Live in Boston? Want to get involved with a really awesome organisation and work for some fantastic people? Then look no further than the Center for New Words, who are now looking for interns. Here’s the release:

Ever wish you could get more involved in making spaces & places where women’s words matter?

Well, here’s a great shot to do just that. We’re in the process of hiring Center for New Words INTERNS for the Spring of 2009. Could it be you or someone you know?

Specifically, we’re looking for folks who want to do any or all of the following, 12-20 hours per week:

-promote our programming and outreach to new communities
-help make our events run smoothly
-plan a fun spring fundraising event
-research grants and other funding opportunities
-plan, manage & promote our WAM!2009 Conference
-gain crucial office skills

Good candidates must be willing to commit to a set number of hours per week, including time for supervision. Fearless in the face of detail. Computer/internet savvy (Mac especially) very helpful. We are not able to offer a stipend but are happy to work with schools to help you earn college credit. Feminists of all colors, cultures, and preferences encouraged to apply.

TO APPLY: Mail or email resume and cover letter to:
Intern Search
Center for New Words
7 Temple Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
email: cnw@centerfornewwords.org (subject: Intern Search)

Not you? Please help us spread the word!

See you at the Center (maybe for an interview)…

xo
Jaclyn

P.S. Here’s what Alexandra Smith, our recent intern, has to say about her experience at CNW:

“Being an intern as CNW has given me an invaluable opportunity to put my feminist beliefs to work, and take real action for change. Every day, I learn more about connecting women, our allies and communities as a whole. The commitment, intelligence and fearlessness of the people at CNW is inspiring, and the atmosphere of the office is incredibly supportive. CNW has given me hands-on experience in programming, fundraising and outreach, all with the mission of strengthening the voice of women from all aspects of society – and nothing feels more rewarding than actively (passionately!) working toward that goal.”

I’m late, because the Transgender Day of Remembrance was yesterday. I don’t feel knowledgeable enough about transgender violence to adequately articulate the huge problem that it is, so I encourage you to head over to Amber’s blog, where she’s compiled some links of some good reads.

I’d also like to remind everyone about two great events going on today at the University of Alberta.

Transformative Stories: Crip and Queer Art as Activism is at 1:00 in Tory 1-91.

Eli Clare - “Gaping, Gawking, Staring: Living in Marked Bodies” is being held in Humanities L-2 at 3:00.

I really recommend checking these out today, along with anything else you can catch at the Exposure Festival, which ends tomorrow.

I’ve been quiet for a long time. I haven’t written anything thought-provoking since the end of August, maybe early September, but that’s pushing it. I have some valid reasons for it, like the fact that I’m stressed, that I’ve weaved in and out of depression for the past few months, or that I’ve convinced myself I’m too damn busy. These are all factors, of course, but I wouldn’t say they’re the reasons.

I feel I got tired of challenging people on their shit.

I’ve become tired of engaging the ignorant and the uninformed. I’ve become tired of being the subject of other people’s anger. People don’t want to have their own shit shoved in their face for them to smell it, and they get angry when someone does it. That, I can understand. I don’t think it’s right for them to get upset about things they’ve said and done, but I can understand it.

This revelation came to me after engaging several people from my hometown on their own fat hate. The matter in question was a photo which I won’t post here, and the comments that followed. Too many bad experiences under my belt, I gave them a link to Fat Hate Bingo and left it at that.

I returned to the image today to see that a few others had stood up where I chose not to. What I saw gave me the courage to add some more of my thoughts, then some more, and then more after that. I was shaking with both anger at what was being said and the excitement of challenging others. For a slight taste:

Hey derek i appreciate the input but hey next time keep it to yourself…

As I engage them to check their privilege:

So it’s a privilege to eat yourself into oblivion?

Being a smoker and a drinker, I am constantly reminded of the harm I choose to inflict upon my own body by other people, sometimes politely, and other times abrasively and rude. Don’t forget about shaming. I can’t even count the numerous amounts of time people have tried to shame me in public for smoking and drinking. But it’s my privilege, right Derek?

And that’s all I’m willing to add here. Gawd, I was saying shit like that back in high school. What does this have to do with ANYTHING? Right, it’s always about you.

Tangent aside, I was reminded today of the importance of challenging the desire to remain silent. It’s easy, it’s painless. Speaking up is hard, and we’re bound to compromise relationships, infuriate the willfully ignorant, and quite possibly face violence, be it physical or not. I’m not sure where else to go with this, so I’ll end with a very important reminder:

I didn’t come to feminism to make friends.

After tackling The View two weeks ago, Sarah’s at it again, this time looking at car marketing.

Click here to watch.

There’s a great project that’s come out of the University of Alberta Women’s Centre, at the hands of a great person (I won’t name her out of respect for anonymity), called (Mis)Conceptions: Expressing Reproductive Rights.

It’s a lot like PostSecret, in that she’s asking people to send in postcards with pro-choice messages on them. Here are a couple of them:

If you’d like to submit your own postcards, it’s definitely encouraged, and they’ll be posted here. Just send them to:

Box 37
Students’ Union Building
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB
T6G 2J7

Please pass along the word, and check out the other postcards as they get posted here.

