The 88th Anniversary: What have we forgotten? August 26, 2008

Today is the 88th anniversary of (some) women’s suffrage in the United States.  Speaking to this fact, and connecting it to HIllary Clinton’s run for the White House is problematic, since both can be read as emblematic of the “whiteness” of American feminism.  Nonetheless, Susan Faludi’s reflections on this and on the fact that Hillary Clinton is speaking tonight at the Democratic Convention have some important points. 

In fact, there’s lots in her article that is worth remarking on, but her central point is particularly important.  That is, there’s a cycle that feminists are experiencing again.

Suffrage was, like Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, not merely a cause in itself, but a symbolic rallying point, a color guard for a regiment of other ideas. But while the color guard was ushered into the palace of American law, its retinue was turned away.

In the years after the ratification of suffrage, the anticipated women’s voting bloc failed to emerge, progressive legislation championed by the women’s movement was largely thwarted, female politicians made only minor inroads into elected office, and women’s advocacy groups found themselves at loggerheads.

Among other things, the flapper succeeded the feminists, eerily like those young women today who think that the US is “post-gender.” 

Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women’s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.

Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.

Women’s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

I  can’t verify all her facts, so please pitch in if you have other documented data.

Iowa’s “Open-air prison” for women and children August 20, 2008

According to Democracy Now, an immigration raid ended up with 400 people arrested at a meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa.  What happened to the families of those carted off?

And for those left behind–namely the wives and children of the men taken away–the town has been turned into what some have described as an open-air prison. Dozens of immigrant women remain in Postville without status or a means of support. Many of them are even forbidden from leaving and have been made to wear electronic monitoring bracelets.

According to the broadcast, the government helpfully supplied packets for those picked up, with scripts for them to use when entering their pleas and so on.  There was a problem, though.  The scripts presumed they were guilty of a series of crimes, including fraudulent use of government documents, identity theft and so on.

Why not just suppose them guilty, now that Habeas Corpus and all that no longer applies to non-citizens in the US, does it?

“Majority of Americans Say Racism Against Blacks Widespread” August 10, 2008

Gallop’s headline emphasizes the agreement. One could equally well look at the differences. I worry more about bias in people who think there isn’t any.

L’Oreal in whitewash trouble August 8, 2008

L’Oreal have come under fire for lightening the skin tone of Beyonce Knowles in their adverts.  

In this report:

“Shevelle Rhule, the fashion and beauty editor of Pride, a lifestyle magazine for the British black community, said: “We know that this is fairly common practice but that doesn’t make it excusable.

“This sort of thing creates a negative perception of African beauty. It’s an attempt to impose European values on African beauty.”

You know the story… August 7, 2008

 A young person in graduate school hears a very inspiring lecture about saving the world.  And then drops out of school and goes off to help severely disadvantaged people.  Well, now that young person can keep a multi-media record and it’s pretty cool too.  There’s even a psychic dog who warns of floods.

If you look at the project photos on the right hand side of the opening page, you’ll see a picture  of our friend Kathy Ward.

Shawn, the young person, is a wonderful model, but any graduate students who decide to follow him will PLEASE not mention us as the origin of your information!  We’re considered subversive enough already.

Summer session finals: And an answer sheet August 5, 2008

The question and video come from The Situationist, which asks, “Do We Miss Racial Stereotypes Today that Will Be Evident Tomorrow?“  There is an informative discussion of a classic US movie that is heavily racist (”Birth of a Nation,” which appears to give the KKK a heroes’ welcome) and perhaps a transitional political ad.  And then there’s the  recent McCain ad:

THE FINAL EXAM

Anwer the Situation’s question with specific reference to the film above.  Be sure you explain your answer.

___________________________________________

So no one has tried this one, and I can’t tell whether it was because it was too hard, too obvious or too boring.  But, retiring into the professorial mode, I offer this:

With questions like this, there is often no one right answer (oh, sure).  One way, however, of gaining a critical stance on the video would be to consider what you would say of yourself if, after a VERY great deal of thought and hard work, you pulled off some major accomplishment and found yourself described as, say, “appealingly flashy.”  There you are, perhaps, considered the best graduate student in philosophy in one of the top ten schools and you hear someone describe you as having a lot of pizazz.  That could well be at least close to a put down.

