136 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240307125758/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-is-the-dominant-emotion-in-400-years-of-womens-diaries-180983834/

      Women's diaries from 17th till now have frustration as recurring theme, analysis shows. Not a big surprise. I think journaling often is emerging when frustration rears its head. And women have had ages of deeply systemic reasons to be very frustrated by.

      I've only ever journaled when there was something wrong with me or my context, when I was frustrated, sad, depressed etc. Perhaps except for those who treat their being as action research and make daily notes for later data mining, or those in a public role journaling to maintain first hand observations before spin gets invovled (keep a journal is a sound advice for anyone getting politically active).

  2. Feb 2024
    1. In 1894, she moved to Oxford andher days as a Dictionary contributor came to an end as she took up the post ofLibrarian of Manchester College, the Unitarian college that had opened itsnew buildings in Oxford the year before. The Unitarians and the college hadalways been radical – already co-educational before any other college – so theappointment of a female librarian was in keeping with its spirit. LucyToulmin Smith, with her extensive scholarship and networks, and from an oldUnitarian family, was the perfect candidate.
    2. The Cambridge jurist and legal historian (and advocatefor women’s education) Frederic Maitland
    3. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, two Readers who wereaunt and niece and also lesbian lovers.
    4. Very early one chilly morning in October 1895, Fielding Blandfordstepped into a horse-drawn carriage with Edith Lanchester’s father and twobrothers. The four men arrived at Edith’s rented lodgings in Battersea. Theywoke the whole house with heavy banging on the front door, and FieldingBlandford forced his way in to ‘examine’ Edith. He ordered that she be takento an asylum because she was committing ‘social suicide’ by insisting on livingwith her working-class lover without marrying him. He justified this byarguing that under the Lunacy Act 1890 he would have certified her had sheattempted (normal) suicide.

      Fascinating story of a kidnapping and committal of a woman in October 1895 for shacking up with a man she wasn't married to.

      Ultimately gained international attention.

    5. Across the entry for T. W. Tonkin of Barnes, who had sent in nothingfor a sixteenth-century polemical work against female monarchs, The FirstBlast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by theScottish Protestant Reformer John Knox, he wrote in blue pencil, ‘Impostor –Stole the Book’
  3. Nov 2023
  4. Oct 2023
    1. This text is discussing how the concept of "women" as a group can be problematic.

      ??? could give reason to suggest that Black feminism has a place, but is it bad to split up feminism? does it make it less effective and a resistance movement?

    1. important to note that identity continues to be a site of resistanc bers of different subordinated groups
    2. But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in our world

      acknowledges differences

    1. liberal feminism

      same ideology but different context allowed to become commonplace

    1. which suggests that different gendered subjectivities lead to different knowledge

      nature vs nurture

    2. rather than relying on traditional methods dominated by men

      dismantling embedded structures of patriarchy in knowledge production

  5. Sep 2023
  6. Aug 2023
    1. “I think the most important thing I can say about Phyllis Diller,” says Bowers, “is that she was like Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. Just like Friedan, Phyllis Diller chronicled the daily lives of woman. But she did it with laughs.”
  7. Mar 2023
  8. Jan 2023
    1. https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15630

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwkRfN-7UWI


      Seven Principles of Data Feminism

      • Examine power
      • Challenge power
      • Rethink binaries and hierarchies
      • Elevate emotion an embodiment
      • Embrace pluralism
      • Consider context
      • Make labor visible

      Abolitionist movement

      There are some interesting analogies to be drawn between the abolitionist movement in the 1800s and modern day movements like abolition of police and racial justice, etc.


      Topic modeling - What would topic modeling look like for corpuses of commonplace books? Over time?


      wrt article: Soni, Sandeep, Lauren F. Klein, and Jacob Eisenstein. “Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 6, no. 1 (January 18, 2021). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.18841. - Brings to mind the difference in power and invisible labor between literate societies and oral societies. It's easier to erase oral cultures with the overwhelm available to literate cultures because the former are harder to see.

      How to find unbiased datasets to study these?


      aspirational abolitionism driven by African Americans in the 1800s over and above (basic) abolitionism

  9. Nov 2022
    1. apartheid social, al poder delegar las tareas domésticas y el cuidado de los niños aempleadas («obviamente» mujeres) mal pagadas

      delegar tareas es una cuestión de clase -> jerarquías

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  10. Oct 2022
    1. Czech teacherComenius (1592–1670). He championed universal education, which hepromoted in his Didactica magna, arguing for the commonality of education—itwas for everyone, including, shockingly, females.

      Comenius championed not only lifelong learning in Didactica magna, but he also argued for educating females, something not commonplace in the 17th century.

  11. Jun 2022
    1. Lois Weber<br /> - First woman accepted to Motion Picture Director's Association, precursor of Director's Guild<br /> - First directors committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences<br /> - Mayor of Universal City<br /> - One of the highest paid and most influential directors in Hollywood of her day<br /> - one of first directors to form her own production company

      See also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Weber

  12. May 2022
    1. Right now, it’s most prominently in my comic books. I don’t want to blow the story, but basically one of the main threads is a revolution launched against the main character.

