What is choice or autonomy without options? August 15, 2008

Lots of pathologies limit alternatives.  Certainly, abusive situations can do this when, for example, an abused women finds herself caught in a relationship since leaving may involve real risks to her and her children’s lives.  Some people use their anger to stop things, leaving others without reasonable alternaitives. (Thanks to KW for a recent reference that describes this dance.)  And there’s the tragic situation of borderline personality disorder sufferers, whose behavior is particularly apt to bring about the abandonment they so fear.  

We might think of violence in a neighborhood as not very analogous to individual pathologies or pathological acts, but it can have very similar effects.  If bullets whiz around your neighborhood, you really should want to go out less.  So what is the solution?  How about bringing in the armed police?  Well, see what you think of what doing that looks like in practice:

HELENA-WEST HELENA, Arkansas (AP) - Officers armed with military rifles have been stopping and questioning passers-by in a U.S. neighborhood plagued by violence that’s been under a 24-hour curfew for a week.

On Tuesday, the Helena-West Helena City Council voted 9-0 to allow police to expand that program into any area of the city, despite a warning from a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas that the police stops were unconstitutional.

Police Chief Fred Fielder said the patrols have netted 32 arrests since they began last week in a 10-block neighborhood in this small town on the banks of the Mississippi River long troubled by poverty.

The council said those living in the city want the random shootings and drug-fueled violence to stop, no matter what the cost.

“Now if somebody wants to sue us, they have an option to sue, but I’m fairly certain that a judge will see it the way the way the citizens see it here,” Mayor James Valley said. “The citizens deserve peace, that some infringement on constitutional rights is OK and we have not violated anything as far as the Constitution.”

However, such stops likely violate residents’ constitutional rights to freely assemble and protections against unreasonable police searches, said Holly Dickson, a lawyer for the ACLU of Arkansas who addressed the council at its packed Tuesday meeting. Because of that, Dickson said any convictions coming from the arrests likely would be overturned.

There is a curfew in effect, one that all evening service workers, for example, will run afowl of.

There are multiple levels at which alternatives have been lost. Removing the police would restore some, but is that a good alternative? What do you think?

(Many thanks to NG for the story.)

LaVena Johnson July 30, 2008

It’s been shamefully long time since I mentioned LaVena Johnson, the soldier whose apparent rape and murder seems to have been the subject of quite a cover-up. I’m mentioning it again now because there’s a petition to sign. But it’s also worth noting, as Cara does, just how slow both civil rights and women’s organisations have been to join this fight.

Horrible ballot design May 15, 2008

Wouldn’t you think by now people would at least *try* to produce ballots that work? Here’s a detail from an absentee ballot for New Jersey’s 12th congressional district. Which bubble would you fill in if you wanted to vote for current representative Rush Holt (ironically, the leading congressional advocate of improved voting procedures)?

In this instance, no great problems are likely to result: it’s the primary, and Holt is running unopposed. However, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence for the future. This isn’t technically challenging stuff– it’s a matter of putting bubbles *next to* the voting options. Let’s please, please, please try to get this one right by November. Sigh. (Thanks, Mr J, for your technical assistance.)

When knowing is not enough May 6, 2008

A recent article articulates the experience of being the recipient of masculine condescension to explain that which one already knows.  Although two weeks old, its link is still flying around cyberspace, and I have certainly contributed to the collective gasps of recognition.  It’s a familiar variety of painful to discover how many women of authoritative knowledge still find ourselves reluctant to correct or contradict “Men Who Explain Things.”  Like the article’s author, I feel obligated to observe, at this juncture, that women can be condescending, that genders condescend to their own members, etc.  However, the minicareer of, as one lovely coworker put it, “a lifetime of getting patted on the head by men who assume I know nothing,” certainly seems widely shared.  Why is knowledge not enough? What further informs our failures to assert that which we know we know?  Granted that my explaining-condescender is an ass, why on earth am I struck with self-doubt in the face of confident assery?

 

Note that early in the article, a friend speaks up on behalf of the all-too-polite author. This experience, I also share, and the fact that we often more easily assert our confidence in other women makes it all the odder that we so often fail ourselves. An excellent method of pursuing epistemic justice is to use what privilege and power we have to call attention to less privileged women with firsthand knowledge, but at some point, we must also improve our skills of self-defense!  Further proof, if I needed it, that one can have duties to oneself - - a position which I’ve held for decades, but doubted when a talented man challenged it at a recent conference. (Sheesh!)

 

Thanks to Angela Johnson for the link!

