Carnival of Feminists XIX

Welcome to the 19th edition of the Carnival of Feminists! It has really been a pleasure to read all of the nominations and to discover some new blogs we knew nothing about.

Our theme for this Carnival is “Feminism and Career” and we definitely came across some exceedingly interesting posts on the subject. This happens to be a topic that we here at Figure: Demystifying the Feminist Mystique hold near and dear to our hearts. However, we also wanted to recognize that a career does not necessarily have to be an office job…

Meloukhia at This Ain’t Livin took our theme to heart in her piece We are the Borg. Now, as a girl with a pretty committed Trekkie boyfriend, I appreciate the reference, and find her piece on generalizing about the sexes being more dangerous than perhaps it seems to be refreshing!

“We are not the borg: we are all beautiful and unique snowflakes, damnit.”

Shark-Fu at Angry Black Bitch takes a similar stance to the homogenization of feminism. In Because It Made My Afro Hurt, poster responds to an NBC News report on “What Women Want” (and by women, NBC apparently means wealthy white women.)

Also angry is Female Science Professor at Science + Professor + Woman = Me. In 4 Months Too Young, she chronicles being passed up for a promotion, despite her qualifications. In many fields women still hit the glass ceiling, frustratingly (Larry Summers comments on Women and Science certainly showed us that ignorance is still alive and well in the hallowed halls of academia) and this personal battle is admirable.

In the reverse of that situation (and no, I do not mean reverse discrimination, a phrase not in my vocabulary), Afrofeminizta in Kenya writes about the Problem with Male Gynecologists. I liked this take on feminism in career; her personal musings show that perhaps there are situations where one gender is preferred to another in a profession and begs the question: can we always be gender blind? Do we want to be?

Gretchen at Girls Can’t WHAT? in The Right Time of the Month to Race shows the complexities of gendering professions. She writes in defense of Danica Patrick, a NASCAR driver who is breaking boundaries left and right. Gretchen takes on the inane male defense used so often to keep women back about getting emotional during their time of the month. At the Happy Feminist, PMS is the issue as well in PMS a Laugh Riot. Some might be surprised to read how frequently that excuse is still used.

Another woman who made her name in an overwhelmingly male-dominated profession is the inimitable Frida Kahlo. Explore Sharanya Manivannan’s Invoking Frida. In honor of the famed artist’s 99th birthday, the blog is full of rare, intimate photos of the artist who to this day will be the first woman many will think of in the art world.

For a fresh career perspective, see Britt Bravo’s post on UNIFEM and Women-Owned Businesses in Rwanda at Have Fun and Do Good. Women make up over 90% of microfinance clients worldwide and are starting their own businesses everywhere.

For advice from an entrepreneur herself, check out Jory des Jardines post at Blog Her on Lynn Broadwell. She interviews Broadwell, a wedding planner, mom, and business woman and offers some practical tips for women trying to make a career for themselves. While her words may be more relevant for some than others, I find some universal themes for whatever your career may be.

TJ Geiger at the Academic Texan also provides a feminist peek into the life of a snitch (or an informant). In addition to this being an interesting insight into a profession I knew little about, this post also shows how valuable it can be to apply a feminist curiosity to any situation.

Andrea Rubenstein at Official Shrub.com Blog in Embracing Your Inner Skeptic provides another interesting career examination – this time of evil women playing the villain in comics. The post provides an analysis of a UPenn Study and Article; a good reminder that a healthy dose of skepticism, or at leas the ability to question the status quo, is critical to any feminist analysis.

No less valid of course is the job of housework. While this topic and the surrounding intersections of race and socioeconomic status are volatile and contentious, Natasha at Feminish provides a humorous and fantastic personal entry on how the gendering of housework begins in childhood.

“I remember being strangely confused that my little bro had to be shown how to use the washing machine age 16 - how on earth had he got away with not knowing?"

Then there’s the “world’s oldest profession.” Witchy Woo at Well, I’ll go to the foot of my stairs has a message to all pro-pornstitution 'feminists' out there. She takes a stand against those in support of porn and prositution – the post is unabashedly opinionated and great starting point for discussion.

Or actually, isn’t acting the world’s oldest profession? Natalie’s review of Antony and Cleopatra, now showing at Shakespeare’s Globe, in My London Your London, ponders a stage full of male actors.

And, for another type of job entirely, see two posts making up an ongoing debate about the hypocritical nature (or not, depending on who you ask) of women criticizing other women. Responding to a Village Voice article, Bryan McKay at Les Faits de la Fiction and R. Mildred at Punk Ass blog provide an interesting point counterpoint about freedom and the right to choose.

