Carnival of Feminists, 23/12/09: Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Season's greetings, and welcome to this special festive edition of the Carnival of Feminists.

As we're so close to the holidays, it's tempting to fill this space with cheery, unproblematic links and posts celebrating all our gains and pretending all's right with the world. This winter in particular that process seems especially hypocritical, so I've decided to just say bollocks to it. Here is a Carnival full of righteous indignation, intersectionality, rage and renewal.

As it's Christmas, let's start by remembering that the personal is political. A guest blogger at The F Word has some words of advice for fellow survivors of childhood abuse on dealing with the holiday season - which, for many victims, can involve unwanted proximity with their former abusers or with those who were complicit.

Even for those of us lucky enough not to have to face our abusers over the dinner table, Christmastime nearly always throws up a few feminist dilemmas. I've often found myself squeezed in with blithely misogynist members of my extended family, trying to explain why certain remarks are hurtful without causing an almighty row. An exciting-looking new blog, Stop Sexist Remarks, is here to help, with tips to challenge bigotry and stop sexist jibes in their tracks: Setting Boundaries in 15 Words or Less.

You might also want to take a look at a humourless festive rant I posted here at Penny Red this week, in which I get all pissy about the contemporary fetish for retro-domesticity.

Sometimes anger is important. Even at Christmas, when even more than usual women are expected to be placid, to keep the peace, to make things nice for everyone else, anger can be constructive, and it can be precious, and it's possible to stay tapped into to that vital stream of political awareness and personal rage without souring your appreciation of life's many joys. In that spirit, here are some excellent, topical posts full of incisive anger:

Radical Profeminist offers a powerful, angry and constructive response to man men's perception of their own 'suffering' at the hands of feminism, in one of the finest feminist posts I've read all year.

Guest blogger Dumi Lewis writes at Racialicious about the politics of being an ally.

Sara Ahmed at Comment Is Free reminds us that climate change is also about gender justice.

HarpyMarx reports on institutional police misogyny, brought to light once more by the case of a murdered woman failed by Greater Manchester Police

And the brilliant Womanist Musings offers a timely dose of WTF over the latest jolly commercial racist misogyny outing in celebland.


Rape, intersectionality and the language of victim-blaming -the feminist blogosphere is currently awash with powerful, courageous discussion of rape - and not only rape itself, but how we fight rape culture by working to change the language we use to describe rape, criminality and victimhood. Of particular concern this month has been the victim-blaming language used by authorities nominally responsible for rape prevention. (The following posts may be triggering for rape survivors):

On a new blog, rapedattufts.info, a brave survivor of rape at Tufts university speaks out about how her experience was dismissed by college authorities because she didn't resemble the 'perfect victim' - in part because she is a woman of colour. She describes the 'intersectionality of discrimination' that she faced with dignity and depth.

Kate Harding at Salon offers a powerful dissection of the shocking case of a 12-year-old girl being told by site supervisors at her middle school that she had 'asked for it', and that her attacker's 'hormones' were to blame. Jezebel has more.

In the UK, Dark Purple Moon tackles the graphic, distressing 'anti-rape' adverts currently being featured all over the London public transport system, reminding us that rape doesn't just 'happen'.

In slightly better news, In a Strange Land has details of a new rape prevention programme to train bar staff in reducing the risk of rape. The programme is refreshingly free of victim blaming language, in part because it was compiled in conjunction with anti-rape educators. And this week Al Franken's anti-rape amendment has been signed into law in the United States, which would 'withold defence contracts from companies like KBR if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court", after Jamie Leigh Jones was prevented from seeking justice for her charge of gang-rape by Haliburton (via Shakesville). Slowly but surely, and with tireless work from feminists of all genders, the dialectic of the rape culture we are living in is beginning to falter.

So, that about wraps it up for 2009, no pun intended. It's been a really exciting year for feminism online and in the meatspace, and next year looks set to be even more jam-packed. Watch this space for details of the next Carnival; meanwhile, on behalf of the new-and-improved Carnival of Feminists, it falls to me to wish all readers and contributors, of every faith and none, a happy holiday and a tolerable end to this crazy bloody decade. In sisterhood. x

Three cheers for the internet! (plus a small public service announcement)

Sorry that this is yet another linkdump, guys. Meds withdrawal and general winter craziness have meant I've been finding it difficult to write anything at all this week, and I've had to concentrate on the things I'm being paid to write, which are taking me me twice as long as they normally do. I'm not getting anything properly down until the small hours, and it feels like pulling a thick, heavy rope out of my forehead inch by inch. I'm stressed, and my sleeping patterns are shot, but hopefully I'll be able to return to devoting proper time to this blog before Christmas.

Meanwhile, an article about internet politics that I've been sitting on for a while has just been published by Prospect. I'm really pleased with it, even though something odd has happened to bits of the syntax between my outbox and the Prospect homepage. I love the magazine, have been reading it since I was at school, and am dead chuffed to have my ideas featured on their website. It's like an early non-denominational Winterval gift.

