May 25, 2014
- “When a doctor examines a woman, it is a moment of acute vulnerability. And it lasts until she is sitting up and fully clothed. It lasts until she gathers herself and leaves, stepping back into the “normal” world and her place within it.” A candid personal essay by Gynecological Teaching Assistants Lania Knight on her experiences of bodies, poverty, work, relationships, and sex.
- Are we all so confused about the Ontario elections?! Things are not any clearer this week as progressive activists, including longtime feminist and working class activist Winnie Ng, sign an open letter to Andrea Horwath, criticizing her right-wing populism. Dismal times.
- Devastating gender violence: 6 dead and 13 Wounded in California after a man open fires on Santa Barbara campus, siting sexual frustration and rejection as the cause of his rage.
- The Crunk Feminist Collective weighs in on the (now old on the internet) bell hooks’ vs. beyoncé debate.
- Liz Phair gave us feminist pop-rock. Now she gives us oral history about making feminist pop-rock.
- More disappointments in Nova Scotia as nurses are suspended from work for walking off the job. Nova Scotia nurses went on strike, bringing attention to hospital under staffing. The administration’s response? Make it so that there are fewer nurses!
- Not surprisingly, Sheryl Sandberg says she doesn’t have time to lean in with hotel workers in Cambridge Mass.
- Mary Adkins argues that the legal definitions which define rape as a use of force as opposed to a lack of consent are just one more example of how the law perpetuates patriarchy and rape culture.
- This week in historical letters: Anaïs Nin gives Henry Miller a what-for.
- “The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. […] But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.” Neither particularly feminist nor Canadian, but really really good: The Case for Reparation.