Manly Cupcakes

Courtesy of J-Bro (of course). As he notes, you’d be making a mistake not to click on ‘about us’.

Many thanks to Mr Jender for technical assistance.

A Virtual March on Washington, DC.

If you’ve tuned out on health care reform,  along with perhaps the Democratic Party, you might not realize that Obama is holding a summit on it next week.

A call-in campaign for the 24th and 25th of February is being organized at this site.  You can easily join in on the effort to strengthen and save health care reform in the US.  The goal is to get 1,000,000 people involved.  The important public option may end up with a second life.

A major force behind the march is DKos blogger, nyeve.   Below is a video she shot in Connecticut at one of the major free clinics being organized in convention centers in major cities around the country.  As she comments, she points out the contribution to stop reform made by Lieberman, a senator from that state:

CFP: Ethics of Embodiment

Hypatia Special Issue Volume 26 Number 3 (Summer 2011): Ethics of Embodiment
Guest Editors: Debra Bergoffen and Gail Weiss
CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2010
Papers should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes and
bibliography, prepared for anonymous review, and accompanied by an
abstract of no more than 200 words. For details please see: http://depts.washington.edu/hypatia/submission_guidelines.shtml

This Hypatia Special Issue is interested in showcasing the diversity of ethical approaches to embodiment. Despite the centrality of the body in discussions of gender, race, class, religion, ethnicity, and ability and their respective intersections, the implications of feminist analyses of the body as a ground for ethical theorizing, as the subject of ethical demands, and as the very means by which these demands are articulated, are yet to be the subject of a volume or journal issue. We seek to remedy this important gap by calling for original essays by feminists who draw from different philosophical traditions and practices to develop the ethical implications of human and/or nonhuman embodied experience.

Contributors may wish to consider questions such as:

How does bodily vulnerability inform ethical demands?
What ethical traditions offer the most (or least) productive resources for considering the ethical implications of embodiment?
How might a focus on embodiment re-align existing ethical theories and practices (e.g. medical practices and public policy)?
What challenges does an emphasis upon the primacy of embodied experience pose to traditional, cognitive-based, ethical theorizing?
How might considerations of nonhuman forms of embodiment affect ethical understandings of human embodiment (and vice versa)?
What current bodily norms are challenged by an ethics of embodiment?
How can the suffering of people who have been socially, politically, medically, and/or legally disenfranchised be alleviated by considering the ethical dimensions of the body?
How would an embodied ethics contribute to new ways of thinking about space, time, and/or intersubjectivity?
How might an ethics, grounded in the body, affect and transform both individual and collective lives?

Please submit your paper by 3/15/10 to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hypa.
When you submit, make sure to select “Special Issue Ethics of Embodiment” as your
manuscript type, and also send an email to Debra Bergoffen (dbergoff@gmu.edu) and Gail Weiss (gweiss@gwu.edu) notifying them of the title of the paper you’ve submitted.

Pregnant Woman Arrested for Falling Down

Thanks to RF for this appalling story:

Life can’t get much worse for Christine Taylor. Last month, after an upsetting phone conversation with her estranged husband, Ms. Taylor became light-headed and fell down a flight of stairs in her home. Paramedics rushed to the scene and ultimately declared her healthy. However, since she was pregnant with her third child at the time, Taylor thought it would be best to be seen at the local ER to make sure her fetus was unharmed.
That’s when things got really bad and really crazy. Alone, distraught, and frightened, Taylor confided in the nurse treating her that she hadn’t always been sure she’d wanted this baby, now that she was single and unemployed. She’d considered both adoption and abortion before ultimately deciding to keep the child. The nurse then summoned a doctor, who questioned her further about her thoughts on ending the pregnancy. Next thing Taylor knew, she was being arrested for attempted feticide.

More on rape and responsibility

At the risk of providing only more ire-stoking fodder, I’ll pass on the link to this further discussion of rape and responsibility, on the BBC world service’s ‘World Have Your Say’ programme.
There’s discussion of the show here at Pandagon (Amanda Marcotte was a participant in the discussion). I haven’t listened all the way to the end yet, but I haven’t been quite so enraged by this show as by MM.

(Thanks jender for the link!)