Even though I'm finding it difficult to juggle everything at the moment, it's really nice to think that since I started this blog my writing has grown up to the extent that it's now my real job, rather than just a hobby. Sure, I'm not making piles of money, but I'm paying my rent, and keeping busy enough that sometimes I have to prioritise freelance article gigs over what I really want to write. I miss being able to post something original here two or three times a week, though, and I'd like to get back to that soon.

Oh - and one more thing. Penny Red will be hosting the next Carnival of Feminists on the 23rd, so if you have any recommendations for feminist blog posts I should link to, please post them in the comments! Thanks ;)

55th Carnival of Feminists

Ladies, gentlemen, girls, boys and anyone else out there in the meatspace: welcome to the 55th carnival of feminists! I'm immensely honoured to have been asked to do this, and would like once more to extend my admiration to Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon for starting and maintaining the event. Virtual kowtowing out the way, let's get down and reasonably dirty with the global hyper-sisterhood.

As luck would have it, this edition of the Carnival straddles both International Women's Day and Women's History Month in the USA. As feminists, we are as diverse in our personal politics as the kitchen at a socialist's birthday party at one in the morning, when the conscience-lesbians are clustered in the corner with the hidden vodka, the marxists have occupied the table with all the crisps, and someone's anarchist girlfriend has nabbed the damn bottle opener again. There is no single politics of feminism; accordingly, responses to IWD and WHM have varied dramatically across the blogsphere, and our political diversity and ingenuity is something to celebrate in itself.

International Women's Day
Saturday saw worldwide celebrations and protests taking off to mark this Soviet-originated festival, along with some heartfelt writing. UK feminists were on the move, with the Million Women Rise event attracting thousands of supporters despite the biting rain; again, the demands of the march were as varied as the groups who attended, but the most comprehensive and well-expressed summary of its aims comes from the Feminist Fightback website. The F Word has the best round-up of the march itself, with some great photos that really capture the atmosphere of freezing optimism. Personal responses to International Women's Day were a theme, with posts at menstrual poetry and here at Pennyred; A good round up of world responses can be found at feministing, and stroppyblog has a nice strident reminder of reasons to be grateful for a century and a half of back-breaking work by feminists across the world. It did make me start humming this song from Mary Poppins, but I'm not sure that's altogether a bad thing.

Unfortunately, the spread of feminist ideas across International Women's day has led to a small number of unwelcome clashes. Hats off to Blacklooks for alerting us to the exclusion of sex workers and their supporters from the Million Women Rise event in London. The unilateral last-minute exclusion of Terisa Mackay of the Solidarity 1st Coalition to Decriminalise Prostitution from the speakers' stage is particularly shocking in the context of a day which was meant to be all about solidarity.

Feminism is a leftfield philosophy, and as such will always benefit from individual groups' ability to define and discriminate on the basis of nuance. This also means that we will never all agree on precisely what is and is not an acceptable stance within feminism. It's in this spirit of promoting diverse and challenging forms of feminism that Uncool Blog speaks up in defence of the 'sex-positive' tone of the 53rd Carnival of Feminists; and yes, a certain amount of meta-Carnivalling keeps us on our toes from time to time. Feminist erotic writer SelenaKittyn has a great post on nuances of feminism within pornography and radical objections to the sex industry, just squeezing in under the deadline. All of us, from hard-line Radfems to pro-sex-work Socialist Feminist activists, must recognise that our diversity is part of our strength, and that we will get nowhere fast by pitting ourselves against one another whilst consumer-capitalist patriarchy giggles anthropomorphically on the sidelines.

Diversity was the theme at Women'sspace, which hosted its own Carnival for US Women's History Month drawing together a wide variety of analytical feminist voices. One of the best posts from the event is up now at WhatTamiSaid, negotiating the preconceptions of different generations of potential feminists across North America.

Gender inclusivity is another issue which continues to divide the feminist left; the notion that men are also worked over by endemic sexism, misogyny and strict gender binaries and should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to take up their place in the feminist movement, is a contentious one at the best of times, but particularly on International Women's Day (the clue is in the name). Despite this, TehPortlyDyke at Shakespeare's Sister posted a brave and engaging piece on robbing the hearts of men on the 8th; the 189 comments (and counting) are worth a read all by themselves, as is the follow-up post on the 10th. Elsewhere, MissAvarice has a fantastic post on the semiotics of 'femme', picking apart tired gender binaries and looking at gender identity as a 'matter of intent'. Jo Christie-Smith looks at men's role in preventing violence against women, whilst at Pennyred I had a little splurge about intra-feminist misandry and the immense scope for positive change.

The under-reported issue of feminism and mental health is a field upon which we can lay down our weapons and put our talented and attractive heads together for some reasoned and only moderately bloody patriarchy-dissection. It's great to see Crazy Like Us up and running; let's hope the site goes far.

Finally, to remind us all why we're here, hats off to menstrual poetry and TheFWord for drawing attention to this piece of clit-itchingly irritating misogynist marketing filth. And the prize for least progressive clip of the month goes to: The G4 channel. All together now: 'I'm cheap and fun! In fact, I'm just peppy!'

And by the way, my vibrating features HAVE been disabled. Until next time, in solidarity,

PR.x