Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Kids Today! So Spoiled

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Ampersand

Just relocating some comments from another thread….

When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.

–Hesiod, ~ 800 BC

In the good old days, every man’s son, born in wedlock, was brought up not in the chamber of some hireling nurse, but in his mother’s lap, and at her knee. And that mother could have no higher praise than that she managed the house and gave herself to her children…

Nowadays… our children are handed over at their birth to some little Greek serving maid, with a male slave, who may be anyone, to help her.. it is from the foolish tittle-tattle of such persons that the children receive their first impressions, while their minds are still pliant and unformed… And the parents themselves make no effort to train their little ones in goodness and self-control; they grow up in an atmosphere or laxity and pertness, in which they come gradually to lose all sense of shame, and respect both for themselves and for other people.

–Tacitus, ~100 AD

Posted in Families structures, divorce, etc | 42 Comments

climbing out from the valley of the shadow of school homework to rec this post:

Posted on February 16, 2010 by unusualmusic

Recognition, Codes & Box Office Draw

It is exciting to recognize something, to know what something is supposed to be, even when it’s in a new form, a new medium; even when it is a new interpretation. A lot of my own enjoyment of Batman Begins, for example, was in recognizing batarangs and other devices, as well as recognizing characters. There’s an insider’s kind of glee to see the new interpretation but know what the original looked and sounded like. There’s a bit of that involved in fanfiction as well, reading it and writing it both; though in writing it the fun is in coming up with a new interpretation whether you’re writing an AU or a ‘missed scene’ or a set of continuing adventures.

That Recognition Glee is what’s counted on when Hollywood takes inspiration from somewhere else and brings a book, tv series, comic/graphic novel to life. That’s part of why they bother to do it in the first place; because those who liked/loved it once, will WANT to see a new spin on things. Assuming the movie isn’t meant to round off a series that never properly ended, that is. Still, taking from somewhere else and bringing it to the silver screen is a unique relationship, with hesitances, false starts, supposedly good natured intentions…

…

Whatever term they have for it, Hollywood knows all about Recognition Glee & Recognition Rejection. And they’ve been pointing at Recognition Rejection for years when it comes to heroes and leads of colour – except the place they point to keeps changing. First it was ‘The South Won’t Show This & We Will Lose Money‘ and now it’s ‘Middle America Likes To See Itself And It Is White Or We Will Lose Money‘.

“Well we don’t want to upset people, and well, the coloureds should just be glad we’re risking putting them on screen in the first place. Look, we know what we’re doing. We’re putting coloureds in roles we know regular people can expect them in – roles that fit them, fit their place in society. That’ll get people used to seeing them up on the screen. A Chinese person as the hero? With Chinese culture everywhere?! We’d never make movies again! You can’t bring change that quickly,! People just won’t accept it! Hold your horses! Patience is the key here. Patience and calm.”

Now it’s the 21st century and we still have the Mammy/Sassy Confident, The Inscrutable Servant or Villain, The Hot Spicy Cha Cha and all those other stereotypes that ‘fit their place in society‘; those stereotypes that bring their own Recognition Glee – for white viewers and Recognition Rejection, for PoC sick and tired of narrowed and negative associations.

Hollywood might be a place with individual struggling artists. But the people in power aren’t poor struggling producers/movie studio moguls/directors/investors. No. What they are, is soaking in greed and cowardice and have been for so long as an industry they barely know anything different. They’re the ones who created the concepts of the ‘general audience’, and ‘relatability’ as a sugar coat for racism and white superiority. They’re the ones who have the movie industry set up so that equal time equals segregation (black movies, kung fu imports, foreign stuff, foreign brown stuff).

And then, every time Recognition Glee does happen with an audience for a lead/hero of colour, they’re the ones calling the phenomena a one off and an exception.MORE

*sinks back under the wave of essays*

And now a word from our sponsor…

Your ad could be here, right now.

climbing out from the valley of the shadow of school homework to rec this post:

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff, Syndicated feeds | Comments Off

Virtuous Versus Disgusting Bodies, Then And Now

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Ampersand

Historiann makes the most interesting comment I’ve seen on Michelle Obama’s dreadful anti-fat “Let’s Move” campaign, pointing out parallels to 18th century cleanliness campaigns:

…nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one’s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and/or have a “hired girl” in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters. Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness. Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children’s bodies as an index of their mother’s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools.

If we replace the words “unclean” with “fat,” and “cleanliness” with “thinness,” we’ll come very close to the rhetoric and language of the “Let’s Move” campaign.

Reading that reminded me of this quote about the politics of disgust from Martha Nussbaum (last quoted on this blog in 2004):

Thus throughout history certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.

Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation — all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.

(Thanks to Maia for pointing out the Historiann article on her google reader feed!)

For a more straightforward response to Michele Obama’s campaign, I’d recommend Kate Harding’s article on Salon, and Paul Campos’ article in the New Republic.

