December 29, 2013
by GUTS
- While this rare footage of Hannah Arendt on Zur Person, a German TV show, was released earlier this summer, we are reposting it for those who might have initially missed it. The 1964 interview begins with a question that interrogates Arendt’s views on women’s role in philosophy. Arendt, who was famously tight-lipped about her views on feminism, responds, “[Philosophy] need not remain a masculine occupation. It is possible that one day a woman will be a philosopher.” Importantly, Arendt did not see consider herself to be a philosopher; rather, her interests were oriented towards political science.
- Gender Focus recaps its most popular posts of 2013. Topics cover everything from Seth McFarlane’s “Boobs” song at the Oscars to abortion in Canada.
- The Cut evaluates “Twitter feminism,” an “emerging social media community behind several hashtags that cracked the site’s overall trending list and made their way into listicles and thinkpieces this year.” #TwitterFeminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #NotYourAsianSidekick are just a few of the popular hashtags that the piece discusses.
- Check out the articles in the inaugural issue of Them, a literary journal of trans* writers.
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The New Yorker shares a previously unpublished short story called The Iceberg by Zelda Fitzgerald. “In 1918, Zelda Sayre, later Zelda Fitzgerald, won a prize for this story, which she published in the Sidney Lanier High School Literary Journal. She was seventeen or eighteen years old when she wrote it; she would soon meet F. Scott Fitzgerald, her escape hatch from the restrictive world of Montgomery, Alabama, into a tumultuous life of literary striving.”
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Autostraddle selects 10 women who should have been chosen as The Advocates’ person of the year in place of Pope Francis.
- “Ignoring Women’s Work: Yet Another Christmas Tradition.” Christmas is over, but this blog post nicely examines the exploitation of women’s “labour of love” during the holiday season. “‘I love that moment when you first come downstairs and you can tell the turkey’s already in the oven.’ So says the placard outside my local Sainsbury’s, complete with the picture of a traditional Christmas roast… Every time I see this advertisement I’m reminded of one thing: the trivialisation or even erasure of unpaid domestic labour, especially at Christmas.”
- “2013 The Year in Gay Rights”: Salon provides an overview of the year’s most important events in the gay-rights movement in the United States.
- The Atlantic considers the “complex legacy of the female robot” in this short article on Spize Jonze’s new film, Her. “There may be an underlying reason for this tendency to portray caring, concerned AI programs as female. As Robin James, a University of North Carolina, Charlotte associate professor and Cyborgology contributor, recently pointed out, technology now aids in many of the tasks once performed mainly by women: scheduling, reminding, diagnosing, helping, etc.”
- Real Colored Girls’s most recent post, “Ratchet Me This: How Do We Ride for Pleasure in a Pimp Culture?”, deconstructs the “interlocking systems of oppression that create the material conditions under which Black women experience bodily and psychic harm,” and in doing so, lays out its vision for a “revolution for Black women.”
- This is absurd, but we are posting it anyway. The Guardian presents a quiz testing your knowledge of feminist news from 2013.
- Eurostar Group is launching the ePad Femme, an “eight-inch Android-based tablet that comes with apps pre-loaded.” According to press photos, the pre-selected apps include: “Cloathing Size Conversion,” “Daily Yoga,” “Yoga for Women,” “Women’s Fitness,” “Women’s Assistant,” “Finest Perfume for Women,” “Women’s Log,” “Shopping List,” “Our Groceries,” “Indian Curry Recipes,” “Middle Eastern Recipes,” “Arabic Recipes,” and “Yogurt Cannon.” Nair, the company’s VP, insists that the ePad Femme “isn’t sexist.”
- Support the Cree Language Classroom in Montreal Campaign. Writer and activist Chelsea Vowel reports: “Here I am, in Quebec, struggling to not lose my Cree language. There is only one Indigenous language class in Montreal: Inuktitut from Nunavik. This program is fairly recent. You cannot learn Cree here, or Mohawk, or Innu-Aiman, or Atikamekw, or Anishinaabe, or Mi’maq, or Maliseet, or Abenaki, or Wendat or Naskapi, despite these ten languages all being represented within this province.”
- Check out the Centre for Feminist Pedagogy (CFP), a Montreal based organization that “promotes the practice of feminism through readings, discussions, workshops, screenings, parties, performances and other events that are free and open to all.” Between June and August 2013, CFP offered workshops, film screenings, “feminist dance parties,” in an effort to cultivate a “space for open conversation and knowledge production, unencumbered by the… ideological limitations of traditional academic institutions.” Its resource library is certainly worth perusing.