      Feminism & Comic Books

    1. The recipe details, moreover, assume that these “unmarry’d Women” had the kind of knowledge of arithmetic that the book’s earlier instructional sections had taught. The recipe insists on careful attention to measurement and counting. And it asks the preparer to work with repeated multiples of three. Franklin had a track record of promoting female education, and of arithmetic for them in particular. He advocates for it in his early, anonymous “Silence Dogood” articles, and in his Autobiography singles out a Dutch printer’s widow who saved the family business thanks to her education. There, Franklin makes an explicit call “recommending that branch of education for our young females.”

      Evidence for Benjamin Franklin encouraging the education of women in mathematics.

  13. Feb 2022
  14. Jan 2022
  15. Dec 2021
    1. As Barbara Alice Mann suggests to us (in personalcommunication), bourgeois women may have especiallyappreciated the Jesuit Relations because it allowed them toread about discussions of women’s sexual freedom in a formthat was entirely acceptable to the Church
    1. Peruvian letters which was supposedly the letters home by a captured Inca princess who's trapped in France and they're commenting on French society and this is later remembered it 00:50:03 comes out in his late 1740s um it's later remembered as the first book which suggested the idea of the welfare state

      The 1747 book Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess, is remembered as the first book to suggest the idea of the welfare state.

  16. Oct 2021
    1. If cleared, Merck's drug would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19, a potentially major advance in efforts to fight the pandemic. All COVID-19 therapies now authorized in the U.S. require an IV or injection.

      Testing the comment feature in Hypothesis.

  17. Aug 2021
  18. Jun 2021
    1. Page 1

      These advantages alone claim for it a place in the education of all, not excepting that of women.

      Interesting to see a male mathematician advocating for the education of women in 1860 England.

    1. Η βραβευμένη στο Σάντανς ταινία του «Γιάλντα, η νύχτα της συγχώρεσης» βγαίνει την επόμενη εβδομάδα στα θερινά.

      Του Μασούντ Μπακσί, 2020, ριαλιτυ οπου οι καταδικασμενοι σε θανατο ζητουν συγχωρεση απο την οικογενεια του θυματος, "live".

  19. Apr 2021
    1. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

      pls read. u hate neo/liberal representation politics. not identity politics.

  20. Feb 2021
  21. Dec 2019
  22. Nov 2019
  23. Sep 2019
    1. Rigoberto Lara Guzmán defines SHINE as a tactic to counter our erasure by acknowledging one another and unsettling who is considered an expert.

      Ironically, I cannot find a citation for why SHINE is capitalized or what it might stand for (if it is an acronym). Anyone?

  24. Jul 2019
    1. I am the product of male gaze – we all are. I've spent my life loving films that sometimes hated me, identifying with Superman, for example. Female gaze is a hybrid – it’s really about knowing both of these worlds. I am a lesbian, and I know how to live in a male-dominated environment. But the question is, can they?

      I love this quote. If one feels threatened by it, one needs to check itself.

  25. May 2019
    1. The writing staff on Game of Thrones has always been male-dominated, with only four episodes in the show’s history being credited to female writers. Season eight is written and directed entirely by men (only one woman, Michelle MacLaren, has ever directed Thrones), although there has been at least one woman in the writer’s room, Gursimran Sandhu, this time around.

      These statistics are saddening. Fess up, HBO!

    2. I forgave the show for its cruel treatment of Sansa a season ago, when it became clear that her story was one of survival rather than victimhood. But Thrones rarely passes up an opportunity to remind us of her rapes. It undermines a character who has refused to be beaten or defined by her suffering, especially when, in the latest episode, she credits her abuse for transforming her from a ‘little bird’ into what she is now. As Jessica Chastain pointed out on Twitter, it was Sansa and Sansa alone who transformed herself into the strong and savvy leader she is – not the men who abused and manipulated her. If the writers don’t understand that, how can we trust them to tell Sansa’s story properly?

      Why did people let this go live?

      Because sexism is rampant, and more "allowed" than nazism, I reckon.

    3. To hear Tyrion and Varys – characters who have always been portrayed as egalitarian – say that Jon’s gender would make him a better leader than Daenerys is just depressing.

      This grated on me in S08E04. In a huge way.

    4. In its early years it might have lured in the typical male fantasy crowd with sex, violence and alpha-male characters like Ned and Robb Stark, Robert Baratheon and Jaime Lannister, but before you knew it a woman was on the Iron Throne, her main challenger was also a woman, and Westeros was stuffed full of female assassins, knights, wily politicos and Dame Diana Rigg.
  26. Apr 2019
    1. Women in science are cited less than their male colleagues. They have a harder time getting work published in notable journals, including the flagships Science and Nature. They are likely paid less than their peers (a 2013 study found that women working in physics and astronomy were paid 40 percent less than men). And they are more likely to face workplace harassment.
    2. Researchers are protesting grant processes that overwhelmingly fund male-led projects, and scientific societies are reforming their sexual harassment policies.
    1. The Wikimedia Foundation says it is seriously concerned about the idea that cisgender women and transgender editors could be repelled from Wikipedia by online abuse.

