The futility of language is a concept which came up a number of times in the readings for this weekend, both through the abstractness/inaccessibility of the writings themselves and in the discussion of language directly. Specifically, Luce Irigaray opens “When Our Lips Speak Together” by saying that “if we keep on speaking the same language ( Read more... )

In “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” Judith Butler claims that power is a never-ending, always-changing structure: “If the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and ( Read more... )

Ireland's "Crack" Habit - Explaining the faux Irish pub revolution.

Of particular interest to me (especially the readers' comments), as both an appreciator of "authentic" Irish-American pubs and a former American "barmaid" in the UK.

damali ayo (creator of rent-a-negro.com) was interviewed in Bitch magazine's Fall 2005 issue.

I found a lot of it inspiring and/or paralleling to my own aspirations and/or practices in political art.

(I don't really agree with the very first sentence--on all art being activism [though that might depend on how you define activism]--but the rest is ( Read more... )

from BBC News- Slobodan Milosevic: Your comments

What is your reaction to the death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic ( Read more... )

A post on Antioch's intranet by Judith Kintner, who runs the gym:Yep, it's today. Check out some web sites (World Vision is good ( Read more... )

A number of years ago I attended a presentation by a women who worked in inner-city elementary schools. This presentation was of a project she ran with the kids. She’d asked them to draw themselves as they would look if they were a member of a different race. One black student drew a homeless person. When asked why, he explained that he saw white ( Read more... )

On the way there

We're in traffic right now so watching the scenery pass to The Decemberists is not a very inspirational prospect. We're driving to Knox College in Illinois for the Love Your Body Conference (hosted by SASS- Students Against Sexism in Society). We = me, Anat, Rachel, and Julie.

( Read more... )

In “Choosing the Margin” from Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks says that “Our survival depends on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgement that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole” (149). Often I see the undervalued qualities of oppressed groups ( Read more... )

In Gyn/Ecology, Mary Daly speaks to the idea of women being coerced into their own oppressive demise. She quotes Simone de Beauvior’s The Ethics of Ambiguity: “One of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation since, after all, one cannot revolt against nature.” (56 ( Read more... )