Additional Topics: Intersectionality

The blogosphere has been buzzing this month with some excellent posts on intersectionality, many as a response to popular media and culture. In Boys Just Wanna Have Fun, Claudine Zap at Dame Nation comments on the recent New York Times series on the gender divide in higher education.

Carlos at the Naked Gaze also reflects on the pieces on the challenges faced by girls and boys and education. In his post, Surfing a Tide of Weirdness, he also takes on Heading South, a film that takes a fictional view of women’s sex tourism. This post explores the intersection of race and gender, as does Grappling Out Loud by Liz at Granny Gets a Vibrator. The latter post provides a fresh perspective by looking at the debate through the eyes of young women enmeshed in Creole culture.

Two other posts look at the intersection of race, gender, and culture in exciting ways: Roba from …And Far Away deconstructs an ad campaign for skin lighteners in the Middle East. And R.E. Ekosso at Enanga’s POV looks at the intersection from an African woman’s perspective. Both critically analyze the tropes of feminity of their specific cultures in relevant and compelling ways.

Baraka at HU and Megha at Days in a Wannabe Punk’s Life both look at gender as it intersects with religion. Baraka writes on misogynstic interpretations of the Qur’an; Megha on Hinduism and pre-vedic rituals. As Megha says, “A part of my feminism is intertwined with religion.” Both posts remind us the immense power that those interpreters of religious texts (a job often closed off to women) wield.


Finally, dear Carnival readers, I want to leave you with a post from Barbara Ehrenreich’s blog. The author of Nickel and Dimed a MUST read on the intersection of class, race, gender and work in America, asks for that Old Fashioned Feminism. The post provides some interesting musings on the place of feminism for today’s career women:

“Most women today want to smash through the glass ceiling, run for the Senate, and buy contraceptives at will (not to mention abortions, at least if the fetus they’re carrying turns out to be “defective.”) But feminism? It’s just a bunch of hairy-legged, man-hating, harridans screaming slogans that were already obsolete in the era of Charlie’s Angels.”

Well, there you have it!. The next Carnival will be hosted by Super BabyMama

Thanks so much to everyone who nominated a post and to Natalie, the tireless Carnival Master of Ceremonies!

Carnival - Last day for nominations!

Everyone loves a Carnival, no one more than us at Figure! Just wanted to remind you all that today is the last day to send in nominations to feministfigure@gmail.com by 5pm (NY time please).

Theme: loosely based around feminism and career - but as usual this is just a recommendation and you can follow it or totally ignore it. And as usual please remember to keep your eye out for feminist bloggers that have just started or haven't been getting due notice. Visit the Carnival of Feminists to find out more.

Child Brides

Yesterday's New York Times featured this series of photographs on child brides in Afghanistan, an practice that is prevalent across the developing world (although is not always given the attention it deserves as a significant problem because it does impinge on the rights of young women, as opposed to other groups whose voices are often heard louder). However, this particular topic is one that, for me, exemplifies how truly complex and layered these sorts of dilemmas on rights are in the developing world.

When in grad school, I watched a really startling documentary about child brides in rural Ethiopia. Girls as young as 8 years old are married off to men old enough to be their grandfathers, sometimes as a second or third wife. Culture and religion take the lion's share of the blame - families are encouraged to marry their girls off early in order to protect their virginity. The older a girl is, the more likely she is to have had sex, and thus decreased her "value" to a husband. It's actually very difficult for me to write these words because I find them so repugnant (on this issue, you will find me on the anti-cultural relativist stance). The documentary we watched showed male priests decrying Western influence on the subject and encouraging his parishioners to continue the practice. I feel it's pretty clear how women, girls, and their rights are conceptualized in these situations (they have none).

However, this is not a simple debate on cultural relativism, because other issues that plague the developing world - most importantly poverty, and lack of education - have a great deal to do with it as well. Families are more often than not left without the means to feed all their children and sometimes marrying a daughter off young may be the only way to keep her alive. This issue is too a gendered one - daughters are not valued the same way sons are and can fall at the bottom of the pecking order - but it is sometimes basic necessity that causes a family to sell it's daughter to the highest bidder. Education too, or the lack of it, comes into play. There are so many statistics linking women's education to better quality of life; yet here not only are women forced to finish their education when married, but frankly, there are not enough resources for them all (nor all children, male or female) to make it to school.

The documentary I watched added a further layer to the debate. Ethiopia is plagued with a high occurrence of obstetric fistulas in women, which cause them to leak bodily fluids; women become unable to control their urine or faeces and are vulnerable to infections. This condition is often caused by early pregnancy or labor; something most child brides are no stranger to (some of these girls are pregnant by 11 or 12, if their biology allows). Women with fistulas are ostracized from their families and communities, often forced to live alone. Sometimes their child is taken away from them as well. Imagine the life cycle - married at 8, had a child at 11, and sent away to live on your own at 12. Used and discarded - this is the life that many women face.