      This is also, to myself, indicative of the main problem with Wikipedia: most editors are white men in a certain age span.

      When abuse is added like this, non-men are more likely to stay away, and watch Wikipedia wither into a reason for staying with professionally edited encyclopedias.

    1. Despite the controversy Rumisa doesn't regret making the poster. "I'm kind of happy that my poster got a lot of attention," she says.

      Damn straight. Radiant doing.

  27. Feb 2019
    1. You know very well 'tii-inlinitcly better lo be good than to .�eem so.

      This separation of the inner self (human) versus how others interpret your humanity is still audience focused (as mentioned above), but seems antithetical to feminism. One of the ways to receive equal treatment is to be respected--to "seem" good or, at least, worthy of respect.

    2. She brielly mentions delivery, calling it "Pronunciation" and claiming that women have an advantage over men here, in that their voices arc naturally more plcusing and better suited lo the mostly private occasions on which Astell imagines women will speak

      An interesting flip on the "shrill" description of women's voices.

  28. Jan 2019
    1. hat always entails constitutive exclusions and there-fore requisite questions of accountability

      This part about accountability, tying back to the talk of feminism reminds me of feminist writer, Diane Purkiss's "A Holocaust of one's own." She talks a bit about these exclusions in that males (particularly scholars who talk about women/witchcraft) are doing women an injustice and adding to the oppression because they're not talking about it enough or aren't outraged enough. Bob Gummer, 2nd generation Holocaust survivor, said something similar in a speech he gave at UMSL this week. During the Holocaust, those who remained quiet about the atrocities of the death camps, were doing a great disservice to humanity, even if not directly involved. Exclusion happens in language and writing in all kinds of ways that we don't normally think about.

    1. feministpolitics of locations

      This reminds me of an article I read on a feminist reading of Jekyll and Hyde where the buildings and doors were described as either feminine or masculine. "The baize red door" that stood between Hyde and the outside world was described as menstruation, therefore feminine. The male character taking an ax to it was seen as violence against a woman. That was the last time I had seen feminism and locations being grouped together, so this particular phrasing struck me.

    1. he would extend this to "science" tout court-does not use value-free lan-guage, that value-free language does not exist, and that we cannot posit a purely transparent language devoid of distracting ornament, through which we transact business with pure facts.

      This reminds me of an article I read in my Feminist Epistemologies class, "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles," which shook me to my core. It argues that science and culture are intertwined and that they influence and reinforce one another. The scientific descriptions of egg, sperm, reproduction, and ovulation she provides to support her argument show how dangerous the perpetuation of the idea of "value-free" and/or unbiased language can be (and is).

    1. The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreti-cians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all. That's right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero

      Le Guin gives a definition of what it means to be human; the idea of theorists that humans must kill. Then, she makes it clear that this isn't the only definition of human, considering she's human and wouldn't/couldn't act in such a way. Then there's this awesome and gross little paragraph about women possibly not being human, but rather, defective and unworthy of having a say. Ouch.

    1. To participate in the economy, we’re encouraged to shape ourselves into a strategically pleasing form, always with a sale in mind.

      Isn't the phrase

      we’re encouraged to shape ourselves into a strategically pleasing form

      almost exactly what women have been attempting to fix with much of the feminist movement? We should all just be ourselves. Trying to "stay on message" is just painful.

    1. Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice

      Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process. This paper builds upon the Design Justice Principles, developed by an emerging network of designers and community organizers, to propose a working definition of design justice: Design justice is a field of theory and practice that is concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices.

  29. Sep 2018
    1. "The ideas of the First Amendment are not designed to deal with what it took to make the materials [of pornography.]" [5:56-5:59]

    2. "The 'freely choosing women'... As if you've raised a freely choosing black person [who decides to 'freely choose'] to clean toilets. That's the equivalent. You call that freedom. It's called freedom when women choose to do it and it's sex because people believe that sex is free. However, pornography is selling yourself for sex. The idea of money is supposed to make it free. Usually, when people have sex with another person and choose to do it, they're not being paid, it's free because you're not being paid. In other words, this is an arm of prostitution." [NOT VERBATIM] [3:53-4:31]

    1. In 2007, the pharmaceutical company Bayer gave up on a male contraceptive “that involved an annual implant and a quarterly injection,” as my colleague Olga Khazan reported in 2015. The company, she wrote, “concluded that men would consider the regimen—in the words of a spokesperson—‘not as convenient as a woman taking a pill once a day.’”

      I AM FROTHING AT THE MOUTH I AM SO ANGRY

    2. College enrollment has historically been higher among women who have access to the pill, and “birth control has been estimated to account for more than 30 percent of the increase in the proportion of women in skilled careers from 1970 to 1990,” the report reads.

      But how has their academic performance been [negatively] impacted by bad side effects?

    3. he might have mood swings.

      Greater aggression? --> more frequent violence toward women?

    4. most men wanted to continue using the injectable birth control—more than 80 percent of them said they would choose to use it.*

      THIS IS MADDENING

    5. 38 percent had an increased libido, and 23 percent felt pain at the injection site.

      How are these so comparatively bad?

