March 9, 2014
by GUTS
- Happy International Women’s Day! Yesterday, women across Canada joined together to celebrate women’s accomplishments and draw attention to the work still needing to be done. Want to learn more about the feminist discourses and debates that inevitably arise during International Women’s week? The Guardian’s “In defence of feminist dissent” is a good place to start. Then check out these links:
- South Carolina politicians are trying to censor academic reading lists by cutting funding to colleges that assign texts LGBT content, which would include Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home. Says Bechdel: “It’s sad and absurd that the College of Charleston is facing a funding cut for teaching my book—a book which is after all about the toll that this sort of small-mindedness takes on people’s lives.”
- Sex work IS work! But, warns Melissa Gira Grant in this week’s insightful Nation piece: “this should not be confused with uncritical sentiment, as if sex work is only work if it’s ‘good’ work, if we love to do it. Being expected to perform affection for our jobs might feel familiar to sex workers…To insist that sex workers only deserve rights at work if they have fun, if they love it, if they feel empowered by it is exactly backward. It’s a demand that ensures they never will.”
- And Kaley Kennedy provides a crucial overview of sex work, the law, and the labour movement in Canada.
- We must examine the “ways that we have absorbed sexism and heterosexism. These are the norms in this dragon we have been born into – and we need to examine these distortions with the same kind of openness and dedication that we examine racism.” This from an conversation between Audre Lorde and James Baldwin: Revolutionary Hope
- “I became the man who wore a sanitary pad.” How a school dropout from a poor family in southern India is helping to revolutionize rural women’s menstrual health one cheap-pad-making-machine at a time.
- Verso’s radical feminist reading list is a helpful guide for when you are reading writing by women this spring.
- This review of Elizabeth Comack’s Racialized Policing offers a great reading into Comack’s crucial book which questions the social and economic logic of zero-tolerance policing and “documents the violent, and, too often, murderous, ways in which Canadian police forces establish ‘Peace, Order, and Good Government.'”
- Be sure to keep your eye on this month’s New Inquiry issue Consent, which promises to tackle sex, choice, and surveillance: “A long time ago the word consent meant this: ‘feeling together.’ Now it’s all like ‘give, allow, submit to, go along with,’ and it’s hard not to think that the linguistic slip—from parity to a few impaired decisions—has us all in some inhuman bondage.”
- And then, if you’ve made it this far, why not listen to one hour of community supported radio dedicated to IWD.
