell bank here in Newcastle. We need permission from the patient who supplied the bone marrow, the ethics committee and the hospital itself."

If sperm cells can be developed from female bone-marrow tissue they will be matured in the laboratory and tested for their ability to penetrate the outer "shell" of a hamster's egg - a standard fertility test for sperm.

"We want to test the functionality of any male and female sperm that is made by this way," Professor Nayernia said. But he said there was no intention at this stage to produce female sperm that would be used to fertilise a human egg, a move that would require the approval of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

The immediate aim is to see if female bone marrow can be lured into developing into the stem cells that can make sperm cells. The ultimate aim is to discover if these secondary stem cells can then be made into other useful tissues of the body, he said.

The latest findings, published in the journal Reproduction: Gamete Biology, show that male bone marrow can be used to make the early "spermatagonial" stem cells that normally mature into fully developed sperm cells.

"Our next goal is to see if we can get the spermatagonial stem cells to progress to mature sperm in the laboratory and this should take around three to five years of experiments," Professor Nayernia said.

Last year, Professor Nayernia led scientists at the University of Gottingen in Germany who became the first to produce viable artificial sperm from mouse embryonic stem cells, which were used to produce seven live offspring.

His latest work on stem cells derived from human bone marrow suggests that it could be possible to develop the techniques to help men who cannot produce their own sperm naturally.
"We're very excited about this discovery, particularly as our earlier work in mice suggests that we could develop this work even further," Professor Nayernia said.

Whether the scientists will ever be able to develop the techniques to help real patients - male or female - will depend on future legislation that the Government is preparing as a replacement to the existing Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act.

A White Paper on genetics suggested that artificial gametes produced from the ordinary "somatic" tissue of the body may be banned from being used to fertilise human eggs by in vitro fertilisation.

via The Independent
(http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article2444462.ece)

this is one of my favorite documentaries. inga muscio gives props to it in her book, autobiography of a blue eyed devil. she also wrote cunt and although i dont agree with her on everything i think shes a pretty awesome writer bring cool messages to the people. if youd like to borrow either of these, ive got em so just shout a holler.

the revolution will not be televised.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5832390545689805144&q=the+revolution+will+not+be+televised&hl=en


i watched this last summer and one of the things that stood out the most was the notion that hugo chavez got on the radio/tv and answered public questions from constituents.....i remember thinking it would be cold day in hell before georgie goes on public radio and fields spontaneous questions...a cold day indeed. now chavez has his own downfalls, but i think hes a man for the people. word.

seriously, watch this video if you can....its good stuff.

dear boy across the library table from me,

its not cool to refer to a transgendered individual as an 'it'. its blatant and egregious ignorance. you should be ashamed of yourself, you fucking moron.

love,
me.

The season is upon us

As the wedding season kicks into full gear, I'm feeling the need to vent. It's not that I'm bitter towards the people having weddings. On the contrary, weddings tend to make me cry because there's so much concentrated joy. And I don't entirely agree with those "We're not getting married until everyone can" people. I certainly appreciate the sentiment, but it doesn't do much good to deprive yourself. I have no need to at all dampen others' happiness. But I think the current regulations cheapen heterosexual marriage.

I want couples everywhere to be absolutely outraged. I want people storming the courthouses demanding an explanation for why the government thinks they can regulate the kind of love it takes to commit yourself to another person for life. For LIFE! The kind of all consuming, head-over-heels, connected on the deepest level, only in the movies, can't even be done justice by words kind of love. If you can't say it in words (and you can't) you can't put it on a fucking piece of paper. It would probably burst into flames.

All they're doing is institutionalizing reproduction. And with that in mind...: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2003558717_nokids06m.html

top that!

it never gets old.

Sweeeeeeeeeet Jesus!

Looks like a milk chocolate jesus has stirred up much controversy with the christians... too bad they don't sell miniatures at the market.... yummyyyyyyy.... comments?














http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/30/chocolate.jesus.ap/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6509127.stm

Check It Out!

Date: Apr 17, 2007
Time: 1:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location: McKinley Foundation, 809 S. Fifth St., Champaign
Sponsor: IPRH Women of Color Feminism Reading Group, IPRH, Gender & Women's Studies, Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society


The IPRH Women of Color Feminism (WOCF) Reading Group will host a one-day event of programming, which will include a symposium, film screening, reception, and a co-sponsored concert with Brooklyn-based funk band Antibalas on April 17, 2007. The symposium, titled, "Las Krudas: Women, Power & Resistance," will feature interdisciplinary scholarship by UIUC faculty and graduate students conducting research about Black women's activism, the African Diaspora and women-centered Caribbean creative productions that specifically speak to the critically-acclaimed artistry of the internationally renown lesbian feminist Cuban hip-hop trio, Las Krudas. A confirmed concert featuring Las Krudas and Antibalas not only will bring together the campus and larger Champaign-Urbana community, but the daylong programming ultimately will fulfill the primary goal of the WOCF: to heighten community awareness about transnational women-centered intellectual-cultural intervention, which promote a feminist poetics and praxis that engages with diasporic social justice movements.

