by Guts
- If you are in the Toronto area, be sure to check out artist Allyson Mitchell’s Kill Joy’s Kastle: A Lesbian-Feminist Haunted House. “This ground-up, maximalist, not-to-be-missed haunted house has been nailed, knit, and glued by a coven of dedicated feminists over the course of the past three months.” For more information about the haunted house, check out justseeds. For those living outside of the city, Bitch Magazine gives a guided tour with photographs.
- Listen to Humera Jabir on the CBC radio discuss feminism, the Quebec “Values Charter,” and Janette Bertrand’s open letter of support for the charter. Humera wrote the widely read Maisonneuve blog post “The Hijab is Not a Political Tool.”
- Nancy Fraser’s Guardian article on the association between neoliberalism and contemporary feminism (it is appropriately called “How Feminism became Capitalism’s Handmaiden”) has garnered some interesting responses:
- Flavia Dzodan at Red Light Politics and Brenna Bhandar and Denise Ferreira da Silve at Critical Legal Thinking take Fraser to task for her wholesale rejection of identity politics; Fraser’s critique, they argue, needlessly obscures the intersection between race and gender and the ongoing strategic forms of resistance by the non-white feminists.
- The issue for Dzodan, Bhandar, and Ferreira da Silva is not Fraser’s critique of the capitalist-patriarchy matrix but rather her dismissal of Black and Third World Feminists who have long been engaged with “critiques of capitalist forms of property, exchange, paid and unpaid labour, along with culturally embedded and structural forms of patriarchal violence.”“Writing from the early 1970s onwards, scholars like […] A.Y. Davis, Audre Lorde, Himani Bannerji, Avtar Brah, Selma James, Maria Mies, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Silvia Federici, Dorothy Roberts and scores of others […] have systematically engaged a feminist critique of not only state capitalism, but of a globalised capitalism rooted in colonial legacies.”
- Jacyln Friedman takes on the “manosphere” – the dark corners of the internet “where participants rant, bond, and spew ideas so misogynist they make Silvio Berlusconi look like Gloria Steinem” – also known as the breeding ground of the “Men’s Right Movement.”
- “Since its unveiling this spring, the Lean In campaign has been reeling in a steadily expanding group of tens of thousands of followers with its tripartite E-Z plan for getting to the top.” A clever article on the bizarre “global community” that has emerged out of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. (“I really want to invite you to join our community!” Rachel Thomas, Lean In’s President told the assembled. “You’ll get daily inspiration and insights.”)
- For readers of Flannery O’Conner or for people who simply enjoy literary history, check out this unpublished short story at the Atlantic.
- “Trans kids, washrooms and the new harassment”: A quick read about the scare-tactic campaigns of transphobic groups in the US and their effects upon progressive policy work (e.g. “trans student accommodation”)
