Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Should Women of Color Call Themselves Feminists?

So this link to came to me in an email from New Demographic which is a site dedicated to discussing representation of people of color (specifically multiracial people) in the media. I thought it was interesting that the topic of the article was about feminism. According to the article there has been a lot of discussion lately about women of color and whether or not they should call themselves feminist if feminist refuse to address racism as a feminist issue. I do not think this is a new debate at all, but I like to hear if any one else has opinions on this?

http://www.racialicious.com/2008/04/28/
does-feminism-have-to-address-race/

I personally do not have any problems with calling myself a feminist (speaking as a woman of color) but I have always felt that racism was an important issue addressed in feminism. Now that I reflect on my own experiences and some of the information I have read I can defiantly see where some of these women of color are coming from. However, I also recognize that I have some privilege as a white woman also, which makes my experiences different. Although I would say that I identify more as a person of color. Hmmmm.....

Friday, April 18, 2008

Pictures!

































Consider this a call for photos! I know more people took pictures at the voting event...
If you can post on this blog, POST! If you can't we can add you as an author or you can email your photos it to anyone who can currently post and we'll put it up.
I've dug up some pictures from my camera. Some of them are ones I already posted on Facebook, but I'll put them here anyway.

Friday, April 11, 2008

TBTN

Take Back the Night 2008 was amazing!! Everyone should check out the poem Stacyann Chin wrote about it:
www.myspace.com/stacyannchin

Friday, April 4, 2008

Report: Men still not pulling weight on chores

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/
personal/03/06/men.share.chores.ap/index.html

T-shirt design

Given our last discussion on sexual assault, I found this article timely.
The New York Times published this article about allowing rape survivors to "own the experience", says the creator of these shirts. I think it would take a very brave woman to wear such a shirt.

This T-Shirt Is About Rape

t shirt

In 2004, Jennifer Baumgardner distributed T-shirts with a bold message across their fronts in blocky blue text: “I Had an Abortion.” More recently, the Williamsburg-based writer and activist decided to apply her T-shirt approach to consciousness-raising to the subject of rape.

But the straightforward approach of her first rape T-shirt didn’t seem quite right for shirts she hoped to distribute on campuses through a sex-education Web site, as reported in today’s Big City column.

She and a graphic designer friend tried to counter the passivity of the sentence construction “I was raped,” by placing the sentence in a cartoon dialogue bubble, in bright pink.

“Too ebullient,” said Ms. Baumgardner.

A third approach went in the opposite direction: a white T-shirt with one word — “Raped” — pseudo spray-painted on in black.

“Too shocking,” she decided.

Finally, she approached her friend, Vinnie Angel, a graphic artist perhaps best known for designing Vinnie’s Tampon Case. His concept: a safe with its door wide open, revealing inside a small notecard that reads, in handwriting, “I was raped.”

“What the safe design loses is shock value,” said Ms. Baumgardner, but that’s not what she was going for in the first place.

What was she going for? A shirt that would let rape victims “own the experience,” she says, and would help chip away the cone of silence that surrounds a crime with humiliation at its core.

A shirt that would start conversations.



http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/this-t-shirt-is-about-rape/index.html?hp