Please join us for the following events at the McKinley Foundation (809 S. 5th St., Champaign):

1-2pm Film Screening of "T con T: Lesbian Lives in Contemporary Havana"

2-3pm Panel discussing the work of Las Krudas, a Cuban, hip hop trio that address issues such as female liberation, lesbian rights, female solidarity, and racism.
Panelists:
Celiany Rivera-Velazquez, ChairInstitute of Communications Research, UIUC
Marc Perry, PhDAnthropology and African American Studies, UIUC
Erik McDuffie, PhDGender and Women's Studies and History, UIUC
Tanya Saunders, PhD CandidateSociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

3:30-4:30pm Reception with food and music
8pm Concert: Antibalas with special guests Krudas Cubensi, Canopy Club, $13 at the door

doesnt get much better than that!

(http://www.krudas.org/)
(http://www.antibalas.com/)

Where did the kittens go on the class trip? -- to the meow-seum.

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of making a visit to Grinnell College to see a dear friend. She took me on a bit of a tour and showed me their student activist common area (I guess you could call it). Its a mad cool place with a large work/meeting room, a smaller room with a little library and then a locker room that I think would be used mostly for storage. Now granted its a very small-very liberal school (about 1500 students I think), it seems like its a great place for like-minded people to gather in one centralized place and I bet the environment that stems out of that is really invigorating. As I related this back the structure of our school's student group complex, it became clear that the size of this university is both a determining positive and negative factor in terms of coalition building amongst similar goal oriented groups.

We have a ton of groups here so theres a lot of potential for broad coalitons to make resonant social and political progressions but at the same time sometimes I feel like we are too diffused. I feel like theres not enough of a centralized calendar or events/meetings/actions etc. and also a lot of times cosponsorships or coalitions are more so in name or a kind of 'removed' support than anything else. That is to say, if I was to cosponsor your event or become a coalition member it would consist of me 1. supporting it, 2. advertising it to people, and 3. potentially showing up. But, maybe in order for these cosponsorships/coalitions to really become dynamic movements there needs to be a strength of force in numbers at all stages, not just a show of solidarity by way of a shout-out on a phamplet or something like that. I am speaking solely out of my own individual experience on this campus and I don't want to make claims that are bogus or anything, so I am posing two questions sort of. One being: how do you feel about the environment of student activism within the University of Illinois? The second being: do we need a more centralized space to bring people together or with so many people, is it better to just work hard in forming connections by sending people out to different meetings/events to establish familiar ties thereby making it easier to overlap/piggyback onto each others' activism?

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, because I really believe coalition building can be foundational in the evolution of a movement. Ultimately, we are affected and potentially oppressed intersectionally and right now it makes sense to me to see activist movements stemming from such oppressions working most efficiently when we can enlist a cross-section of groups. Maybe if our identities are constituted through a number of intersectional forces and networks, it then also makes sense to use an intersectional approach in how we resist/reflect those identities through our activism.

word. let me know your thoughts.

I'm sitting here trying to write a paper, but I just can't write anything til I vent this to people who will understand. I know I've already told this to some of you, but here's the latest political science class complaint:

We were talking about what Bill Clinton could've done better during his years in office. Our professor asked what we thought he could've changed in terms of appointing Hilary to be the Chair of the Healthcare Reform Committee and having her be otherwise involved in politics. None of us really had anything to say, so our professor felt the need to share his views: "He should've first of all told Hilary not to be so confrontational. Second of all, he should've told her that he only said the American people were going to get 'two for one' if they elected him in order to gain the Presidency, and after he won, she, 'can go do some dishes.'"

Any suggestions for ways I can deal with this, other than bringing an AK-47 to class?"

