by GUTS
- One day after Governor General David Johnston’s throne speech was released, Houston-based fracking company, Southwestern Energy, obtained an injunction to stop the Mi’kmaw Nation’s ongoing peaceful protest against fracking in Elsipogtog, N.B. On the morning of October 17, swarms of RCMP aggressively served this injunction in accordance to Harper’s natural resource development agenda. Learn more about Canadian government’s historically violent relationship with the Mi’kmaw Nation in Pamela Palmater’s piece Feather’s verses Guns, and read about the colonial and patriarchal undertones of the throne speech in Doug Cuthand’s piece at The Star Phoenix.
- Along with Canadian thanksgiving, we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day this week, named after the world’s first computer programmer. Check out some other inventions by women that dudes got credit for posted by Mother Jones.
- If you are feeling frustrated with men’s rights activists who feel it is necessary to run for city council in order to have their voices heard, this 1915 pamphlet by Alice Duer Miller might bring some much needed comic relief.
- “The eager exchange of one’s labor for nothing but passion eerily echoes the long-held societal assumption that housewives perform domestic labor out of love.” Jennifer Pan on riot grrrl, unpaid internships, and the widening gap between cultural and material feminism.
- Brooklyn-based Pétroleuse Press provides online access to some classics by Valerie Solanas, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, and many others, and introduces more recent articles on topics like servitude and service work, communization, and the subversion of community. Overall, looks like a great feminist reading list on one lovely website.
- Sara Ahmed’s recent post, Feminism is Sensational, calls on women to share our experiences of racism and sexism with each other to form a feminist community. Check out the Canadian thread of the everyday sexism project which is cataloging women’s experiences of sexism in an open and collective forum.
- The LIES collective’s new website provides access to individual essays from Issue 1. Also, this sneak peak of Issue 2 is worth getting excited about.
- Nancy Fraser’s piece on how feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden–and how to reclaim it makes some important points about contemporary feminism’s proximity to neoliberalism. Fraser’s reductive historical reading of western feminism, however, along with her failure to acknowledge those feminist thinkers and discourses that have raised similar points previous to her, is quite frustrating.
- Nitasha Tiku investigates “orgasmic meditation” and confronts the limitations of sex positivism in her article My life with the thrill-clit cult