That’s right; one year ago today, I began this blog. It’s my third blog, but the first one I put actual effort into.

I remember the week or so leading up to Doing Feminism’s creation. I wasn’t satisfied with my former blog, and wanted to start anew. Days passed where all I would think about was a name and an intention for the blog. On November 10, I wrote my first post, with a description of why I settled for the title, “Doing Feminism.”

I picked the title, “Doing Feminism”, because I don’t think it cuts it to just identify as “feminist”. There needs to be more than just stating that someone is a feminist. I mean, hell, most of the people I know identify as feminists, but how many of them actually do feminism? Not many. So, this is a space for people to do feminism, to invoke change. I certainly do hope we can create some new ideas for change, or maybe cause a bit of a ruckus once in a while.

It’s amazing to think about what has passed in a year’s time. I’ve expanded as a writer, I’ve challenged myself, and some of my views have completely changed, notably my original anti-sex work position. Blogging has been a great tool for me to lead a healthy life, to develop critical thinking skills, but, most importantly, I’ve made some great friends along the way. (That’s a partial list, so please, don’t think anything if you’re not there!)

I’d just like to thank everyone for reading this blog and for being a part of it through commenting. It’s been been trying at times, but the benefits of blogging far outweigh those costs. So thank you all, really. I look forward to seeing this blog grow with your help, and seeing where it leads us to.

Best,
Derek

Via Toothpaste for Dinner

I’ve been neglecting my blog lately. I’m not even going to attempt to cover everything I haven’t written about, both important and trivial. Perhaps most important of all, Obama’s won. Also important, of course, was the number of propositions that both passed and didn’t pass. We had an election in Canada, which I believe I failed to cover (not surprisingly), and elected another Conservative minority. I can only hope the presence of Obama influences voters for the next election.

I’ve been busy, which is why I haven’t been blogging, but I’m also coming to recognise I have a problem dealing with my anxiety. With blogging (and any other form of writing), I set standards for myself, but become anxious about those standards, and, as a result, end up writing nothing. Except for my academic work, I haven’t written anything notable since the end of August.

Anyway, I’m aware of this problem and so I’m really working at solving it now. I should be back soon to blogging regularly, or so I hope. It won’t be as much as the summer months, but it’ll be something. Unfortunately academic life really sucks any other kind of life out of me for roughly eight months out of the year.

My apologies to those who actually enjoy reading this, and my thanks to those of you who still are still reading.

I’m currently writing a paper on feminist activism and blogging. I wanted to focus on issues that affect WoC that are tackled through blogging, but the research is very scarce there, so I’m going to broaden it to feminist activism in general, I think. My paper is in its very early stages, so, in reality, it could branch off to be more specific at any time. I may end up limiting it to feminist issues in Canada, but I’m not sure at the moment.

This is where you come in. I need to conduct an interview(s) for my paper with a feminist blogger(s). If you’re interested, please email me or leave a comment saying you’re interested. I would need to get your consent via email or fax (I would send you the form), and then we’d likely conduct the interview through email, depending on your geographical location, resources, etc.

Feel free to ask any questions you might have. I look forward to hearing from you!

I can’t believe I’m posting this just now, but anyway, here’s my interview with Laura Kipnis from September 16. Laura is a professor of media studies at Northwestern University and the author of several books, including Against Love, Bound and Gagged, and The Female Thing. She was at the University of Alberta for a talk entitled, “Self-Deception: Theory and Practice.” Here’s Laura:

I’ll start us off with my first question, and that’s on the topic of your new book. Can you tell us a little bit about what that’s going to be about?

Well, the title is How to Become a Scandal, and it’s hard to talk about it, because I am in the middle of it, and I’m a writer who tends to figure things out as I’m writing, so I don’t really have a lot of conclusions, but I am really fascinated by the question of how people get themselves into scandals. I’m less interested in celebrity scandal, which I think as the commodification of scandal, in a way the trivialisation of it, but I’m interested in, in a way more ordinary people, or people who weren’t previously celebrities, and how they come to ruin their lives, particularly in ways that get national attention or raise national outcry. But not just that side of it, but also the audience side, how the audience responds to it, and the particular pleasures involved in watching people wreck their lives.

Your lecture today is on self-deception. How would you say that relates to scandal?

Well, there are different theories, both popular theories and academic theories about self-deception. One of the reasons academic writers, like philosophers and psychologists are interested in self-deception is because it is thought to passively reveal the structure of the mind. You know, what kind of minds do we have if you can both know something and not know it at the same time. Like, have a desire to do something, know it could potentially ruin your life, but do it anyway. So, it sort of suggests that the way the mind is structured is that there are parts of it that are not fully accessible to the other parts, which of course corresponds to a more Freudian theory of the mind. So there are all sorts of questions about self-deception that arise, but once again, that there’s this interesting pleasure that we get out of watching other people deceive themselves, where it’s not something that we tend to think of that we do ourselves. So there’s a kind of split in the audience in regard to other peoples’ self-deception that is similar to the split of the self-deceivers themselves. So I’m interested in that, I guess, circularity.

