Day: July 11, 2013

Save Greek “undesirables” from internment camps

jennysaul1 Comment

First migrants and recent immigrants were rounded up from Greece’s streets and forced into internment camps.Then they threw the drug users in. Next came the sex workers, forcibly HIV tested, publicly humiliated, and imprisoned.

Now they’re coming for transgender men and women — and the list of “undesirables” just keeps longer.

Operation Zeus is a cleansing campaign targeting and imprisoning the most vulnerable members of Greek society, accompanied by spikes in racism, gender hate and homophobia.

Sign a petition to the EU here.

(Thanks, S!)

Conference: Feminist Philosophy and Pornography

jennysaul

  
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY AND PORNOGRAPHY
  
16th – 18th of September 2013, Berlin

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Main Building (Unter den Linden 6), Room 3059
 

SPEAKERS:

NANCY BAUER (Tufts University, US): What Philosophy Can’t Teach Us About Sexual Objectification
AMNERIS CHAPARRO (University of Essex, UK): Inegalitarian Pornography: Harm to Dignity
MATT DRABEK (University of Iowa, US): Gender Subordination and Pornography’s Authority
ANNE W. EATON (University of Illinois at Chicago, US): A Sex-Positive Antiporn Feminism
NICOLE HALL (University of Edinburgh, UK): ‘Sexiness’ and the Problem of Pornography
KATHARINE JENKINS (University of Sheffield, UK): What Are Women For? Pornography and Social Ontology
RAE LANGTON (University of Cambridge, UK & MIT, US): Pornography and ‘Sex Positive’ Feminism
HANS MAES (University of Kent, UK): Falling in Lust: On Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects
ISHANI MAITRA (University of Michigan, US): Revisiting the Authority Problem
MARY KATE MCGOWAN (Wellesley College, US): On How Pornography Can be Used to Enact Discrimination
EVANGELIA (LINA) PAPADAKI (University of Crete, Greece): Pornography: Objectification and Personification
NICOLE WYATT (University of Calgary, Canada): Naming and Refusing: Austinian approaches to MacKinnon on Silencing
ROBIN ZHENG (University of Michigan, US): A Case Against Racialized Sexual Preferences: Why Yellow Fever Isn’t Flattering

Registration for the event is now open! Please register by the 26th of August 2013 via email (feminismhu AT gmail.com). The conference fee is 10 Euros (full)/ 5 Euros (reduced) and payable on the day. The fee covers coffee breaks as well as a vegan/ vegetarian buffet at the conference reception (to be held on the 16th of September). Places are limited, so please register as early as possible.
 
This event is part of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Symposium Series Feminist Philosophy and…. For further information about the Symposium Series and past events, please see http://blogs.hu-berlin.de/feminist_philosophy/. For queries concerning the event, please contact Mari Mikkola (mari.mikkola AT hu-berlin.de).
 
Best wishes from local organisers,
Hilkje Haenel
Cathrin Hoefs
Mari Mikkola

Woman’s work: an Italian freelance reporter in Syria

Monkey

An interesting and rather sad piece.

People have this romantic image of the freelancer as a journalist who’s exchanged the certainty of a regular salary for the freedom to cover the stories she is most fascinated by. But we aren’t free at all; it’s just the opposite. The truth is that the only job opportunity I have today is staying in Syria, where nobody else wants to stay. And it’s not even Aleppo, to be precise; it’s the frontline. Because the editors back in Italy only ask us for the blood, the bang-bang. I write about the Islamists and their network of social services, the roots of their power—a piece that is definitely more complex to build than a frontline piece. I strive to explain, not just to move, to touch, and I am answered with: “What’s this? Six thousand words and nobody died?”

You can read more here.

California prison hunger strikes

philodaria

Lisa Guenther has a really moving and informative post up on the California prison hunger strikes over at NewAPPS. Well worth a full read, but here’s just a snippet:

The issues raised by the strike action of the Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective and the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition are more than “just” prison issues.  They are more than “just” human rights issues.  They are issues in which the very possibility of a meaningful life – both behind bars and beyond them – is at stake.  To live in a world where anyone is treated this way is to be implicated in the practice of torture.  Torture is about power, but it’s also about meaning.  In her classic book, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry describes the logic of torture in terms of an “unmaking of the world.”  I cannot think of a better description for the SHU.  You don’t need electrical cords or dental drills to torture a person; you just need to stuff them in a concrete box and force them to bear the whole weight of their being in isolation from others.