    6. “It was believed women would tolerate side effects better than men, who demanded a better quality of life,”

      THIS IS SO INCREDIBLY FUCKED UP.

  30. Jul 2018
    1. Transwomen and women were once each other’s strongest friends and allies. We respected and supported each other’s rights and safety. We fought side by side on the same team against the common enemy – toxic masculinity. Tranwomen never made any claims on womanhood. Both sides knew that our lives, challenges, experiences and biology were different. But that didn’t matter; transwomen were welcomed into the club as honorary members and we all rubbed along together in harmony.That, however, was back in the day we knew what “Trans” actually meant. A transsexual was someone who had medical treatment and surgery in order to live socially as the opposite sex. But now the new identity politics woowoo has allowed the trans community to be invaded and overtaken by cross dressers, transvestites, fetishists, autogynephiles, men with porn-soaked lesbian fantasies, any attention-seeking, gender non-conforming male who loves glitter and lipstick and calls himself non-binary… They’re all covered by the ‘trans umbrella’.  Trans now means everything. And it means nothing.

      What and who is excluded?

  31. Jun 2018
    1. The trope of configuration animates another study of surgical practices by MargunAanestad (2003), who focuses on the labors (carried out predominately by women)involved in aligning a complex sociotechnical environment for the conduct of so-called‘minimally invasive’ or ‘keyhole’ surgery. The latterrequires, among other things,displacing the direct gaze of the surgeon and attendant practitioners from the interior ofthe patient’s body– formerly achieved only through a correspondingly large incision– to aview mediated through camera and video monitors. Aanestad’s analysis follows thecourse of shifting interdependencies in the assemblage, as changes to existingarrangements necessitate further changes through what she names thein situwork of“design in configuration” (2). She emphasizes that, incontrast to views of technologydesign as the province of (predominately male) ‘inventors’ located in research anddevelopment labs, the ongoing work of design takes place in the worksite, and isaccomplished by actors rarely recognized as designers.. Moreover, her analysis makesclear again how in such a setting the capacity for action is relational, dynamic andcollective rather than inherent in specific network elements, and how the extension of thenetwork in turn intensifies network dependencies.
    2. The feminist orientations of these studies add crucial sensibilities to thereconceptions of agency under development in STS more broadly. First, feministresearchdisplaces traditional preoccupations with abstracted and decontextualized formsofknowledge in favor of particular, specifically situated practices of knowing in action.Second, feminism directs attention always to the labors (particularly those previouslyignored) that are an essential and ongoing aspect ofsociotechnical assemblages and thecapacities for action that they enable. And finally, feminist research orients us not only torelations and symmetries among persons and things, but also to the politics of difference.The boundaries that constitute things as separate and different are treated not as pre-given, but as enacted, and practices of boundary-making and the enactment of differenceare inevitably political.
    3. A rich body ofempirical studies have further specified, elaborated, and deepened the senses in whichhuman agency is always inextricably tied to the specific sociomaterial arrangements ofwhich we are part.These studies provide compelling empirical demonstration of howcapacities for action can be reconceived on foundations quite different from those of anEnlightenment, humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world ofseparate things. Insofar as we see the politics of technology to be based in fundamentalassumptions about where agency is located,and whose agencies matter, these approacheshave at least the potential to work as powerful allies to feminist projects. In particular,these scholars align with feminist theorizing in their emphasis on the always relationalcharacter of our capacities for action; the constructed nature of subjects and objects,resemblances and differences; and the corporeal grounds of knowing and action.
    4. Must those not presentlyidentified as creative be shown in fact to be inventors in order tobe fully recognized? Thisquestion suggests that we need to pay close attention to the tensions and contradictionsthat arise when we adopt a strategy that distributes practices previously identifiedexclusively with certain people and places (for example, with privileged white menworking in elite institutions of science and technology) across a wider landscape (one thatincludes women). In distributing those practices more widely, they are givencorrespondingly greater presence. A counter project, therefore, is to question the valueplaced on innovation itself. The aim is to understand how a fascination with change andtransformation might not be universal, but rather specifically located and with particularpolitical consequences for women, both in termsof the possibilities that are available tothem, and the visibility of their already existing contributions.
    5. Recent research on the actual work involved in putting technologies into usehighlights the mundane forms of inventive yet taken for granted labor, hidden in thebackground, that are necessary to the success of complex sociotechnical arrangements.
    6. While not all of the authors and works cited would identify asfeminist, they share with feminist research– in my reading at least– a commitment tocritical, but also reconstructive engagement with received conceptions of the human, thetechnological and the relations between them.
  32. May 2018
    1. So, let’s summarize. Men get frustrated when they are not competitive in the sexual marketplace (note: the fact that they DO get frustrated does not mean that they SHOULD get frustrated. Pointing out the existence of something is not the same as justifying its existence). Frustrated men tend to become dangerous, particularly if they are young. The dangerousness of frustrated young men (even if that frustration stems from their own incompetence) has to be regulated socially. The manifold social conventions tilting most societies toward monogamy constitute such regulation.

