Social Resources
Gender
Activists
Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood, Jo Freeman
Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy. [read more]
The Proud Boys and the Long-Lived Anxieties of American Men, Adam Hochschild.
"...But one wonders if what groups like the Proud Boys are really worried about is the replacement of men by women.
A similar sense of precarious white masculinity underlay the earlier vigilante groups...
A future U.S. administration may more tightly seal the country’s borders and claim to stop the Great Replacement. But despite recent efforts by the Supreme Court, it will have a far harder time rolling back advances by American women. Which suggests that the Proud Boys — who have misogyny “baked into the rules,” Campbell writes — won’t vanish from our streets any time soon."
[read more — behind paywall]
Posted in Gender/Articles.
Why Sex-Positive Feminism Is Falling Out of Fashion, Michelle Goldberg. "...Somehow, as sex positivity went mainstream and fused with a culture shaped by pornography, attention to emotion got lost. Sex-positive feminism became a cause of some of the same suffering it was meant to remedy. Perhaps now that the old taboos have fallen, we need new ones. Not against sex, but against callousness and cruelty." (read more)
Women’s Global Strike — “The demand for a global strike led and owned by women was ignited by feminists, trade unionists and activists at the People’s General Assembly held in 2015, in New York… in 2017, the Women’s Global Call for Climate Justice supported the call for women’s global strikes starting on 8 March. This call for a Women’s Global Strike on 8 March 2020 was initiated by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), a leading network of feminist organisations and grassroots activists in Asia Pacific. APWLD’s 248 members represent groups of diverse women from 27 countries in Asia Pacific. ESCR-Net -International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights later endorsed the strike, connected local struggles to escalate the Women’s Global Strike to the global level and provided support to strengthen participants’ leadership across regions.
Women’s March — “Principles. The Women's March on Washington is a women-led movement bringing together people of all genders, ages, races, cultures, political affiliations, disabilities and backgrounds in our nation’s capital on January 19, 2019, to affirm our shared humanity and pronounce our bold message of resistance and self-determination.”
Young Women's Freedom Center — “Founded in 1993, Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC) is a leadership and advocacy organization led by systems-involved cis and trans women and young women, trans men and young men, and gender-expansive people of color who have grown up in poverty, worked in the underground street economy, and have been criminalized by social services such as foster care, welfare, and the mental health systems.”
AfroResistance — “Since 2014, we have been educating and organizing for human rights, democracy, and racial justice throughout the Americas. Through three focus areas, AfroResistance has worked to ensure that Black women and girls are leading movements for true liberation and equality.”
Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) — “a grassroots organization of Latina immigrant women with a double mission of promoting personal transformation and building community power for social and economic justice. MUA members lead our movements for justice and dignity. We achieve our mission by:
Creating an environment of understanding and confidentiality
Empowering and educating our members to provide mutual support
Offering trainings to build economic security and leadership
Working in diverse alliances on the local, regional, national, and international levels
Organizing campaigns to win immigrant, workers’ and women’s rights.
…We work to liberate society from domestic violence, war, and other abuses of power. We want an economic and political system that creates just conditions at the local and global levels so that no one has to leave their country in order to survive.”
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
Audre Lorde’s 1979 landmark lecture, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”, reflected on the women’s movement’s work with consciousness-raising groups. (read more, 5/10/23 entry)
Who Lost the Sex Wars? Amia Srinivasan. “Fissures in the feminist movement should not be buried as signs of failure but worked through as opportunities for insight… On March 8, 2017, millions of women from more than forty countries took part in the global Women’s Strike. It came about largely through the efforts of Argentine and Polish feminists, who have been leading powerful movements in their countries...building large-scale radical coalitions...is an achievement that has so far eluded Anglo-American feminists. Such coalition-building…'was anything but spontaneous. It has been patiently woven and worked on.'... That commitment is also seen in [the] insistence that feminism include more than people traditionally understood to be women. It must, they say, include people who are trans, queer, indigenous, and working class... Ni Una Menos issued a statement proposing that the next assembly adopt a motion to formalize what, the organization said, had been collectively agreed: that trans-exclusionary feminists not be given a platform at future meetings. “The Argentine movement is transfeminist,” one woman argued. “That’s how it grew, with the presence of trans and transvestites. We owe them the movement, so their inclusion is really non-negotiable.’” (read more)
Year of the Womenx: A Conversation with Charlene Carruthers, BOLD. “What I remain concerned about is how we relate to one-another, and so what practices can we glean or take up and enhance that we’ve learned from BOLD in how we treat each-other… and so how we are is really important to me. Because if we are talking about building this world beyond carcerality and beyond prison and police and punishment, now is the time to practice how we want to be with each other. How are we practicing the things that we’ve learned not only in our organizations but in our friendships, in our intimate relationships, and with our neighbors?”
Identity Politics and Social Movements — An important recent Ezra Klein Show podcast is the interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and the author of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which traces the origins of the term “identity politics.” In the podcast, Taylor argues that the weakening of social movements in the 1980s contributed to a distortion of the term’s original meaning.
Multiple Identities, Politics, Freedom, and Equality — the most important article of 2019 may prove to be “The Philosopher Redefining Equality” by Nathan Heller in the January 7 issue of The New Yorker. The article’s subhead is “Elizabeth Anderson thinks we’ve misunderstood the basis of a free and fair society.” The caption for the lead illustration is “Our real concern should be equality not in material benefits, Anderson argues, but in social relations: democratic equality.”… she decided to stay at the University of Michigan, where she is now the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies.
Videos
“Women Are On Fire,” Alicia Garza — "A woman said I don't control the channel changer in my house.... I've got to change conditions in my house, I've got to change conditions in my neighborhood, I've got to change conditions where I work."