Entitlement

I went to Cowboy Monkey last night to see Shipwreck, Page France, and Headlights, all excellent local bands you should check out. But I had a really creepy experience that had a lot to do with entitlement and sexism. I was sitting at the bar keeping track of all the winter coats and paraphernalia of the group I was with, who are all bigger fans and had gone up to the stage. I noticed this older (30-ish) guy walk around me, looking at me, and sit down behind me. I switched seats so I could see the stage better, and to consolidate the stuff I was watching. One of my friends came back and sat down in my old seat and we chatted a bit over the music. Out of the blue the guy puts up a hand and manages to slur out between swigs of his drink, “You know, I could say something about the two of you…” “what? Go ahead.” He mumbled incoherently and we exchanged a few words. But there were two things he managed to say clearly that really disturbed me. Very early on he said “You know, I just can’t help it if you’re a hot woman and I’m just, you know…” This kind of thinking is so irritating on so many levels. One, it blames me just for being female while absolving him just because he’s male. Power imbalance, anyone? Two, dude, get some self respect. Do you really have that little self control that you can’t close your mouth when someone is clearly being hostile and avoiding you? You really think that little of yourself?

The second thing he said, with astonishing clarity and force given his intoxication, he said while my friend had gone to warn the bartender that if they didn’t stop serving the guy she was going to have to deck him, because he had started trying to touch me. “It’s just, you know, it’s, -- You can’t, legitimately, challenge me. You know it.” “Says who?!” I replied, mouth agape. He didn’t have a response aside from an eyeroll, and then she was back and I told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to go somewhere else at the bar.

This kind of thing is why I can sympathize with feminist separatists. Regardless of whether every man has this kind of mindset, it is clearly a virulent strain of sexism that persists today, the kind that says that a man who chooses to treat a woman as a human being entitled to some kind of dignity is just restraining himself, offering her charity, and that he could rescind that at any moment he chose. He remains in power because he can choose how to treat her. It would be easy to just say that this can’t be fixed, that we can never undo something so pervasive and we should just start over on our own.

But then I think that ties into allies of all kinds. Men are supposed to be women’s allies in the fight against sexism. But they could choose to take back their power at any time. In thinking about my own status as middle class and white, it makes me understand why people who aren’t would be suspicious of me.

Realistically, I know that allies of historically oppressed groups have often been instrumental in creating change. Alliances across groups can be powerful things. But I still think it takes a certain amount of trust, or faith, in other people to make things work. And I guess I’m not really sure where that comes from, or how to build it.

The other thing that really bothered me about the whole thing was that it kind of ruined the whole concert for me. From that point on I had to be on watch, just because I was female and had left my house. And I did so with good reason- within the next half hour he walked past me twice more, looking me up and down both times and then came back a third time to go around behind me and slowly creep closer. I didn’t even realize he had done that until my girlfriend said “oh my god is that him?!” to which I turned around, found him within six inches of my face, and grabbed the wrist of the hand he had just put on my back, slammed his hand on the bar and said “GO! It’s a big bar, get away from me!” Today he probably doesn’t even remember doing any of this, and I’m still on edge. There’s that power imbalance again… What can we do about it?

In the spirit of Stephanie's post about FIST because I, too, am very excited about our group, I thought I'd post a little bit about what we're trying to do so that if anyone else wants to join they can.

We met after a follow-up discussion about Racism, Power, and Privilege and decided to continue that conversation and form a group around it. It seemed like a great opportunity to form a group of GWS undergrad and grad students (since not everyone knows each other), and to act on the issues we discuss every day in class.

After discussing the possibility with the STOP coalition, we decided to jump on board with some of what they are doing because for some reason there wasn't an organized GWS presence around the issue. We're still just starting, and right now we're in the process of getting together with the Tri Delts to discuss how they've felt oppressed as women in the Greek system, hear more about their experiences of what happened after the "incident," and hopefully to link some of their oppressions with other oppressions on campus. This will later be a part of the narrative collection that STOP is doing.

If anyone has anything to contribute or would like to join our weekly parties-er-meetings, we meet on Thursdays at 4 in the GWS house. If you can't make it but would like to be on the email list, let me know and I'll send you weekly notes (elabedz2@uiuc.edu).

Also, this Tuesday the 10th, our group is sponsoring a queer women's night at the rainbow coffee house. If you or anyone else you know who identifies as a queer women would like to come, join us at the coffee house on the corner of Goodwin and Green from 6-9 and discuss the current climate on campus.

With Feminist Fury,
Elizabeth

The Routine Debasement of the Transgressive Heroine

Hi everyone. Stephanie invited me to this blog, so I thought I'd contribute by posting a paper I wrote for a Women Writers class last year. It starts by focusing on the "fallen woman" film genre of the 1930s, but soon delves tangentally into an incoherent array of associations. I apologize for the obscene length of the post - not to mention its inexcusable dryness. (This is why I'm not an advertising major).

