Fist Waving Feminism

VICTORY

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 01:30:29 -0500

VICTORY

Things that make you go hmmm... Globalization of labor edition

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 21:16:00 -0400

over 2,000 multinational corporations have drawn over a half million workers, two thirds of them women, who get paid between $3.75 and $4.50 a day.
In El Salvador, women employees of Taiwanese maquilabor Mandarin are forced to work shifts of 12-21 hours during which they are seldom allowed bathroom breaks; they are paid about 18 cents per shirt, which is later sold for 20 dollars each. They make clothes for the GAP, J. Crew and Eddie Bauer.
In Haiti, women sewing clothing at Disney’s contract plants are paid 6 cents for every $19.99 101 dalmatians outfit they sew; they make 33 cents an hour. Meanwhile, Disney makes record profits and could easily pay workers a living wage for less than one half of 1 percent of the sales price of one outfit.
In Vietnam, 90 percent of Nike’s workers are females between the ages of 15 and 28. Nike’s labor for a pair of basketball shoes(which retail for 149.50) cost Nike $1.50, 1 percent of the retail price.

Well…. This sucks

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:54:16 -0400

Well…. This sucks

Women in Black

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:46:12 -0400

Women in Black:

I have been neck deep in feminist theory and have been reading a learning so much. I haven’t been able to commit much time to the blog lately but I HIGHLY suggest you go and check out this website. Take a few minutes.

-Fist Waving Feminism

ROE V WORLD Woman Files First Lawsuit Challenging ‘Fetal...

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:32:51 -0400

ROE V WORLD
Woman Files First Lawsuit Challenging ‘Fetal Pain’ Laws
Source: Jezebel.com

When pro-choice activists warn that restrictive abortion laws harm women in rural areas the most, Jennie Linn McCormack is who they’re talking about. In June, McCormack was charged with having an illegal abortion after police found a fetus in a box in her home that was between five and six months gestation. McCormack says she took abortion-inducing drugs she found online because she didn’t have enough money to get a legal abortion. When she got pregnant she was unmarried and unemployed and making only $200 to $250 a month. She already has three children and couldn’t spend the time or money necessary to travel from her home in southeastern Idaho to Salt Lake City for an abortion. The charges against McCormack were dropped, but now she’s challenging the laws she allegedly violated in what’s believed to be the first lawsuit to argue “fetal pain” restrictions are unconstitutional.

In the past two years, Idaho, Kansas, Alabama, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, have banned abortions after 20 weeks, arguing that that’s when fetuses can feel pain. (Anti-choice activists aren’t all that interested in the scientific evidence that this isn’t true.) The Associated Press reports that now McCormack is seeking class-action status in a lawsuit that challenges the idea of “fetal pain” as well as other aspects of Idaho’s abortion law. A judge dismissed the case against her without prejudice for lack of evidence, which means that the prosecutor could refile she charges — unless McCormack is successful in having the laws declared unconstitutional.

Currently abortions in Idaho must be performed by physicians, and second-trimester abortions must take place in a hospital. If a woman causes her own abortion or goes to an unlicensed physician, she can be fined $5,000 and jailed for five years. The lawsuit says that this puts too much of a burden on women who live in rural areas of Idaho where there are no abortion providers. McCormack also argues that the ban on abortions after 20 weeks passed this year violates the Constitution because there’s no exception for abortions necessary to preserve the mother’s life, and it forbids some abortions before the fetus has reached viability. Roe v. Wade established that states can’t prohibit abortions before the age of viability, which other cases have found is between 22 and 23 weeks.

When the law was first passed, Idaho’s attorney general wrote a opinion warning lawmakers that the “fetal pain” measure might be unconstitutional, but they forged ahead anyway. If this lawsuit is successful, McCormack may be able to save herself from prosecution, and help prevent women like her from ending up in such a desperate situation.

Source: feministing.com

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:41:35 -0400

Source: feministing.com

Source: feministing.com Things that are awful…

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:40:08 -0400

Source: feministing.com

Things that are awful…

Source: feministing.com Things that are awful…

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:38:27 -0400

Source: feministing.com

Things that are awful…

"Every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the..."

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:17:14 -0400

“Every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change”

- Audre Lorde: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power*

I will be majoring in Women's studies come spring, and I was just wondering if you know of any organizations that give out scholarships specifically for Women's studies students. My parents just went through an awful divorce, and I already work 2 jobs, so I need any help I can get. Thank you and your blog rocks!