Who knows what’s in your mind? April 25, 2008

Or: Is there such a thing as repression?  (from Mixing Memory)

A thoughtful student of mind recently discovered research that bore on a way she had been treating a language-disabled child. The prescribed task was for the child to put together phonemes (basic letter-sounds) to make a word and then take words and decompose them into distinct phonemes. The child could do the first, but not the second and she remembered saying, “O you can do it. If you can put sounds together, you can take them apart.”

It turns out that she was, according to recent research, just wrong. These are very different tasks, and someone with a mis-wiring problem might well be able to do the first and not the second. Of course, the child knew he couldn’t do the decomposition task and said so, but his self-knowledge had been put in question and instead it was suggested he was unwilling to try. So in addition to his language disability, he may now worry about how he isn’t even able to be cooperative.

If you are nine or ten and are very aware that you do not fit in, you really do not need this extra burden.

There is a way to make the situation very much worse for the child. Well, probably many more ways than one. But one way is to take the now certifiably uncooperative child to a doctor who is convinced that she knows what the real problem is, and it is entirely out of the child’s consciousness. And that’s because the child has repressed all his negative feelings about his parents, which repression is producing the uncooperativeness. If everyone is very unlucky, the child will be encouraged to think that the solution to his language problems is to act on his previously entirely unknown dislike for his parents. So the family will shortly have an adolescent child who is convinced that being a loving member of the family is very harmful.

This story is not entirely a fantasy; I’ve seen a father situated as a target by his son’s psychiatrist and it is really not easy to deal with. But the question that needs to be raised is: Who really does know what’s in your mind.

The idea that some stranger whom we haven’t known for long can have better insight into our real motives and beliefs is a familiar one in some cultural circles and it forms the basis for an approach to psychotherapy. It has recently received yet another challenge in the Review of General Psychology (March 08). In addition to the empirical challenge to the truth and therapeutic effectiveness of the repression hypothesis, the article argues another important point: the empirically supported hypothesis of the unconscious in cognitive science is VERY different from that of the unconscious in Freudian theory. Here’s the abstract; the article is, unfortunately, not widely available on the web unless you have a suscription and can get it through the electronic services of your library.

Does Repression Exist? Memory, Pathogenic, Unconscious and Clinical Evidence, Yacov Rofé
The current dispute regarding the existence of repression has mainly focused on whether people remember or forget trauma. Repression, however, is a multidimensional construct, which, in addition to the memory aspect, consists of pathogenic effects on adjustment and the unconscious. Accordingly, in order to arrive at a more accurate decision regarding the existence of repression, studies relevant to all three areas are reviewed. Moreover, since psychoanalysis regards repression as a key factor in accounting for the development and treatment of neurotic disorders, relevant research from these two domains are also taken into account. This comprehensive evaluation reveals little empirical justification for maintaining the psychoanalytic concept of repression. My stress.

It is important that nothing in this says that all experiences are always remembered and so a case of recovered memory is not necessarily put in question.

Added In case you are wondering what’s feminist about this, there are a couple of things at least. (1) The ‘reality’ of recovered memories has been discussed in a lot of feminist literature; (2) feminist theory is sometimes inclined to invoke theories of repression (and so note that the theory of repression is not described as refuted); and (3) In practice, a feminist philosophy professor may find that a Freudian’s supposed insight into her unconscious is clouded by many of the factors we have discussed here, from Valian’s interpretative schemas to misunderstandings of our conversational strategies if they have been affected by our professional context.

Ending Silences April 11, 2008

There are far too many things that don’t get talked about.  Things that need to be talked about– so that we can know they are happening and fight them; or so that when they happen to you, you don’t feel so isolated and alone; or simply because of the human need to talk about important things.  And a lot of these silences involve issues feminists care a lot about. Fortunately, there are a lot of interesting efforts out there to end these silences.

You may have heard, a while ago, about the “I had an abortion” T-shirts.  

Now there are “I was raped” T-shirts.

There is the Document the Silence website, devoted to ending the silence about violence to women of colour. They’re planning an important event on April 30– wear red to show your support. (More details will be posted soon about what else you can do.)

And there’s Exhale, an organisation devoted to providing a safe place where women can talk about their abortion experiences– positive, negative, whatever. (I was interested to learn that it’s not just women who are upset who need this service. It’s also, for example, women who feel relieved but don’t feel that they’re allowed to say that.) They also offer e-cards to send to loved ones having abortions, to help us talk to each other about abortion. Apparently these have been very popular. (I heard about this on Amanda Marcotte’s excellent Reality Check podcast.)