So here’s my worry:  very successful African Americans can have star power of the sort sexy Hollywood stars have, but their intelligence, powers of organization and vision are not going to be part of the story for some people, since they haven’t yet gotten around to admitting that’s what non-whites are capable of.  And behind this is another ugly thought that some people without vision are having:  Obama is only about self promotion.  Just like Paris and Brittney.

 

Quick Guessing Game August 5, 2008

Three Presidential debates, one Vice Presidential. Moderators: Three white men, one black woman. Who gets the Vice Presidential debate?

Italy and Roma July 24, 2008

Probably unbeknownst to most Americans, one of the most discriminated-against groups in Europe is the Roma. And Italy has become, especially recently, an especially bad place to be Roma. Berlusconi has recently launched a campaign to fingerprint all of Italy’s Roma population (and nobody else). But what seems to finally be waking people up to how bad things are is what happened on a beach in Naples. According to reports (for some questionning of them, see the links here), four Roma sisters went swimming despite lack of knowledge of how to swim. Two of them drowned. Many people failed to even try to help. Their bodies were laid on the beach. Then everybody got back to sunbathing– not allowing a couple corpses on the beach to interfere with their holiday. Photos were taken of holiday-makers sunning themselves by the bodies. I’m not posting them here, as I feel that might be disrespectful– but they serve to show the extent to which the Roma have been dehumanised in the minds of many Italians (and others). I’m so very depressed by this.

‘One World, One Dream’ not for Blacks or Mongolians in Beijing July 21, 2008

*Disclaimer* apparently it has been difficult to confirm. How reliable the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong’s main English-language newspaper) is up for debate.

Beijing, for the Olympics is ordering bars not to serve black people or Mongolians as part of an attempt to crack down on prostitution and drug dealing. Details in the SCMP.

What is confirmed is no Tibetian flags or protesters will be allowed at the equestrian events that will take place in Hong Kong.

h/t to flaming feesh

Joint sessions and women in philosophy July 16, 2008

I’ve just got back from the Joint Sessions in Aberdeen, which was much fun. There were plenty of interesting talks, and a good friendly atmosphere.

Some points of note:

1. there was a SWIP UK panel session of talks, which was well attended. The line up was: 

• Marije Altorf, ‘After cursing the library …’ Women and philosophy: a case study; Dan O’Brien, A feminist interpretation of Hume on testimony;  Vera Tripodi, On the distinction between abstract and concrete objects; and Lina Papadaki Pornography: is there a connection between treating things as people and treating people as things?

This seemed to be a good forum for promoting work by and of interest to women in philosophy. For anyone who wants to find out more about SWIP UK, the website is here:

http://www.dur.ac.uk/swipuk/

 

2. My impression was that there were lots of women in attendance, and giving papers. I did a quick  count of the sex distribtution across papers given.

In the plenary sessions, M:9, F:4

In the graduate sessions, M:3, F:5

In the open sessions, M:69, F:26

Total: M:80, F: 35.

 

As pointed out in comments (thanks gaye!) this is rather far off 50%.

 

However, that there was a visible presence of women philosophers, especially at the more prestigious and well attended sessions (plenary and graduate) seems important.

In her much cited and hugely important paper, Haslanger (linked here)notes that schemas (the model with which she understands unconscious bias (from Valian)) tend to be activated when the individuals are perceived to be in a minority group - tipping point being 25-30%.

So having such a visible presence of women in philosophy may be doing good work in dislodging the clash of woman schemas with philospher schemas. One hopes…

 

On a less positive note, whilst the conference drew a fairly international crowd, there were very few non-white philosophers there. And all the papers I saw (which, in fairness, was a small proportion, approx 20) were by white philosophers.

 

(updated from comments, to remedy my maths errors! thanks again!)