      I would love to see the posters for JP's socially regulated monogamy propaganda

  33. Apr 2018
    1. The turn towards intersectionality has also made feminists uncomfortable with thinking in terms of false consciousness: that’s to say, with the idea that women often act against their own interests, even when they take themselves to be doing what they wanted to do. The important thing now is to take women at their word. If a woman says she enjoys working in porn, or being paid to have sex with men, or engaging in rape fantasies, or wearing stilettos – and even that she doesn’t just enjoy these things but finds them emancipatory, part of her feminist praxis – then we are required, as feminists, to trust her.

      yes but don't trust the patriarchy's self-serving exploitative aesthetics and ethics.

  34. Mar 2018
    1. Finally, science doesn’t make aesthetic judgments about what we should or shouldn’t value. For example, right now, Western culture, broadly speaking, measures success based on largely material standards: how much money you make, what car you own or how big your house is. It similarly rewards more material results, such as working more hours and improving efficiency. What it generally doesn’t do, arguably, is measure or value compassion, or long-term ecological thinking — look at how we treat our environment, for example. So while it may be the case that differences between men and women — biological or otherwise — in part explain average differences in income between men and women, perhaps if societal values and measures of success changed, some of these differences could too.

      Materialist feminist analysis

    1. Jeanine Dear Miranda, Thank you for writing and publishing such an excellent essay. I have printed this as a .pdf and wish to ask the students in my Intro to Women and Gender Studies class to read it this week as part of our examination of “transgender.” You grapple with issues most avoid and do so eloquently and in a scholarly manner, and I am sure many call you a transphobe for your arguments. As a transwoman holding a doctorate who teaches women, gender and sexuality studies, an ardent feminist, the spouse of a feminist female attorney and a past advocate and activist for trans rights I have become quite disillusioned with the transgender trend/phenomenon over the past many years for all the reasons you identify. Please continue your much needed work! Best, Jeanine

      Testimonial by a disillusioned transactivist

    2. A manifesto

    1. I watch so many young transwomen dissolve, or lash out, at the notion that they aren’t female, that they haven’t always been female. The conflict arises because deep down they know they aren’t female. They know they cannot be. Any insistence they are male triggers an existential crisis. I wish I could show them how it doesn’t have to be this way. I want them to feel what I felt during Christmas: The joy and freedom the truth allows. I wish other transwomen would listen to that voice that knows what you really are. I want them to embrace it. To deny the truth, to insist otherwise, is internalized transphobia. To speak this truth is not self-hatred. It is self-love. It is self-care. I speak from experience. The truth will set you free.

      "trans women are women" = "Internalized transphobia"

    1. In the case of misogyny, if a radical feminist is shown survey evidence that most men favor equality of opportunity, she might respond that they are fooling themselves, and that deep down most men are unconsciously motivated by misogyny, or participate in a society that has institutionalized misogyny

      Ce n'est pas si caricatural.

  35. Jan 2018
    1. (Of course, there were plenty of other things happening between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries that changed the shape of the world we live in. I've skipped changes in agricultural productivity due to energy economics, which finally broke the Malthusian trap our predecessors lived in. This in turn broke the long term cap on economic growth of around 0.1% per year in the absence of famine, plagues, and wars depopulating territories and making way for colonial invaders. I've skipped the germ theory of diseases, and the development of trade empires in the age of sail and gunpowder that were made possible by advances in accurate time-measurement. I've skipped the rise and—hopefully—decline of the pernicious theory of scientific racism that underpinned western colonialism and the slave trade. I've skipped the rise of feminism, the ideological position that women are human beings rather than property, and the decline of patriarchy. I've skipped the whole of the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions! But this is a technocentric congress, so I want to frame this talk in terms of AI, which we all like to think we understand.)
  36. Oct 2017
    1. He calls for more thoughtful engagement with the notion not so much of making things, but of fixing them, repurposing them in their diminishment and dismantlement—not of making new, but of making do, and of thereby engaging what he calls ‘an ethics of mutual care’—with each other, the world around us, and with the (quite literal) objects of our affection (Jackson, 2013, p. 231). This is a source, he says, of ‘resilience and hope’ and it’s a way of being in space and time that has deep feminist roots (Jackson, 2013, p. 237).

      My initial thoughts were: sustainability, repurposing, upcycling. And yes, I agree that there is a resilience and hope in that. How Jackson made the leap to 'feminist roots' is not clear to me. Page 11 of this PDF goes into more detail: https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/RethinkingRepairPROOFS(reduced)Aug2013.pdf.

      After reading this PDF, I think he is saying that this idea of sustainability and repurposing or 'an ethics of mutual care' can be sourced back to feminist scholarship that came about in the '70s through the '90s'. Unfortunately, I can't see any deeper meaning than that or why this must be feminist in nature and not simply human nature. Why gender comes into this, I do not know. But then again, perhaps my understanding of what it is to be feminist is flawed?

    1. resist the patriarchy

      Ode to My Mother

      The friend (the spider - why the spider?) because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and as useful as a spider. She could also defend herself, and me, by refusing to answer "stupid," inquisitive, embarrassing, personal questions.

      Drawings of the spider - Ode to My Mother.