Abortion? No such thing April 4, 2008

Try ‘post-conception fertility control’.   Women’s Health News writes:

entering “abortion” as a search term in the POPLINE database now returns zero results because of a move by the database personnel to block that search. For background, POPLINE is “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues.” The librarian who noted the problem inquired about it, and was informed that it wasn’t a simple technical glitch; the response she received was, “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a [US] federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.” f you’re not familiar with “stop words,” they are typically words like “a,” “an,” and “the” that are omitted automatically from the search, because they is assumed to have no added value or meaning. Suffice it to say, it’s quite unusual for a word with “real” meaning to be a stop word, especially one so relevant to the resource being searched.

Wow. It is now impossible to get a decent search of POPLINE using ‘abortion’ as a search term. And the way this was accomplished is fascinating: the system was set to treat it like ‘a’ or ‘the’. But there are ways around this block on searching, if you know what you’re doing (which you can check out in the full email correspondence at Crooks and Liars). Here’s one they suggest:

In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’.

Now there’s a fabulous euphemism. In case it needs stating: this is quite a stunning situation. A US-government funded reproductive rights database has decided that “for now” it’s best to block people from searches using the word ‘abortion’. Add it to the list of the many ways in which the current US government wants to make accurate reproductive scientific information hard to obtain. Thanks, ProfBigK!

The Mad Professor April 3, 2008

Each of us probably knows some of the very eccentric members of the profession.  Perhaps we even  are one of those people.  Their behavior may be charming, disruptive or both, and one might conjecture that sometimes and with some people it is an accommodation that makes a positive contribution to their livies.  In other cases it can seem too clearly the result of failing to find any accommodation. 

The above perhaps trite comments are meant to clear the way for a genuinely extraordinary story.  Perhaps not unique; people like Elyn Saks tend wisely to keep quiet, if they can, about the disturbances in their minds.  They live in a world of horror quite far from even dismal unhappiness.

The review of Saks’ autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, in the New York Review of Books tells us that in  her first year of law school at Yale,

“I feared that my brain was actually heating up and might explode. I visualized brain matter flying all over the room, spattering the walls. Whenever I sat at a desk and tried to read, I caught myself putting my hands up to either side of my head, trying to hold it all in,” [she writes].

The fear did not go away. A few weeks into the semester, after gibbering away on the roof of the law school—believing both that people are out to kill her and that she has killed others (”Don’t try to fuck with me, Richard,” she tells a friend, “I’ve killed better men than you.”)—she is taken to Yale–New Haven Hospital where she surrenders her telephone-wire belt and a roof nail, after which, she writes, “it was all over.”

It wasn’t all over, by any means:

…despite repeated confirmation by doctors of a diagnosis of schizophrenia, Elyn continues to achieve at the highest levels. She graduates from Yale Law School (where she becomes an editor of the Yale Law Journal) and goes on to teach at the University of Southern California Law School, where she is appointed the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences. She’s also appointed an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine (”I’ve infiltrated the enemy!” she announces to a friend). She publishes numerous articles and several books, becomes a research clinical associate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. She falls in love and marries.

The review leaves no room for doubt that Elyn Saks is psychotic:

On her wedding day, alone with her closest friend, Steve, she writes that “a serious question had been troubling me for hours, and finally I just had to ask it. ‘Will aliens be attending the reception?’” Steve holds her hand, tells her that they won’t, and she tells us that she “needed to hear that reassurance from him, and having heard it, I happily went on with the day.”

The book gives a vivid and intelligent account of the elements that add up to living with psychosis. In addition to providing an insider’s view from a very intelligent mind, it argues for an unusual approach to psychosis: medication and talk therapy.

Silencing and Forced Marriage March 28, 2008

A deeply depressing story.  12 year old Ruksana complained to UK police when her parents said they were going to force her into an unwanted marriage. They came to her house to discuss it with the whole family, and told her not to worry– thus alerting her parents that she had talked to the police, whereupon they moved her elsewhere. She complained again, with a similar response, and eventually was forced into a marriage, forced out of education, and raped. As she says:

“White kids can call Childline and they get listened to - but for Asian children it’s thought of as wrong to complain.” 

Ruksana is, however, hopeful (let’s hope she’s right):

Because of the publicity about forced marriages I think they would take you a bit more seriously now. 