Petition Against Fox Treatment of Michelle Obama July 10, 2008

Here. Go sign it! There’s also a video showing some of the problematic coverage. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)

Free Speech and Hate Speech July 3, 2008

There’s a thoughtful discussion in a recent New York Review of Books entitled “Free Speech and the Menace of Hysteria.”  Though he passes by without comment the title’s term  that associates the womb with a mind out of control (groan), Jeremy Waldron does provide an interesting review of a book by Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate.  A later comment by Perry Link summarizes a point Waldron argues for:

In his excellent essay “Free Speech and the Menace of Hysteria” [NYR, May 29], Jeremy Waldron shows how, in the United States over the last two hundred years, the state came to be viewed as sufficiently stable that it “did not need the support of the law against the puny denunciations of the citizenry.” To subject the state to “free trade in ideas” is by now seen as carrying little risk and as having considerable advantages for democratic rule. Next, Professor Waldron argues that the case is not parallel for vulnerable minorities—such as, in our society today, Muslims from Asia or Latinos in the Southwest. Here the hate speech that might appear in the marketplace can bring grievous and irreparable harm, and perhaps should be restricted by law.

Link also argues that there is a serious problem about who employs the restraint.  I hope both the article and the comment are  available electronically.  It could be used to set  up a good discussion.

Stanley Fish v. Feminist Theory & Cognitive Neuroscience June 30, 2008

Whew!

The connection is a matter of conjecture, but three things are not:

1.  Stanley Fish’s remark in the NY Times about how boring the run-up to the elections is turning out to be.  And his comment:

 It’s often been said that once a woman or an African-American wins the presidency, the obstacles attached to gender and race will just fade away. They already have. I’m not saying that no one will vote against Obama because he’s black; but everyone gets voted against for something, and now that we have gotten quite used to Obama, voting against him because he’s black will be just another ordinary exercise of prejudice, not a special or particularly notable one.

Let’s leave aside the extraordinary idea that the obstacles have faded and look at the claim that follows.  Since “everyone gets voted against for something,” a racist vote against Obama is just par for the course? What is so very hard to understand about the effects of racism or sexism? Voting against someone because you do not like the way they stare into the camera is very different from participating in a prejudice that ends up with a group of people most of whom are disadvantaged in comparison with those who escape the prejudice.

2. Feminist standpoint theory holds that those who live as a subordinate group can understand the world in ways not accessible to the normal understanding of the subordinating person. 

3.  Cognitive neuroscience has explored the many ways in which our capacities to, for example, move through a complex environment are grounded in neural connections almost all of which are below our awareness.  This morning I was thinking of an old example of Elizabeth Anscombe’s:  Someone is coming down a stair and stumbles at the end; they say, “O, I thought there was another step” even though no such thought would have occurred to them.  What this captures is the way that our bodies can embodied expectations of which we are usually unaware, but which it seems right to count as expectations about the environment.

So here’s the conjectured connection:  a lot of us have a knowledge of the effects of living as objects of prejudice and we have a deep bodily-based sense of it.  The expectations are often ones that feminists may spend a lot of effort to bring out and understand.  But the understanding itself is so hard to communicate  because it is a matter of connections that are often part of our quite fundamental ways of coping with our environment. 

The chances of Stanley Fish’s getting it are not that great unless he makes more of an effort than he seems to have done so far.  But we’ve tried to help here and here.

Media Watch June 13, 2008

Further to Jender’s post (and from the comments), What about our daughters  are monitoring the media coverage of Michelle Obama here:
http://michelleobamawatch.com/

The site is dedicated to tracking the media coverage, serving as a ‘repository of the good, the bad, the ugly and the indifferent’ they say.

This seems like a good resource for keeping tabs on the media. As has been noted in previous posts, it’s all very well for people say there’s been  no sexist coverage, or no racist coverage (yeah, right, as our bloggers, amongst others, have pointed out). When the coverage is stuck together, it becomes clear just how atrocious the media has been. 

Note: they want volunteers to help them keep track, so if you want to sign up, go here.
 Once again, one hopes they’ll have only fair and measured coverage to track. One fears not.
(linked from fword)

Well, that didn’t take long. June 12, 2008

Obama monkey dolls are being marketed.

And Fox news has called Michelle Obama Barack Obama’s ‘baby mama’ in their running caption.

Yeah, Gloria. Blatant racism would *never* be displayed the way blatant sexism has been in this election campaign. We’re SO past all that. (Damn, back to the marking now.)

 
Update: In case you’re wondering, the folks making the Obama doll say their intent is not to offend: 

Our objective is three fold:

1} Provide a cuddly toy for the millions of Obama fans to take a little piece of their favorite candidate home with them.
2} Have a means for children to become a part of the political process with a cuddly plush toy all their own.
3| Contribute a pivotal article of presidential election memoribilia.