Fistulas are cured by surgery - a surgery that some estimate costs only $300. Once solved, the woman can go back to leading a normal life. Moving beyond the fact that it would take families making under $1 a day over a year to earn that kind of money, most women can't even get to the hospital in the first place; so many of these families in rural areas where as the hospitals that can deal with fistulas are in the capital. There are not always sufficient roads, or even if there are, means of transportation besides walking.

I provide this example to show how issues, even ones that may seem deceptively small, in the developing world are complex, compounded, and incredibly difficult (I hope not impossible) to solve. For more information on how to help child brides, go to UNICEF's website.

Birth plans.....

For those of you who might not be familiar with this term, a birth plan is a set of notes that are prepared by the mother, with the advice of her midwife, to be followed during labour- for example 'no drugs of any kind', 'immediate skin contact after birth' etc...Now until I got to Chapter 11 of Kitzinger's 'Politics of Birth', I completely assumed that birth plans were inherently good for mothers. Not only does it require finding out about what is actually going to be happening to a woman when she gives birth, but it should give a woman some sense of control of what is being done to her body, especially if she is giving birth in a medical environment (i.e. not a home labour). However, Kitzinger tells a different story that has now made me doubt my own opinion of the use of birth plans and my own personal use of a birth plan.

Kitzinger herself was one of the strong campaigners for birth plans in the UK, but she admits that the method with which they were introduced was not at all what she had imagined. She presents several ideas for why birth plans need to be reconsidered: they are often used as a way to assert control over a woman; they take away control from the midwife, making it often difficult for them to give strong advice when needed- keeping doctors in the position of authority; and finally birth plan forms (most commonly used now and what Kitzinger calls 'shrinkage') are so basic, in a multiple choice form that in fact it limits a woman's options and understanding of what happens.

I haven't actually prepared my plan yet. It is left to much later in the pregnancy, when more information is available to you about your situation (i.e. if it is clear that you need a caesarian by the third trimester, your birth plan will have to based around that fact). However, I have found that in the two meetings I have had with my doctor and midwife over the past four months, numerous questions have gone unanswered because apparently "we will get to that when we do the birth plan at a later date....". If you are feeling especially cynical, you could interpret this as "we are so squeezed for time and resources on the NHS that I can only answer those questions during a specifically allocated time in the third trimester". And even though I think my midwife is great and my GP is too, there are times when I am suddenly faced with the realization that I am just a file number- what has demonstrated to me the extreme formality of the system is that my own knowledge of women's health and maternity health to be specific goes completely ignored by them. I realize that this mainly to ensure that they provide me with all information necessary, but it also demonstrates that establishing a relationship with their patients may be secondary. I would like to note here though that I am aware of how ridiculously overstretched midwives are in the NHS and that the NHS itself is an extremely bureaucratic system.

My point is that I feel somewhat duped, because I know that I am relying on my birth plan being rigidly followed in order to guarantee that what I want happens. It is my only defense fro having the labour being completely overrun by healthcare providers. I have this impending sense of doom that giving birth in a hospital can be equated to going to a garage with your boyfriend to get YOUR car fixed and having the mechanic ignore you to talk to your boyfriend. My belief in the health system treating women as thinking, rational beings is practically non-existent.

Select environments for sexual harassment

The Australian Big Brother sexual harassment incident has been bothering me and besides the obvious reasons, I couldn't really articulate until today why. For those of you who don't watch Big Brother or haven't been following the story in the news, the premise for the show is that a number of 'contestants' are locked in a house under constant surveillance, asked to perform random task, etc..one by one they are nominated and then voted out by the public. The incident in the Australian version involved two male housemates and one female: one held her down and the other pushed his penis in her face. Those are the facts. The context in which it occurred is being debated. Nonetheless, after much public reaction, the two male contestants were removed from the house and the female contestant was given the chance to press charges with the police, which she did not do. What is being debated is whether or not what happened can be defined as sexual harassment, the ethics behind a reality television show that works on sex (even if slightly aggressive) selling and if that suggests that the producers are creating environments and promoting behavior that at times is questionable to even the most liberal viewers (re: Kinga and wine bottle incident on 2005 UK Big Brother - need I say more?).

What interests me is the question of whether or not the incident can be defined as sexual harassment. Australia's chief sexual discrimination officer Pru Goward stated that it was indeed sexual harassment, arguing that the fact that Camilla (woman involved) was embarrassed by the incident is the test to whether something is sexual harassment - this argument is slightly dubious because those that have no sympathy for Camilla simply can write it off by claiming that she is a prude and easily embarrassed, more so than is the social standard.