For the nerds among you, there’s arguably both locutionary and perlocutionary silencing going on indicated in Ruksana’s first quote. Asians don’t think they should complain (locutionary), and they aren’t taken seriously when they do (perlocutionary). Depending your views on felicity conditions for complaining, there may also be illocutionary silencing going on. For a quick intro to these silencing issues, see here. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)

Take Back the Tech March 9, 2008

This site is about reclaiming ICT (information and communication technologies) to end violence against women.    TBTT has  an international audience, and on March 8,  International Women’s Day, the site invited its visitors to tell their stories.  The result adds to the rich amount of information already on the site.

You can see some of the narratives collected here.

 (Despite the efforts  of Kathy,** our notice about International Women’s Day is coming to you a day late.  “Philosophers don’t do efficiency,” I say probably too frequently; I’m going to add “or dates.”  Apologies and thanks to you, Kathy, for the wonderful link.)

From TBTT you can go to genderIT.org, which promotes the use of ICT  to “contribute to the economic, political and social empowerment of women, and the promotion of gender equality.”  This is another important site that rewards visits.

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**To see Kathy’s blog, go to our blogroll and click “bideshi blue”.  The link “Bangladesh from our view” takes you to an important project Kathy is administering.

Women of Color and the Academy February 20, 2008

Campus Lockdown:

Women of Color Negotiating the Academic Industrial Complex

   The Campus Lockdown conference will center women of color in the academic industrial complex. 

We will consider its structural constraints, as well as the implications of our scholarship.

Saturday, March 15, 200810:30 - 5:00pmMichigan UnionUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Speakers include:

• Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside
• Angela Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz (via teleconference)
• Rosa Linda Fregoso, University of Southern California
• Ruth Gilmore, University of Southern California
• Fred Moten, Duke University
• Clarissa Rojas, San Francisco State University
• Haunani-Kay Trask, University of Hawai’i

Schedule at a glance:

          10:30 - 12:00   Panel I:  Women of Color in the Academic Industrial Complex

          1:30 - 3:30      Panel II:  Why Women of Color Scholarship?  Social Justice, Ethnic Studies, and Women’s Studies

          3:45 - 5:00      Closing Event

The registration deadline is February 29, 2008.  For more information & to register online, please visit http://www.woclockdown.org/

Look at the freedom we’ve brought! January 31, 2008

An Afghan journalism student has been sentenced to death for downloading a report on women’s rights. What a fabulous democracy we’ve brought the Afghan people.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

The Independent has a petition you can sign here. It’s a petition to the UK foreign office, but anyone can sign it, and non-UK pressure can make a difference.

Women, Work and the Academy January 19, 2008

How do discriminatory attitudes and practices get so embedded in the academy that we find ourselves still struggling against them after decades of efforts to eradicate them?  A pamphlet, Women, Work, and the Academy, written by Alison Wylie, Janet R. Jakobsen and Gisela Fosado, brings very recent research to bear on these issues. 

The pamphlet grew out of a conference held at Barnard shortly after Summers infamous remark.  The conference website is also a wonderful resource.  Note the video of the keynote panel and the summaries of presenters’ remarks.

Anyone who wants to understand academic discrimination and think about effective tactics against it should read these resources carefully.

 

Bob Herbert: Politics and Mysogyny January 16, 2008

Gender issues are suddenly in the news, and Bob Herbert is wondering where we’ve all been.  As in, could people in the US possibly just be beginning to think about these issues?  If so, what’s the big deal?

If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America. Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.

The pervasive violence against women is not even reported as revealing the mysogyny:

The cable news channels revel in stories about women (almost always young and attractive) who come to a gruesome end at the hands of violent men. The stories seldom, if ever, raise the issue of misogyny, which permeates not just the crimes themselves, but the coverage as well.

The media is perfectly aware that there are hate crimes that occur against racial and sexual minorities, even if its record of accurate reporting leaves much to be desired. But crimes against women don’t seem to count as hate crimes, Herbert is telling us.

We’ve become so used to the disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous and even violent treatment of women that we hardly notice it. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed against women and girls every day. Fashionable ads in mainstream publications play off of that violence, exploiting themes of death and dismemberment, female submissiveness and child pornography.

If we’ve opened the door to the issue of sexism in the presidential campaign, then let’s have at it. It’s a big and important issue that deserves much more than lip service.

Given the mysogyny that so many women face every day, let’s forget about who’s playing the gender card. What is much more important is that a wise parent may well feel that girls need to be brought up to be wary and fearful.

Updates December 18, 2007

1.  On punishing the victim:  Saudi King Abdullah has pardoned the woman who was gang raped 14 times, in a Wonderland case where it is one crime for a woman to be alone with a male non-family member and another one to protest a harsh sentencing.