The Routine Debasement of the Transgressive Heroine

In The Wages of Sin, Lea Jacobs scrutinizes the pre-production controversies surrounding the fallen woman film genre, often referred to as the “sex picture.” The story of the fallen woman was typically marked by a sexual transgression linked directly to the heroine’s downfall (Jacobs 5). Contemporary digressions from traditional conventions, however, were viewed by certain parties as potentially offensive, sparking the need for some method of regulation. Relying primarily on case files, screenplay revisions, and studio memoranda, Jacobs presents a thorough examination of how the industry’s system of self-censorship contributed to the Hollywood representation of female sexuality from 1928 to 1942 — the latter year being “when the system of self-regulation [became] complicated by the Office of War Information’s attempt to monitor scripts through its Bureau of Motion Pictures” (Jacobs 25). The idea of the fallen woman, however, certainly does not seem to be a novelty of 1930’s film. The Biblical Book of Genesis, for example, gives the account of the first woman’s fall in the face of temptation. Upon discovering her transgression, God tells Eve that “In sorow thou shalt bring forth children: and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and hee shall rule ouer thee” (16). Thus, childbearing and societal inferiority are the eternal wages of her sin. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, which also is rendered divinely legitimate by the author’s self-proclamation, Adam tells Eve that “nothing lovelier can be found / In woman, than to study household good, / And good works in her husband to promote” (Milton 1978). The promotion of the female’s domesticity and of subjugated devotion to her male counterpart as a God-intended role is nothing short of value-oriented manipulation working to justify patriarchal morality. Similarly, the system of self-censorship associated with the 1930’s film industry effectively denounced or punished transgressive heroines in order to stabilize gender roles and to advance a normative definition of the family through domestication (Jacobs 123). Bearing in mind the gradual demise of the Production Code, and the advent of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s (as described by Alice Echols in Daring to be Bad), the idea of the fallen woman has evolved considerably. Consequently, contemporary film, and the viewing public, are generally more sympathetic to feminist values, yet some of it is still marked by rote conventions of self-censorship distinguished by the effort to maintain a sense of contemporary decency or the attempt to avoid potential backlash from morally conservative communities.

The rationale behind the necessity to portray sexuality in a certain manner “is best understood,” according to Jacobs, “as a function of a set of assumptions about spectatorship, specifically female spectatorship, current in the thirties” (3). These assumptions were reinforced by Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser’s Movies, Delinquency and Crime, a reputable scientific study focusing upon the psychological and social effects of filmgoing on young males and females, which attributed the problems of prostitution and misbehavior among female adolescents to the “sex picture” (Jacobs 5). Due to this conception of the consequences of spectatorship, Jacobs argues, “the resistance to the fallen woman film on the part of censors and reformers largely centered upon…new permutations of the genre” that were deemed potentially offensive (6). It was then suspected that films shaped the morals of audiences, so it was argued by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association that they must safeguard moral standards (Jacobs 40).

One particularly troubling aspect for these parties was a new emphasis on social mobility among women. Perhaps the most blatant example of aggressive social mobility is found in the 1933 film Baby Face, which portrays a woman who sexually exploits men in order to rise to a prominent and luxurious position. Considering the film was “banned in Switzerland, Australia, three Canadian provinces, and in the United States in Virginia, Ohio, and initially New York,” even after standard revision procedures were implemented, one can get a sense of how dangerous or undesirable the idea of female aggressiveness was viewed to be, for there was a fear that witnessing such aggression on screen would produce a congregation of imitators (Jacobs 69).

Also among the permutations of the fallen woman film, along the same lines as social mobility, was the depiction of glamour. Jacobs states that “in the thirties, glamour was defined as a problem by reform groups and social scientists concerned about the Hollywood cinema’s presumed appeal to women, particularly young, working-class women” (133). In the 1937 film Stella Dallas, the heroine goes to the movies and becomes mesmerized by the upper-class lifestyle portrayed on the screen. Her aspirations for such riches come true when she, a poor girl, marries into an aristocratic family and is provided “with a large house, elaborate clothes, and an entrance into the town’s most exclusive club” (Jacobs 134). Yet in both films, the heroine is not allowed to remain prosperous, as the instances of female aggressiveness are intentionally reciprocated with some form of denunciation; for it would not be conducive to conventional morality for the films to condone transgression by associating it with success.