So, scandal and self-deception, are both voluntary, or performances?

Well, that’s one of the interesting questions, is that there is a performance aspect, you could say. I mean, there’s something circus-like, you could say some of these scandal protagonists, or performers, if you want to call them that, are setting up these theatrical situations to bring about certain kinds of outcomes. So yeah, I think there’s definitely a performance aspect of it that’s very interesting, and the scandals themselves can be very theatrical; they can be these very convoluted narratives with all these interesting narrative details, so one of the interesting things about writings about scandals is picking out these elements that are narrative and symbolic and literary and retelling them as narratives, so that makes an interesting subject to write on.

Why do you think we, as participators in other peoples’ scandals, why do you think we’re so invested in that?

Well, that really is the question I’m trying to figure out, and I think to some degree, we get to play the role of public superegos. We’re invited into the scenario, because you have to think about scandal as requiring an audience. If there’s no audience, there’s no scandal. So, it’s not just that there are these people, other people who provoke scandals. Our parts in it are even more essential, because if no one pays attention to a scandal, it’s not a scandal. So, we get involved and called upon to play a certain role, which I think is the role of the superego, the cultural superego, and part of the pleasure, you could say there’s a sadistic pleasure in thrashing other people for their foibles, and I think it also it lets us off the hook for our own foibles. So there’s this moment of this scandal pact between the protagonist and the audience, so it’s a kind of sadomasochistic pact, where it’s a culturally sanctioned form of sadism. It lets you feel exonerated from that same kind of propensity yourself. So there’s a kind of self-delusion for the audience as well, by their own exemption from those kinds of fates. So I think it’s complicated, psychically complicated.

And who would you say is the audience for self-deception?

Well, all of us, to the extent that we’re social participants, and to the extent that we’re media citizens, I think it’s sort of impossible not to be a participant. So, whether you claim to be above it or not, and, you know, some people are more invested in it than others, but I think it’s the same thing as the public in general, you know, the citizenry.

How do you feel gender works into scandal?

For one thing, I think scandal tends to reinforce gender stereotypes, so there’s a lot of policing around sexual morality. I mean, we talk about the John Edwards scandal, the American presidential candidate, so that’s a very predictable kind of scandal. On another level, politician adultery, it reinforces a lot of gender stereotypes, you know, the hound dog, the man who’s thinking with his dick, the twit he’s involved with.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

No, just that it’s a work-in-progress, and so it’s always interesting to give something that you don’t really feel quite as settled in your ideas and to hear what the response from the audience is. This is, in fact, the first time I’m giving this as a paper, so it always is a bit, you feel a bit exposed and not secure about what you’re saying, which is, in a way, more fun to do.

Here’s another post from my blog for my Feminism and Sexual Assault class. My conclusion is a bit polemical, I think, so feel free to critique it. I think these are some very important questions, though.

Discussion in class this week has been extremely interesting, to say the least. Sharon Marcus in particular stirred up a significant bit of controversy with her Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention, namely her assertion that women can prevent rape by interrupting the rape script - that is, learning the script and learning when and how to interrupt it. Women can do this, she argues, by acting aggressively, by utilising their “will, agency, and capacity for violence,” things the rape script leaves out by constructing women as passive and subjects of fear, not violence.

The solution seems like a good one, especially considering the statement in her conclusion, “we will be waiting for a very long time if we wait for men to decide not to rape.” Her words ring true: Unless a significant other, daughter, or other woman close to a man is (knowingly) at risk of being raped, the majority of men have no vested interest in ending a problem that keeps men in power by subjugating women through fear.

That said, when Marcus speaks of “a narrative of rape, a series of steps and signals whose typical initial moments we can learn to recognize and whose final outcome we can learn to stave off,” I become wary. The implication is that there are steps to a rape that are, if not identical, then similar, and that women can learn this and thereby successfully avoid rape. Women must disrupt the rape script by becoming agents rather than passive victims.

Is this victim-blaming? Of course it is. The message is that if you’re about to be raped and don’t act, you will be raped because you didn’t act, because you didn’t do The Right Thing. Nevertheless, it’s also possibly the most realistic approach to rape prevention I’ve come across.

With the current state of matters, the best solution may be for women to become violent, assertive, and to utilise their strength. Such a strategy acts as a prevention to both stranger and acquaintance rape. Until the rape epidemic is brought to a halt, it’s an imperfect solution, but a solution nonetheless.

This strategy would, arguably, prevent individual rapes from happening and may even bring down the rates of sexual assault, but it is by no means a solution. Women as a whole, generalised group, cannot be made to be responsible for bringing an end to rape. Men, while ultimately responsible, refuse to be held accountable. I argue, then, that it is feminists’ responsibility to end rape.

If men do not acknowledge their role in ending sexual violence, then feminists must bear the task rather than continue to insist that it is, in fact, the responsibility of men. We’re aware of the magnitude of the problem. Marcus points out that law fails to prevent rape; rather, law deals with rape after it has already occurred. A solution, then, is a push for further education and a firm contestation of rape culture. Men will, in my mind, stop raping women when they’re educated about rape and when sexual violence ceases to be glorified and eroticised.