However, I do like what Goward continued to say about the incident being considered 'incitement to the crime of sexual harassment'. Because she is getting dealing with the contextual issue of the debate. By arguing that it may not necessarily be sexual harassment in this situation but that it promotes behavior that is definitely illegal within a different context helps illustrate that there is a problem with how we define sexual harassment. Which I think is based on space.

In certain spaces women are open targets for sexual assault and harassment - for example dancers in strip clubs often have difficulty claiming sexual assault/harassment, as do prostitutes who claim rape. The process of paying for sex or sexual titillation apparently negates any potential for inappropriate sexual behavior in many people's (and court's) eyes. Being sexually harassed on the street or public transportation is also seen as merely 'life' and not sexual harassment (visit Holla Back NYC to see how you can change that notion).

There are doubts about the severity of the BB incident because people feel that Camilla put herself in that situation - an environment were sexual flirtation is common and only a moron would enter as a contestant for the show not knowing that sexual behaviour will get ratings up and also raise your public profile. Much like the prostitutes and the strippers or any one who wears a provocative outfit - she asked for.

Germaine Greer article - Sexual harassment is nothing new in Big Brother

Carnival of Feminists soon, soon, soon!

Just some more info for the Carnival. Please send all nominations to feministfigure@gmail.com

Theme: loosely based around feminism and career - but as usual this is just a recommendation and you can follow it or totally ignore it. And as usual please remember to keep your eye out for feminist bloggers that have just started or haven't been getting due notice. Visit the Carnival of Feminists to find out more.

Carnival of Feminist Soon to Come!

Just a little heads up that we are hosting the Carnival of Femininsts of July 18th. We are still deciding on a theme so remember to check back in a few days to find out what we've come up with. Meanwhile Ink and Incapability is hosting the most recent edition, with a great theme: Women and Religion.

MIA.....

Finally I am back on Figure after having been pretty much missing in action for the past two months. However, I have good reason: finding out one is pregnant and the ensuing chaos is very time consuming, not only logistically but in terms of brain exertion. I have been storing up thousand of incidents and issues about feminism over the past months that I want to put on the blog and then been side tracked by baby-issues. One of the main points of reflection that has consumed me is my employment and pregnancy, maternity rights, my peers and my own attitude towards pregnant workers rights, but I am going to devote an entire entry to that and will not go into here (small note - I find it slightly humorous that my last blog entry is about career and job searching.....).

Needless to say, being pregnant has obviously brought a whole range of issues to the forefront of my concerns for feminism. While I will try and refrain from turning this blog into a motherhood and feminism blog, I'm suddenly facing situations that previously I could only theorize about, with little direct experience, such as telling your boss you're pregnant, breastfeeding in public debates, ensuring birthing plans are respected, understanding the NHS's perspective on natural labor v. medical labor, paid v. unpaid maternity leave etc... the list goes on. I will be addressing many of them over the next few months.

But what I am going to discuss in this entry is what (so far) has sprung up as the most suprisingly annoying and wonderful things in terms of feminism in these initial few months. To start with is the literature.

Having a mother who was extremely involved in maternal rights campaigns in France during the 70s and 80s means that besides the compious amount of books that I have bought, I have an interesting source of comparison with the books from when she was having children and campaigning. The first thing that I noticed was how even 25 years on, the majority of books still always refer to the child as a 'he' (Sheila Kitzinger aside - she even has an introductory paragraph about why she is using 'she' in one of her books!). After reading 3 0r 4 books with no mention of a baby girl, it kind of starts grating on you and I can't help but think that constance reference to a MALE bundle a joy doesn't help the issue of female infanticide and gender selection concerns. I even am catch myself constantly referring to my baby as a 'he'.

However, there are some positive developments over the past 25 years that stick out immediately. The main one being breast feeding, which is strongly supported by the National Health Service in the UK, something I was not really expecting but glad to find out. My first meeting with my appointed midwife included a catalogue of feminist issues that you don't really expect to find in an NHS doctor's office. She talked about increased rates of domestic violence during pregnancy, asked about my partners drinking and smoking patterns (even though I assured her violence was not a problem, nor was drinking and smoking), female genital mutilation, depression (not just post-natal), she questioned me about whether I was happy about this pregnany and a few other subjects that I will get to eventually. Recounting all this to my mother and other female friends, many were astonished at how improved maternal care was. To bring up domestic violence within five minutes of sitting down gave me hope that something had gotten through (at least with clinic).

BUT! maternity rights in terms of employment are still embarrasing in the UK and in most countries. Standard maternity pay is still traditionally based on women working part-time, paternal leave is practically non-existant (in my book two weeks does not suffice) and the number of discrimination cases that pop up constantly is only a reminder at how willing employers are to be taken to court over sex discrimination.

P.S. Big thank you to Alisha for holding down the fort so well while I was away....