Jacobs makes a distinction between the regulation techniques of pre-1934 and post-1934, the former generally relying on a single major debasement or punishment of the transgressive heroine, and the latter using a more omnipresent form of judgment, “‘hidden’ within the mechanisms of narration” (148). It is commonly believed that the Studio Relations Committee, the division of the MPPDA in charge of the administration of censorship, was “an ineffectual organization, unable to enforce the terms of the Production Code until its reconstitution as the Production Code Administration in 1934.” However, Jacobs points out that in the period 1929-1934 the office actually was active in negotiating with producers and formulating strategies for dealing with the fallen woman genre (27). For example, the Committee was heavily involved in the negotiations concerning Baby Face. In order to render the gold-digging heroine’s exploitation of men less explicit, the producers were advised to censor much of the sexual innuendo surrounding her rise to prominence (Jacobs 74). After the New York state board rejected the film, however, it became clear that an acknowledgment of conventional values was needed in order to undo the appeal of female exploitation. This was accomplished by changing the ending—which originally was to show the heroine reacting with indifference to her husband’s suicide—to one that both punishes her with sudden impoverishment and stabilizes her role as a female through domestication. According to Jacobs, Baby Face’s “ending is crucial to censorship, not only because it inverts the trajectory of class rise, but also because the heroine’s sudden reformation allows the inversion of the power relations that have been played out along the lines of sexual difference” (78). The product of such endings was apparently typical of Studio Relations Committee negotiations, given that, as a general rule of thumb, sin was to be ultimately portrayed as unattractive and crime was to be punished.

Since the Committee “focused primarily on denunciation scenes and endings, it could tolerate forms of the plot which would have been unacceptable after 1934” (Jacobs 152). This is because, as previously stated, the Production Code Administration developed a more pervasive mode of censorship, one interwoven throughout the majority of the film narrative. Whereas “pre-Code” films were often characterized by abrupt shifts and seemingly illogical sequences, films after 1934, such as Stella Dallas, were rather uniform in their judgment of the transgressive heroine. In contrast to films of the early thirties, which frequently portrayed class rise as a graceful and unproblematic experience, Stella Dallas “marks the failure of the heroine’s social aspirations by rendering her transformation as a hideous display” (Jacobs 135). After her marriage to Steven Dallas, Stella is almost immediately shunned due to her inability to conform to upper-class tastes and interests. Later, she is even forced to leave her daughter in the care of Steven’s new upper-class wife in order to guarantee her daughter’s success (Jacobs 134). Stella’s realization of her own common status and her self-sacrifice for the well-being of her daughter were clearly contributions to the acceptability of the film in the eyes of the Production Code Administration, but what was probably most significant to that end was the portrayal of her discomfort with the upper-class lifestyle. Jacobs asserts that Stella Dallas “undercut the motif of class rise in ways which made it highly congenial with the aims and interests of censorship” (134).

Jacobs’ most important clarification is that self-regulation or self-censorship was always, to some extent, in accordance with the goals of film producers (150). The Studio Relations Committee typically was not involved in banning films or cutting scenes, but rather in negotiations that were ultimately beneficial to producers. The Committee’s goal was to identify certain elements of a film that the state boards would find offensive. Upon identification, the committee would advise the producers to alter particular aspects, or it would defend the inclusion of such elements as instrumental in upholding certain conventional values; Jason Joy, head of the Production Code Administration, declared that “the mere statement or even description of an evil, lawless or immoral act is not in itself immoral and the question of whether it would ‘tend to corrupt morals’ or incite to crime would depend upon the impression left as to whether the act stated is profitable or unprofitable” (Jacobs 49). The state boards, as Jacobs notes, were the genuine threat to producers, with the ability to alter a film’s editing by emitting certain scenes and also to even prevent films from being shown (20). So the Studio Relations Committee actually aimed to help producers avoid such violations to their films, though they still tried to remain faithful to the Code.

The Production Code, which was implemented officially in 1930, specified primarily that “‘no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin’” (Wikipedia). Aside from films centered around gold diggers and other transgressive women, one genre affected by the Code was classic noir, in which the villains tended “to be homosexual aesthetes…or homosexual Nazi sadists…[threatening] the values of a democratic and somewhat proletarian masculinity” (Naremore 98-99). The motivations behind the suppression of depictions of such “sexual perversion” were ideologically analogous to those underlying the criticisms of the transgressive female in film; the misrepresentation of what was deemed corruption and immorality constituted a danger to the conservative patriarchal status quo. Accordingly, it was violence—a matter relatively harmless in the patriarchal scheme in comparison to sex—that “accounted for the most visible changes in the standards of motion-picture censorship during the 1940s and early 1950s” (Naremore 102). Perhaps, in part, this also can be attributed to the desensitization of routine violence in the midst of American involvement in World War II and the Korean War. During the McCarthy Era, with the formation of House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklist, writers and directors relied on self-censorship to avoid any overtly undemocratic or unpatriotic subject matter. Once again, the pressures on filmmakers stemmed from the apprehensions of conservative ideology.