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:13:37 -0400

I am sorry I cannot speak on scholarships as I use finacial aid and student loans for my education. I do however hope that you find something to help you out! Keep trying, dont give up and enjoy your education!

-Fist Waving Feminism

Have you seen the documentary series Dreamworld 1, 2, or 3? It is really what made me so passionate for a change in this world. If you have seen it, I was just wondering your thoughts on it. I love your blog!! Thanks for the inspiration!

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:12:16 -0400

sorry for the late reply, I was one of the many left without power.

I haven’t seen it but I will for sure check it out now that you have brought it ito my attention! Thanks so much for your kind words. I appriciate you very much.

-Fist Waving Feminism

Poetry is Not a Luxury by Audre Lorde : Read it....

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:10:50 -0400

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” and of impotence.

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

When we view living, in the european mode, only as a problem to be solved, we then rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious.

But as we become more in touch with our own ancient, black, non-european view of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes.

At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches as keystone for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.

Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety. We see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of non-universality, of self-centeredness, of sensuality. And who asks the question: am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? (Even the latter is no mean task, but one that must be rather seen within the context of a true alteration of the texture of our lives.)

The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that the action in the now is also always necessary. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?

Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.

For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core-the fountain-of our power, our womanness; we have give up the future of our worlds.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.

Funny quip

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 22:52:32 -0400

I ordered my Grad school books on amazon. I’m getting my grad degree in Women’s Studies. Amazon sent me a set of 5 full length curtains instead of my feminist theory texts and novels…. Too bizarre to be a coincidence?

Photo

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 22:52:02 -0400

Things that make you go Hmmm...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 20:45:43 -0400

75% of all Sub-Saharan Africans infected with HIV are women

1 and 3 women will be raped, abused or beaten in her lifetime

49% of all sexual assualts world wide are against girls 15 and younger

7% of girls in grades 5-8 and 12% of girls in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused.

93% of juvenile sexual assault victims know their attacker

more reasons to fear.

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 20:21:43 -0400

rabidcentipede:

Bachmann recently presented a Citizens United award to anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, who in 2007 argued that there could be no such thing as rape within marriage because, “by getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.”

Trigger warning Another NYPD rape

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:21:58 -0400

*Trigger warning* Another NYPD rape:

Not again! Yet, another NYPD cop was arrested over the weekend for raping a woman. Off duty officer Michael Pena was literally caught with his pants down after police were called to the scene of him attacking a schoolteacher early Friday morning while she was on her way to work in Inwood.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is alleging that Pena forced the schoolteacher into an alley at gunpoint and forced intercourse and forced her to perform oral sex. When a neighbor heard the attack and looked out her window to see him attacking the schoolteacher she called 911 and Pena was caught in the act apparently intoxicated.

Pena is being held in Rikers on $1 million dollars bond and was arraigned over the weekend for first degree rape, forcible rape, and predatory sexual assault.

Pena is claiming that the D.A. is going to throw the book at him because of the recent high profile acquittal of the other NYPD Rape Cops Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Matta telling the NY Daily News:

“The DA is arresting cops, indicting cops…They’re trying to make an example out of me. There’s a lot I want to say about this,” he said. “Eventually, the truth will come out. Everything’s not black and white. There are shades of gray.”

Presumption of innocence is a right that everyone has, of course, but exactly what is this “shade of gray” he speaketh of? Seems to me that there is an eye witness to the crime and the police arrived while you were standing over the woman with your pants down. I hope the D.A. does throw the book at Pena and punishes him to the full extent of the law, not because Moreno and Matta got off but because every rapist should be locked up as long as the law will allow.

An innocent schoolteacher’s life is turned upside down while she is walking to work and Pena thinks he’s being treated unfairly?! Please.

source: feministing.com

Education is outrageously expensive

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 20:49:05 -0400

I am starting my graduate career in Women’s Studies in exactly a week, and in true Jen Fisher form I have put off buying books until tonight. AND, I just spent an OBSCENE amount of money on books… I mean they are all great titles, and I am super excited to read ALL of them. BUT HOT DAMN who even has enough money to pay for school….

Goodbye savings account,

Love Jen

things that make you go hmmm…

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:51:05 -0400

things that make you go hmmm…

she is a disgrace…

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:50:22 -0400

she is a disgrace…