      Source: Louise Bourgeoise, Deconstruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, published by MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.326

    1. n. Women countered some of the denigrating attitudes expressed toward them by males and asserted positive self-images. The local folklore, to which females as well as males contributed, stresses the importance of women, their indispensable role, and their ability to get their way.76
  37. Mar 2017
    1. This brings into women's writing an element which is entirely absent from a man's, unless, indeed, he happens to be a work-ing-man, a Negro, or one who for some other rea-son is conscious of disability.

      Is she acknowledging the intersectionality of feminism?

    2. I killed her

      This reminds me of a lot of feminists reclaiming "nasty women" or the riot grrrl movement: this idea that the myth of the pure, well-behaved woman must go, and going against this myth (misbehaving) is forwarding women's liberation. Killing this myth is an act of defiance.

    1. Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be re-made, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a different dis-tinction. So that A may become non-A. But not merely by a leap from one state to the other. Rather, we must take A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is con-substantial with non-A; then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead.

      Looking ahead to Cixous, there will be some interesting overlaps here. In "The Laugh of the Medusa" she attempts to break down the gender binary of "man=A" and "woman=non-A" (castration, mutilation, MEDUSA), to be annotated there...

      I had never realized it until now, but she even uses the same earthly metaphors:

      This doesn't mean that she's an undifferentiated magma, but that she doesn't lord it over her body or her desire (1533).

  38. Feb 2017
    1. I shall only remark that it might well suit the poet's fancy, who sings of sparkling eyes and coral lips, and knights in armor clad; but it seems to me ut-terly inconsistent with the dignity of a Christian body, to endeavor to draw such an anti-scriptural distinction between men and women. Ah! howl many of my sex feel in the dominion, thus un· righteously exercised over them, under the gentle appellation of f'rutection, that what they have leaned upon has proved a broken recd at besl, and oft a spear.

      This is badass and actually had me loling. Basically, Grimké says: "That little poetry bit was cute and all, but frankly, I find your comparison of the female body to a beautiful (but still frail and dependent and clingy) vine as fancifully out-of-touch, demeaning to my faith, and personally offensive to my sex. P.S. The metaphorical tree of masculinity that women supposedly lean on for support and protection (anyone catch the underlying phallic reference here?) is actually either a weak twig or a weapon that impales us. So thanks."

    2. Moreover, fcminii;ts in the twentieth century have further developed an alternate women'$ rhetoric to which Sarah Grimkc con· tributed.

      The development of an alternate women's rhetoric (one that is separate from the male-dominated political hierarchy) might include an alternative spelling of the word "women" altogether. For some contemporary feminists, "womyn" is the new preferred spelling. Whereas the traditional spelling implies that a woman’s identity is inherently reliant on man, spelling the word with a “y” acknowledges identities and roles of and for women that are not defined by their relationships to men (or dictionaries). In essence, this spelling marks a kind of rhetorical severance with the male establishment. Which is pretty rad.

    1. These would i.ccm to be topics lo engage future public leaders, not just those who hoped merely to marry the leaders.

      Interesting that these topics of study were made available to women even before they were granted the right to vote in the United States (the beginning of the paragraph says "By the end of the nineteenth century," and the 19th Amendment was not passed until 1920). I wonder how the women's suffrage movement affected the types of education that were made available to women? In turn, how did rhetoric influence women's suffragists and their strategies to gain the right to vote? How did the suffrage movement influence rhetoric?

    2. Not surprh,ingly, as women's education improved, women increasingly began to speak in public :md to reflect on their rhetorical practices.

      From the intro to Mary Astell's section: "For Astell, women's rhetoric should focus on the art of conversation... This is women's proper rhetorical sphere, different from but in no way inferior to the public sphere in which men use oratory" (845).

      In what ways does this new focus on women's public oratory affect Astell's insistence on private, domestic, and/or conversational discourse as sites of rhetorical power? Especially as we consider this part from Mary Beard's lecture: "In the early fourth century BC Aristophanes devoted a whole comedy to the ‘hilarious’ fantasy that women might take over running the state. Part of the joke was that women couldn’t speak properly in public – or rather, they couldn’t adapt their private speech (which in this case was largely fixated on sex) to the lofty idiom of male politics."

    1. 0, ye fairer sisters, whose hands arc never soiled, whose nerves and muscles arc never strained, go learn by experience! Had we had the opportunity that you have had, 10 improve our moral and mental faculties, what would have hin-dered our inlcllccts from hcing as hright, and our manners from hcing as dignified as yours'! I-lad it been our lot to have been nursed in the lap of af-fluence and case, and to have husked beneath lhc smiles and sunshine of fortune, should we not have naturally supposed that we were never made to toil'! And why arc not our forms as deli-cate, and our constitutions as slender, as yours'! Is not the workmanship as curious and complete'! Have pity upon us, have pity upon us, 0 ye who have hearts to feel for other's woes: for the hand of God has !ouched us. Owing to the disadvan-tages under which we labor, there arc many !low-ers among us that arc

      Long before the concept of intersectionality was introduced to feminism, Stewart is making it clear that arguing for the rights of African American women is much different than arguing for the rights of white women.