It was not until the late 1960s that the Production Code was abandoned due to its ineffectiveness and the lack of any means of enforcement. Furthermore, the Motion Picture Association of America introduced a ratings system, in 1968, “under which there would be virtually no restriction on what could be in a film” (Wikipedia). Another significant transformation came with the alleged sexual liberation of women. David Loth wrote in a 1961 publication that

“emancipation” and other factors have given women a taste for more precise sexuality than the insinuating tone of the Victorians. The social conversation which is permitted in polite circles broadens. Petting, even in public places, and discreet sexual experiences outside of marriage grow more tolerated and are even condoned. The widespread recognition of the fact that orgasm is not only possible for women but is entirely proper and indeed their right is encouraged by much of the current sex education. The literature which women reared in this atmosphere find erotically stimulating must also undergo some alterations.” (Loth 152-153)

This suggestion that women’s desire for erotic stimulation is at the heart of thematic and descriptive alterations is remarkably unsatisfying. It seems more sensible, rather, that the prospect of open sexual expression, in the absence of any form of overt censorship, allows for the inevitable acceptance of new extremes, and the redefinition of what constitutes pornography.

Loth’s assessment of emancipation, because it was published in 1961, obviously was not able to evaluate what is today considered a more distinguished time for the advancement of feminist agendas—the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. An understanding of the women’s liberation movement of this particular time and its cultural implications may help to explain some of the changes in the portrayal of women in contemporary film. The movement was comprised of numerous factions including the politicos and the liberal feminists, but the radical feminists were perhaps the most influential of the period. While

“liberal feminism sought to include women in the mainstream, radical feminism embodied a rejection of the mainstream itself. And while liberal feminists defined the problem as women’s exclusion from the public sphere, radical feminists focused on the sexual politics of personal life.” (Echols 15)

Often employing the slogan “the personal is political,” radical feminists argued that women’s inequality in the public domain was linked to their subordination in the family (Echols 3). Echols notes that “the historical conditions that prevailed by the mid-twentieth century—improved possibilities for female economic independence, and accessible and reliable…contraception—made the radical feminist assault on the family possible” (13). Radical feminists “shamelessly asserted women’s right to sexual pleasure while resisting male-defined ideas of sexual liberation,” since they still, to some degree, equated sex with danger (Echols 14). Radical feminism, like all social change movements, failed to survive.

It remained the dominant force of the women’s liberation movement until cultural feminism became the prevailing tendency in 1975, led by the liberal feminists (Echols 243). One of the most appealing aspects of cultural feminism was that it offered women a sort of escape from male supremacy and subordination (Echols 269). Cultural feminism, unlike the politically-charged radical feminism, revolved around the idea of creating an alternative women’s culture with institutions independent from the dominant culture (Echols 270-271). Stressing the connections between women rather than the differences, the founders of the Feminist Economic Network “maintained that women could embrace capitalism and eschew democracy precisely because they were women and had common interests” (279). The empowerment of females through the prospect of entrepreneurship signified economic self-sufficiency and freedom from patriarchy (Echols 272). Yet cultural feminism was attacked and criticized by both radical and left feminists alike. Joanne Parrent argued that “‘we will never make the immense changes that as feminists we see necessary by imitating the structures that men have created’” (Echols 278). Adrienne Rich, though an early supporter of alternative women’s culture, contended that it was a withdrawal from political struggle, and that “‘woman only space,’ while often a ‘strategic necessity,’ had too often become ‘a place of emigration, an end in itself.’” (Echols 281). In response to those who were cynical about women’s culture, Rita Mae Brown made the provocative assertion that

“Big is bad. Feminists don’t want anything to do with it because women will strangle in frozen hierarchies…Perhaps what we don’t acknowledge is that big means successful in America. Many feminists may die before they admit but they are terrified of success. Failure in patriarchal terms, defines women. Success means you’re a ballbuster, acting like a man.” (Echols 275).

One significant transformation that cultural feminism brought about, as Echols notes, is that “the struggle for liberation became a question of individual will and determination, rather than collective struggle” (279). Thus, if one accepted this individualist line, it was a woman’s own fault if she was not successful. This line of thinking was indicative of liberal and cultural feminists’ shared promotion of power and hierarchy, and their condemnation of confrontational politics (Echols 279).