2.  On consent of ten year old to sex with nine: Nine young men who confessed to having sex with a ten years old were allowed to walk free since the prosecutor decided that it was probably consensual.  That prosecutor has now been suspended.

More on both stories at Ms’s Feminist Daily Wire.

Sex Wars VS Farm Wars December 8, 2007

Brownfemipower has a powerful post comparing the feminist energy devoted to the porn industry with the lack of feminist energy devoted to the farm industry.   

I know that there’s more than one way to get fucked.And I only hope there will be a time when feminists fight for thirty years about the best way to end violence against farmworkers.

16 Days November 25, 2007

Today, 25 November, is the first day of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence is an international campaign originating from the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute sponsored by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership in 1991. Participants chose the dates, November 25, International Day Against Violence Against Women and December 10, International Human Rights Day, in order to symbolically link violence against women and human rights and to emphasize that such violence is a violation of human rights. This 16-day period also highlights other significant dates including November 29, International Women Human Rights Defenders Day, December 1, World AIDS Day, and December 6, which marks the Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. 

The International Red Cross is one of many groups to be a part of this campaign. One of their initiatives is to give a voice to women who are suffering from violence.

The IRC is in war zones around the world, helping many thousandsof women and girls every day. We know they have much to say andwe know how easily their voices are lost, so we’re working withwriter, photographer and long-time women’s advocate Ann Jones togive them an opportunity to speak, loudly and clearly.With digital cameras, women who have survived conflict,displacement, discrimination, sexual and domestic violencevividly document their own lives. Through these personalphotographs, stirring portraits are revealed and women cometogether to tell stories of strength, reclaim their rights andmake their voices heard.Be a part of this powerful exchange, which begins tomorrow,November 25th to kick off “16 Days of Action against GenderViolence.” Over the course of the 16 Days, you’ll be inspired bythe extraordinary changes these brave women make with the boldclicks of their cameras.Just sign up for our 16 Days e-mail list, and on each of thosedays you’ll get a special e-mail with one woman’s photo, anamazing story and a chance to add your own voice. Afterward,you’ll get occasional updates from Ann and the IRC about newstories, IRC programs empowering women, and the many ways YOUcan help.

To sign up for the IRC 16 Days list go here.   Thanks, Jender-Parents!

Raped Men and Silence November 19, 2007

A few days ago, I wrote about the story of a Saudi woman who was gang-raped. She was alone with an unrelated man at the time of the attack, which is why she was sentenced to 90 lashes, later increased to 200 when she appealed and her lawyer went to the media. What I didn’t know, and what was almost nowhere reported, was that the man who was with her was also raped– and also sentenced to 90 lashes. (He didn’t appeal.) It’s very important to remember that it’s not only violence against women that may go unreported. Jill at Feministe has the story, and a very good discussion of how its reporting plays into larger Islamophobic narratives.

Punishing the victim, then punishing her more for protesting this November 16, 2007

Just in case you were in too good a mood today, this should fix it for you:

A lawyer for a gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six-months in jail says the punishment contravenes Islamic law.The woman was initially punished for violating laws on segregation of the sexes - she was in an unrelated man’s car at the time of the attack.When she appealed, judges doubled her sentence, saying she had been trying to use the media to influence them.

Despite this, the woman and her lawyer are continuing to fight:

Her lawyer has been suspended from the case and faces a disciplinary session.Abdel Rahman al-Lahem told the BBC Arabic Service that the sentence was in violation of Islamic law:”My client is the victim of this abhorrent crime. I believe her sentence contravenes the Islamic Sharia law and violates the pertinent international conventions,” he said. “The judicial bodies should have dealt with this girl as the victim rather than the culprit.” The lawyer also said that his client his will appeal against the decision to increase her punishment.

Who knows what may happen to them as they continue their fight. (Thanks, Jender-Parents.)

A Jihad For Love November 10, 2007

This wonderful documentary profiles gay and lesbian Muslims in twelve countries.  It tells an incredibly complex story (really, many stories) that I couldn’t hope to do justice to here.  I think perhaps what struck me most was this: the people in the film are being persecuted in the name of Islam, yet it is also clear that what sustains them through this persecution is precisely their deep faith in Islam.  The stories are complex, the people are complex, the interplays between culture, religion, and politics are complex– and they all (people, cultures, religious intepretations, laws) differ tremendously from one another.  I won’t try to say much more, except to note that there is a vast amount of rich material here for those interested in sexuality, gender, self-understanding, religion, culture, textual interpretation, human rights, silencing, and on and on and on.  See it as soon as you can, and tell others about it! the director has a blog here.  And here’s an interview with the director to whet your appetite.