    1. feminist

      I think that the use of the term "feminist" is an interesting topic to discuss as so many of these readings focus on the total subjectivity language. As a man I definitely do not think I am the person who should be deciding what it means to be a "feminist," but I do think this term has lost some of its meaning as people have begun to tailor what it means to be a feminist to their own beliefs. Take for example individuals who are so-called "Pro-life feminists," that is, feminists who do not believe in feminism.

      But again, I am not the individual who should be defining what it means to be a feminist. Just an interesting example where the subjectivity of language has been made clear. I also am unsure whether we can label an individual a feminist if they pre-date the very concept of feminism.

    2. The tille is somewhal misleading given lhat Astcll, a polit-ical conservative, never questioned patriarchal hierarchies, whether in the Church, lhe slate, or the family.

      Right...so maybe we should think of Astell not as the "first English feminist" but instead as a protofeminist?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protofeminism

  39. Jan 2017
    1. Jirst English feminist.

      People today talk as though "feminist" has a simple definition (belief in the equality of men and women), but I think Astell challenges this notion; it's hard not to consider her a feminist considering her work, but at the same time her conservative values are certainly antithetical to feminism. I think this suggests how definitions of words, such as feminist, not only change over time, but also change when we start applying them to figures from different points of history; she certainly wouldn't be considered feminist today.

  40. Dec 2016
    1. ‘Testimonial injustice’, a concept developed by the feminist theorist Miranda Fricker at the University of Sheffield, is a systematic, insidious tendency to unjustifiably and often unintentionally downgrade the credibility of women’s testimony.
  41. Oct 2016
    1. Howard con-sistently expects her during their court-ship and engagement to take over roles his mother performed for him

      Male lead expects female to take over "roles his mother performed". Wants her to do housework.

    2. Roles for female characters in early sitcoms were domestic ones, such as housekeeper and child care-taker as in I Love Lucy (1951–1957), The Brady Bunch (1969–1974), and Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963). These domestic restrictions limited the range of oppor-tunities and expression available in that these women received little power and supported others in their roles as wives and mothers (Dow, “Hegemony” 264).

      The Norm then; Still common now!

    3. The Big Bang Theory. While Bernadette remains inept in her job, she enjoys a somewhat more successful relationship with Howard

      Female that cant be both good at her job and relationship.

    4. For both Amy and Bernadette the gender role expectations occur outside work and within the domestic spaces of the various characters on the show
    5. Amy is expected to take care of Sheldon,

      Why is the female expected to do this?

    6. Bernadette also assumes a care-taker role, though the role sometimes becomes a competition with his mother.
    7. On the one hand, the show represents four friends with careers, but on the other hand, the show features these women looking for long-term relationships

      Show depicts women looking for relationships and men with careers.

    8. At the same time, though, the hegemonic un-derpinnings suggest a development and reinforcement of these female scientists not as professionals but as through their expected gender roles.
    9. scientists were more likely to be male than female and were more likely to be white than of other ethnic groups

      Again with the stereotyping; Feminism and racism.

    10. fe-male scientists are represented as attrac-tive, stylish, and fashionable (39). What the the naïve expert lacks in knowledge she makes up for in appearance (Flicker 312). Among

      Why?

    1. They’re the fears of a child, and most men outgrow them. But for various reasons, not all do. Their masculinity, already a coping mechanism, becomes toxic.

      I'm reading about Toxic Masculinity linked from the front page of the NYTimes .pinch me so I know it's real.

  42. Jul 2016
    1. Crimes against women Can the licence to kill be revoked? “Honour killings”

      "In 2015, 1096 women in Pakistan died in 'honour killings'" – That is bad. What is bad, though, about pointing our finger at places where institutionalized misogyny may arguably be worse than in our community is that it helps discount the institutionalized misogyny in our own social order by comparison. And it's that self-satisfying comparison that helps make us be content with consuming outrage over conditions elsewhere instead of being outraged by conditions here that we can work to change straight away.

      On top of that, using special vocabulary like "honour killings" makes us understand the place and people we assign it to as irreconcilably different from us. This comes as rape and murder of women committed by men in our own community are motived by a similar sense of ownership of women -- a.k.a. honour. It is our resulting sense of self and other that makes our weekly drone bombings of people in Pakistan register less with us. In other words, we are less outraged by the regular killing of mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, sisters and brothers in Pakistan by our drones and are less prone to become active against that than we care about a slain lion. Because turning people in Pakistan into foreigners by assigning special vocabulary like "honour killing" makes us unable to mourn their death the same way we mourn the death of an animal or the death of people in places we understand as familiar.

  43. Apr 2016
    1. If you accuse someone of pretending because you would have to be pretending to be that way, that’s not feminism. That’s using the guise of feminism as subterfuge to actually attack other women.
    1. formal invitation

      For a more critical reading of this speech, see this piece from Black Girl Dangerous: "Women have been trying to get men to care about oppression of women since…always."

  44. Feb 2016
    1. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

      This sentence seems as quotable to me as the one about the "master's tools", and more self-explanatory.

    2. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support

      I've been familiar with the phrase "for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" for a while, but had never read it in the original context.

