Clearing out some tabs
The longform patriarchs, and their accomplices: Beyond the white male canon: Bernardine Evaristo’s New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize Lecture offers a manifesto for the creation of a new, inclusive literary landscape: This essay notes that novels by women and about women are often demeaned by the longform patriarchs and their accomplices, as “domestic”, even today, even when they are not. And even if they are, the domestic sphere is where most of us live out the majority of our lives, so what, exactly, is inferior about it? On the other hand, when male novelists write about the domestic sphere, they are considered to be ruminating on the meaning of life, the “human condition”, the state of the nation, the universe, everything.
It might appear that a certain kind of longform patriarch, and his accomplices, who have looked down their noses at everyone else since time immemorial, are on their way out, especially when some of them have been heard to proclaim that the novel is dying - and even dead. So what hope is there for them? They have consigned their own careers to an early grave. Perhaps they have no idea about the state of the novel, because they still mainly read identity novels by and about people like them. They are the true identarians who have no idea that the novel is thriving because of the fresh perspectives and narratives infusing it with new ideas, stories, cultures, life - because they don’t actually read them.
Sing it!
The forgotten female writers of Play for Today: 'If you failed, it was pretty public': Apart from the masculinity of the commissioning apparatus and the shortage of women in the feeder medium of theatre, another reason for the invisibility of women may have been that feminism, though clearly a form of politics, did not fit easily into the series’ more Westminster-centric definitions of power and opposition.
Also memorialised by Lucy Mangan. (I remember it as The Wednesday Play.)
***
How egg freezing got rebranded as the ultimate act of self-care: The procedure has gotten a makeover thanks to fertility startups, but some doctors are pushing back on efforts to appeal to younger women. On average, egg freezing costs $15,000-$20,000 a cycle, including medication, treatment and storage, and the average patient undergoes two cycles. “If you consider the economics of that, what a terrible investment, to spend $15K to get a 15% chance,” said Gwen Schroeder, a documentary photographer and film-maker based in Brooklyn.
....
The vast majority of patients who undergo the procedure don’t end up using their frozen eggs. The usage rate for frozen eggs ranges from about 3% to 9%. For this reason, women contemplating egg freezing can find themselves in a bind. The younger they are when they freeze, the better the likelihood that they could have a successful pregnancy, but the lower the likelihood that those eggs will get used. The older they are, the higher the likelihood that those eggs will get used, but the lower the chance of successful pregnancy.
(From 2017, but I doubt it's that much out of date) Why Giving Birth Is Safer in Britain Than in the U.S.: The U.S. and the U.K. used to have the same rate of women dying in pregnancy and childbirth. Now, Britain’s is almost three times lower. Here’s what they’re doing right: Underlying these contrasts is a different view of the medical responsibility to mother and child. In the U.S., laudable aspirations for infant safety have intensified focus on the fetus - more sonograms, continuous fetal heart monitoring and granting rights to the unborn. But these measures may at times distract attention from the mother’s health.
By contrast, British medical professionals are legally required to prioritize a mother’s wellbeing if both she and her baby are in danger. They’re trained to stabilize mom first, and then tend to baby. “That sense that the woman (while the fetus is in utero) is the agent in charge is in place. I think that’s the right way,” said Denis Walsh, a midwife and associate professor in midwifery at the University of Nottingham. “Otherwise you start undermining individual women’s autonomy and then you go down a slippery slope.”
A group of more than 100 Italian women have asked prosecutors to investigate who is behind the burial for nearly a decade of foetuses in graves marked with the names of their mothers in a cemetery in Rome: The burials are permitted because of a law updated in 1990 from one that was created more than 50 years earlier by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. Anti-abortion, Catholic and far-right groups have for years pushed for the creation of “fields of angels”, often finding support among local politicians or those working within public institutions.
But Turco, who was health minister between 2006 and 2008, activists and gynaecologists say they were not aware of the practice of naming mothers on the graves until now.
“The question of privacy is serious and we need to find out who’s responsible,” Turco said. “But it’s obvious that this initiative is the fruit of a mobilisation brought forward by Catholic groups that we perhaps underestimated - not just in Rome, but across Italy. They probably constructed relationships within the institutions and so found complicity.”
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3144721.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.