Intersectionality = Lack of Focus June 10, 2008

Is apparently what Linda Hirschman thinks intersectionality brings to Feminism, as expressed in the Washington Post. Apparently women’s issues and race issues are separate things.

The limitations of this position should be obvious when the author apparently made no effort to garner the opinions of the women of colour that she uses as examples, brownfemipower and sudy. Women, who actually engage with intersectionality.

Hirschman’s feminism illustrates perfectly what bell hooks calls ‘reformatory feminism’ - feminism  that does not strive to bring social justice to women are, so to say, at the bottom of the heap, but to a small subsection of women, who already have a considerable amount of social privilege (based on class, race, etc). Intersectionlity, in contrast,  can address the worst circumstances women are in and allows women to articulate their concerns.

Responses to Hirschman here and here.

Mentoring and Diversity June 9, 2008

Sophia Wong has posted a short essay on “how to mentor someone who doesn’t look like you”, but as she notes the issues are much broader than those related to appearance– how, for example do you mentor a student with kids if you don’t have kids?  Or a trans person if you’re not trans?  A disabled person if you’re not disabled?  Since under-represented groups *are* under-represented, people from the better represented groups need to do some thinking about how to be good mentors to those unlike them.  And Wong lists some simple, useful tips.  Go check it out!

A feminist debate on the primary June 3, 2008

The LA Times has commissioned Amanda Marcotte and Katha Pollitt to do their ‘Dust-Up’ column for the next week, discussing the Democratic Primary. Two feminists debating for a whole week in a major newspaper– a good thing. But what’s not so good: They’re both Obama supporters, and they’re both white. Isn’t it a bit odd to get two supporters of the same candidate to debate the primary? And especially since one of key issues– right from the start of the discussion– is race, mightn’t it have been a thought to have at least one of the discussants be a feminist of colour? (Especially since one of the discussants has been rather widely criticised for not totally getting the race issues, to put it mildly?)

Recommended reading June 2, 2008

This report (summary and full version linked) from Fawcett on the under-representation of ethnic minority women in positions of power (in the UK), and possible strategies for change.

What women in philosophy? May 18, 2008

The figures for women in philosophy are dismal.  Careful counting of the job offers recorded on Leiter’s blog suggest that just over  20% of the new hires are women.  Anyone who hoped the hiring figures would provide some cause for optimism should be very disappointed.

Conference announcement after conference announcement demonstrates that  women too often have few or none of the more important and visible roles.   And as for occupants of any other under-represented group, the situation is simply worse.

So what can be done?  This morning I followed a link from A Womyn Ecdysis to Left Turn and Andrea Smith’s essay on recentering feminism.  The task of recentering philosophy is almost as daunting as that of recentering the medical system or the criminal justice system, but I wonder about recentering our efforts.  I think for Smith that means that we think less in terms of simple inclusion and more in terms of empowerment, at the very least.  What would the analogues of empowerment in academia be? 

It isn’t hard to identify some of them.  One would be paying attention to positions of power, where these include journal editor boards and keynote speakers.  Another might be encouraging the disadvantaged members within a department to form some sort of cohesive group. 

But I mention this to ask others for  ideas.  WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Here’s a passage from Smith’s essay, though the whole fairly short piece is worth a read!

As critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw has noted, it is not enough to be sensitive to difference; we must ask what difference the difference makes. Instead of saying, how can we include women of color, women with disabilities, etc., we must ask what our analysis and organizing practice would look like if we centered them in it. By following a politics of re-centering rather than inclusion, we often find that we see the issue differently, not just for the group in question, but everyone.

 

An example of this re-centering is the way the national organization, INCITE Women of Color Against Violence, developed its analysis of domestic and sexual violence. We saw that it did not make sense to focus our strategies on involving the criminal justice system in addressing violence, because as women of color we are just as victimized by the criminal justice system as we are by interpersonal gender violence in our communities.

…

Many grassroots organizations are posing important challenges to how radical women of color should position themselves vis-à-vis the liberal feminist establishment. Fundamentally, these new projects and analyses do not start from or solely identify with the history and establishments of white liberalfeminism.

…. Many … grassroots organizations …  are reunifying the personal and political, and struggling to provide immediate services in empowering forms, as well as building collective political strength.