      It seems to me that Lorde is talking about any number of structures that enforce or maintain oppressive orders. The most immediate such structure to this context appears to be a discourse that presumes difference must be "other" one against another and thereby systematically overlooks difference to generalize about women — fear of being oppressive counter-intuitively leading to oppression.

    3. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist

      What a great, simple critique of bullshit "solidarity" cries.

      Of course, it raises for me feelings of discomfort because I've observed that even those who frequently profess to value difference within a community often still believe it important that the community present a unified face when perceived by outside groups.

      Even within a single company, this sort of philosophy manifests frequently as executives fighting viciously with one another while smiling and acting as though they are all of one mind when presenting to the rest of the company.

    1. Audre Lorde wasn’t denouncing math when she referred to “the master’s tools.”

      Great quote.

  45. Jan 2016
    1. I am now viewing the "Workman's Sandwich" and wondering what it would take humankind to provide the WorkWOMAN's Sandwich... Ladies on the job deserve just as much roast beef as any male laborer. If I may, I'd like to propose an ideal sandwich: it would include the contents of; Cheese churned from the breast milk of strong, independent mothers, Turkey of the female farmer's land, and mustard from a female CEO-owned grocery store on Wall Street.

  46. Dec 2015
    1. But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless — for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.
  47. Jul 2015
    1. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.

      I had similar thoughts around the immensely popular video about street harassment made by hollaback! after a former partner compared an unwelcome invitation I had extended to see a concert together to street harassment. It got me wondering what disciplines have good dialectic for separating useful from harmful exposure. So far I have only an inkling that trauma therapy offers some hope, and it connects the conversation to concepts like triggers.

  48. Nov 2014
    1. But these features also make it ripe for conflict between sex worker activists and anti-trafficking activists who oppose sex work. One of the most frequent attacks on Twitter is that these activists are pimps pretending to be sex workers. This argument defeminizes sex workers into the masculine identity of a pimp and paints them as co-conspirators in trafficking. It’s a form of gendered shaming against female-identified sex workers that pits them over and against victimized women and girls
    1. Perhaps a belief endures in these women that sidling up to men with power, rather than organising for it collectively, will yield individual gains.
    2. The recognition of feminism is that women exist at a social disadvantage to a history that privileges and resources men at their expense.
    3. ...and yet they really do believe that by pandering to the blokes, they'll be treated with respect and equality!

  49. Oct 2014
    1. “We should be building platforms to amplify the voices of women in tech, not to cater to the egos of men,” she said. “Men who want to help need to get the hell out of our way, basically. Because we're coming. And we don't need their support.”

      I think this is an immature stance that I cannot support. When you want to be treated with respect by most of the people around you it helps to demand mutual aid and cooperation from 50% of that population rather than telling them to fuck off.

  50. Aug 2014
    1. INTERVIEWER On the subject of being a woman writer in a man’s world, you’ve mentioned A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone. LE GUIN My mother gave it to me. It is an important book for a mother to give a daughter. She gave me A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas when I was a teenager. So she corrupted me thoroughly, bless her heart. Though you know, in the 1950s, A Room of One’s Own was kind of tough going. Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned that. The women who questioned those rules were too revolutionary for me even to know about them. So I fit myself into the man’s world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a man’s world.
    2. INTERVIEWER And featuring male protagonists. LE GUIN Absolutely. Then came literary feminism, which was a tremendous problem and gift to me. I had to . . . handle it. And I wasn’t sure I could, because I’m not much good on theory. Go away, just let me write. But the fact is, I was getting stuck in my writing. I couldn’t keep pretending I was a man. And so feminism came along at just the right moment for me.
    1. Of course, the radical feminist position that masculinity is natural and healthy, and femininity artificial and harmful, is also inherently sexist

      Of course. That's an important theme. It's as though it's being suggested here that radical feminists chose this view, when I think it's more correct to say that they are reacting to it.

    2. In contrast, she mentions and quotes a total of four trans women (zero from books), and two of them are quoted to supporting the radical feminist position.

      Might one argue that since these feminists feel their fight has been co-opted and, despite the many ways trans individuals are less assured of their safety and rights than cis women, the radical feminist is actually the more oppressed insofar as identity politics has left them behind? In which case, might we celebrate that time is given to this minority rather than criticize the piece for being one-sided?

    3. frequently providing physical descriptions

      I count only three instances, none of which are offensively dwelling on appearance in the way that media often is scrutinizing women's bodies. One of these descriptions is particularly well meaning: it is given only to color the story of abandoned transition with the image of hormone-induced stubble. To mention that there are physical descriptions of any of the activists in the piece here is obvious pandering.

  51. Sep 2013
    1. The privilege-pushers have a view of structure (thus of patriarchy) that is so vague that some of them dismiss the notion of a structural view of oppression as at best, academic bullshit, and at worst, a way for an individual to dodge examination of her own privilege.

      I struggle a bit with this because I don't know to view structural oppression as anything but, to borrow a phrase from earlier in the article, "just the way things are" without insisting that it emerges from the way people behave. What is the structure if not an organization of individuals? What is the hope for revolution if not a tipping point? To suggest that the actors are classes rather than individuals pushes the question back without answering it: "What are classes if not collections of individuals?"