Despite the fact that it was internally fractured from the beginning, the women’s liberation movement, most notably the radical feminist faction, made some great strides that have vastly affected the world today (Echols 285). The rise of “feminist health centers, credit unions, rape crisis centers, bookstores…publishing companies,” and newspapers were, for cultural feminists, a profitable opportunity for women (Echols 272). But for radical feminists, these counter-institutions were part of a compromise to help satisfy needs unattended to by the current system and to raise public awareness of feminist political issues. Echols lists some of radical feminism’s lasting impacts:

“By challenging the phallocentrism of normative heterosexuality, radical feminists have contributed to a restructuring of heterosexual sex… [W]omen are today more apt to assert their sexual needs. Both the legalization of abortion and growing public awareness of rape as a serious crime (reflected in revised rape laws) have done a great deal to further women’s sexual self-determination. By exposing the sexism of the medical profession, questioning the omniscience of the physician, and promoting, questioning the omniscience of the physician, and promoting self-help techniques, radical feminists have encouraged women to take a more active role in their health care. Radical feminism’s assault on the nuclear family and institutionalized heterosexuality has helped to make it possible (if not easy) for people to fashion alternatives to the nuclear family and heterosexuality…There has been some erosion of sexual division of labor in the home…Finally, although gender is far from meaningless in our culture, our cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity are today far less rigid and constraining than was the case before the resurgence of feminist activism in the late ‘60s.” (Echols 285-286)

The effects of radical feminism are reflected in the release of the 1994 film The Last Seduction, which probably would not have been made before the 1970s, and certainly could not have been made as early as the 1930s. Linda Fiorentino plays the heroine (or perhaps the anti-heroine) Bridget, who is first seen in an office building, patronizing and belittling the men who work for her. Her assertiveness and dominance in this scene set the tone for the rest of the film. Bridget’s idea of an alternative to the nuclear family is in running away with her husband’s drug money (which is earned as a result of her persuading him to sell medical cocaine), tossing her wedding ring into the vehicle’s loose change bin, and then proceeding to get another job under a different name. At the local bar, after she asks “what a girl has to suck around [there] to get a drink,” an onlooker remarks that there must be “a new set of balls” in town. A man named Michael attempts to play the chivalrous gentleman in buying Bridget a drink, but she is not impressed. He tells her that he is “hung like a horse,” and she, unexpectedly, orders him to show her. While sitting at a booth in the bar, she reaches inside his pants and feels him up (which is ironic, as the men were talking about how many women they’ve felt up at the bar). As if this was not humiliating enough for the now-emasculated fellow, Bridget coldly tells him when he should meet her outside to have sex. After having sex on multiple occasions, Michael tells her that he wants to get to know her more, and she responds, “Okay, you can be my designated fuck.” This reversal of the prospect of phallocentric heterosexuality is a dangerous thing for Bridget’s new sex object, who complains that she will not “stop reminding [him] that [she’s] bigger than [him].”

As Nicholas Nicastro contends, “the pleasure [in The Last Seduction] isn’t suspense, but in the definitive portrayal of a particular male fantasy: the beautiful woman as emotionally disconnected, remotely controlling, and therefore invulnerable as men wish they could be…Bridget engages the deep current of male masochism so cleanly missed in pop psychology and most Hollywood movies.” She almost always remains in control of men and, consequently, everything else. Indeed, the scenes where she appears to be weak or submissive are deceiving. For example, the first sex scene where she is not on top occurs only after he submits to her interests. Another instance is when Bridget walks out to the car of the private spy hired to watch her. Her attire is, opportunely, similar to that of a domestic housewife from the 1930s. And although she is carrying a plate of chewy, homemade cookies, she also is carrying the nail strip that she places under the tire of the spy’s car. Alone, the heroine’s deliberate use of sexuality to exploit and manipulate men undoubtedly would have called for justice done unto her if the film were made in the 1930s. But her utter disregard for morality does not stop her merely at sexual exploitation; she later deceives Michael into killing a man (who happens to be her husband), and then ends up doing it herself. This particular femme fatale, however, is never punished or denounced as was typical in early fallen women films. Instead, she is seen driving off in a limousine, knowing that her husband is dead and that Michael is in jail for it. The fallen woman comes out on top. Nicastro commends director John Dahl for never letting up, never condescending “to Bridget by parsing her character in search of why. To answer that question would make Bridget a character instead of an icon, and The Last Seduction a morality play instead of a kick in the balls.”

The moral disregard of The Last Seduction and the mere thought of Loth’s supposed sexual emancipation are both absent in the 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, which is based on the true story of the estimated 30,000 women detained in Ireland’s laundry factories, or Magdalene Asylums. Run by Catholic nuns for over 150 years, the last factory reportedly was closed quite recently, in 1996 (Dolbee). The fallen “whores” subjected to a life of labor are told to follow the example of the Biblical character Mary Magdalene, for, as the head sister avows, her “salvation came only by paying penance for her sins, denying herself all pleasures of the flesh.” The main characters, however, can hardly be called sinners—Margaret is a victim of rape; Bernadette is denounced as a “temptress” (though she never once touches a boy); and Rose has a child out of wedlock. (Mary Magdalene’s traditionally poor reputation can be called into question too, since the Catholic Church did not regard her as a prostitute until the late sixth century, over two centuries after Jesus Christ’s divinity was affirmed, quite conveniently, at the Council of Nicea, but I digress). Although the film attacks the moral domination of the white male Church, the actual transgressors never are punished satisfactorily, and the true victims are not compensated consistently. For example, the much-abused character Chrispina provides a voice of moral denunciation in harshly condemning the sexually unreserved priest, howling repeatedly, “You’re not a man of God!” Yet this only leads to her being confined to an insane asylum for the short-lived remainder of her life. The film’s judicial ambiguity, however, serves effectively as the fallen women’s redemption, at least in the eyes of the audience. While the punishment and denunciation of transgressive women in the films of the 1930s were often warnings to the audience, the same treatment in The Magdalene Sisters is essentially an invitation to sympathize with the lesser of two relative evils, in this case being the women’s desired release from the subjugation of patriarchal morality.

The 2005 independent film Thirteen seems to follow more closely to the 1930s portrayal of fallen women in its blatant declaration of the exponential dangers of insubordination, sexual promiscuity, and drug abuse. In certain scenes where lewd acts are committed, a conventional utilization of ellipses suggests the worst without actually showing it. For example, thirteen-year-old Tracy is last seen unzipping a boy’s pants before she is shown laying next to her friend, where she subtly alludes to how “it” tasted. In another scene, Tracy and her friend mention getting high, before they are shown suddenly dancing in an unabashed manner among the water sprinklers of a local golf course. Filmmakers typically desire controversy to an extent, as it has the potential to increase sales and marketability, but careless distaste can lead to adverse outrage. Accordingly, such instances of directorial self-censorship are an instinctual attempt to maintain a sense of decency that is appropriate to contemporary standards.

The film’s two main characters, Tracy and her mother Melanie, seem to be doomed from the start, taking into consideration the former’s impressionableness and the latter’s difficulties in coping as a single mother. In fact, Melanie’s “transgression” lies in her rejection of both patriarchal marriage and her role as maternal nurturer. She instead seeks to be a friend to her daughter, despite the paternal sensibilities pouring from her son. Tracy detaches herself from familial responsibility as well, and she devotes herself to insubordination. Her mounting exploitation of patriarchal values in her reckless pursuits is mirrored by a rise in social class; her new wardrobe is characterized by glamour, a distinguished quality ascribed to the appearance of gold-diggers. The glamour and fun obviously is transient, though. The screen, once filled with vibrant, bold colors, becomes tinted in a melancholy blue shade as the family’s relationship grows more disastrous. At the point of Tracy’s and Melanie’s ultimate low, just after they have been condemned by neighbors and friends alike, they embrace in the midst of their despair on the kitchen floor, essentially returning to their domestic familial roles as nurturing mother and obedient daughter. Familial reconciliation is hence valued as the moral solution to transgression.

While Thirteen’s writer and director Catherine Hardwicke probably did not intend her sincere warning to be undermined by an omnipresent defense of normative patriarchal domesticity, it nonetheless occurred, due to the awareness of conservative ideology made intrinsic in all humans by society’s perpetual repetition, and the unavoidable rote learning of its values. The conventions of the “sex picture” and the teachings of the “divine” are ingrained in societal thinking; this rote manner of thinking plays a part in the realization of a self-fulfilling prophesy, one where only female limitations are seen rather than female possibilities. Thus, Rita Mae Brown’s assessment of feminists’ fear of success can be applied more vastly to an entire culture. The majority of the population is arguably uncomfortable with the idea of a dominant female figure. Though they are few and far between, it is the films like The Last Seduction that challenge the authoritarian mentality of the patriarchal culture and that cause viewers anxiety and even great anger. And while The Magdalene Sisters and Thirteen do tend to sympathize with their female characters, the films nonetheless place women at a level that viewers are comfortable with. For if the fallen woman is not punished or denounced, she had better not be glorified.


Works Cited

“Bible in English: The First Booke of Moses, called Genesis: Chap. III.” King James Bible. 6 Apr. 2006 .

Dolbee, Sandi. “Film about Laundry Factories Puts the Catholic Church in the Hot Seat – Again.” 21 August 2003. BishopAccountability.org. 10 April 2006. .

Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Jacobs, L. The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Loth, David. The Erotic in Literature. New York: Julian Messner, 1961.

Milton, John. "Paradise Lost." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 8th ed. vol. B New York: Norton, 2006.

Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1998.

Nicastro, Nicholas. “A lust. Actresses and ambition.” Film Comment. 32.1 (1996): 2-4.

“Production Code.” 6 April 2006. Wikipedia.org. 9 April 2006. .