Posted in Fat, fat and more fat | 44 Comments

What I'm Reading

Posted on February 14, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Laid up with gout today, and for the past four days–the most serious attack I’ve had in a while; I could barely walk on Thursday and Friday–but today is the first day my head feels clear enough that I can get some work done. I’ve been watching TV and reading to distract myself, and so this seemed like a perfect time to start a “What I’m Reading” series of posts, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

Via Fatemeh Fakhraie: Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos. I don’t know Taylor Swift’s music–or, if I do, because I’ve heard in on the radio, I don’t know that I know it–but I enjoyed this analysis of her image and music.
From Critical Mass: The Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, which is doing a series called “30 Books in 30 Days,” each day given over to an NBCC award nominee, this brief review of a biography of John Cheever made me want to read Cheever’s work again for the first time in a long time.
Also from Critical Mass, this take on Louise Gluck’s new book, A Village Life. I have always liked Gluck’s work.
I’d never heard of the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, till I read this–yet one more from Critical Mass–appreciation of Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008. She sounds like someone I could learn something from, not to mention I enjoyed the poems quoted in the piece. Now all I need is a semester with the time to do nothing but read.
New York Times writer Katherine Bouton reviews two books about Mary Anning, The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World, by Shelley Emling and Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. The first is a biography, the second is a novel. Here is Bouton’s lead: “Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a success in paleontology and one of the fewer still whose success was not linked to that of a paleontologist spouse (or any spouse: she was single). She made five major fossil discoveries from 1811 to her death in 1847 and many lesser ones. Why then is she best known as the inspiration for the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore?”
In the same issue of the Times, Denise Grady writes about the ethical issues that arise when doctors take cells from patients and then use those cells in research and, sometimes, in commercial ventures that make a whole lot of money. “A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift” is a response to The Immortal Life of Henriette Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in the 1950s, and Skloot’s book is an attempt to come to terms with both sides of an issue mired in questions of race, class, medical ethics and more: Lacks’ cancer cells, which were taken for analysis, went on to become a mainstay of modern medical research, being used in developing the first polio vaccine and in the development of drugs for diseases including Parkinson’s leukemia and the flu, and they not incidentally have made some people in the medical field very, very rich. Lacks’ family, who can’t even afford their own health insurance, has never seen a dime of that money. The story is not as simple a one of exploitation as that outline would suggest, which is why Skloot’s book sounds like it is worth reading, but so is Grady’s opinion piece.
Due in 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will contain some significant revisions that could result, according to Times reporter, Benedict Carey, in “fewer children [getting] a diagnosis of bipolar disorder[,] ‘[b]inge eating disorder’ and ‘hypersexuality’ [becoming] part of everyday language” and a significant change in the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated. This book is used to define the line between the so-called normal and the so-called abnormal; changes in it could have a profound impact, therefore, on society. It is, therefore, worth paying attention to.
If any of you, like me, have gout, you want to know about GoutPal, the only informational site about gout that I have found–and it’s got a ton of information–that is not also trying to sell you something. I have glanced through it a couple of times, and I am beginning to realize that I need to read it. If you have gout, you probably should too.
An opinion piece on Tehran Bureau that’s worth reading about how to understand what happened in terms of the Green Movement in Iran on February 11th: Were the Greens Defeated?
Also from Tehran Bureau: Why North Tehranis Don’t Revolt: Why some people who clearly see the regime as “them,” don’t see the opposition as “us,” or at least not enough of an “us” that they are willing to risk joining the protests.

Posted in Link farms | 8 Comments

It's not OK

Posted on February 14, 2010 by Maia

I’m not really interested in writing much about American politics. Partly because if I’m going to do day-to-day political stuff there’s so much to write about in New Zealand.* But mostly because I find it even more alienating than I ever did before. To comment on healthcare, or the escalating war on Afganistan, or even the budget freeze, with outrage implies that you expected anything different. And I didn’t. Obama was always going to act like president’s of the united states do and act in the interest of the rich and powerful, not of everyone else. I think the important political work that needs to be done in America at the moment, which is responding to Obama’s inability to meet expectations not with despair, but with organised opposition, is not something that can be helped from a blog. So I write about dollhouse.

But then it becomes the small things that rouse me to fury and writing – in particular Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. My favourite response to this was from a feminist historian. But I’m not even capable of that sort of rational analysis, because there’s only one part in all of this that can I respond to. Michelle Obama frames her entire programme by discussing her daughters’ bodies, what they were eating, when she got concerned about their weight, and what she did about it (out of general principle I’m not being specific about what she said – it shouldn’t have been said and I’m not going to repeat it).

It is not fucking acceptable to use your daughters’ bodies to make political points. It is a betrayal of your role as their parent to use your child’s body in this way. It will fuck them up. It’ll fuck them up even more if it’s going to be syndicated on every news feed in every part of the world, until someone in New Zealand is offering their opinion on it.

Another woman, whose mother took similar actions when she was a child wrote about it in this fantastic article, she lays the damage her mother did right out there (I got the article from a truly amazing post on fatshionista).

I wish that someone would say “You must stop using your children like this” to the Obama parents, before the kids have to say it themselves.

* National Standards ARGH! GST Rise ARGH!

Posted in Fat, fat and more fat, Feminism, sexism, etc, Gender and the Body | 4 Comments

Don't Fly, Fatass, Don't Fly!

Posted on February 13, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

So Southwest Airlines may have just a minor miscalculation in their ongoing war against fat people.

They booted Kevin Smith off a flight.

Yes, the writer and director who regularly has his on-screen alter ego Silent Bob described as tubby, was already seated, with armrests down and seatbelt buckled, when Southwest decided that he was the wrong size to fly.

Smith announced his defenestration via his (warning, at times incredibly NSFW — which goes without saying; this is Kevin Smith we’re taking about) Twitter feed. Kate Harding was kind enough to stitch a few of Smith’s tweets together:

@SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no “safety risk” (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was wrongly ejected from the flight (even [attendant] Suzanne eventually agreed). And fuck your apologetic $100 voucher, @SouthwestAir. Thank God I don’t embarrass easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don’t sulk off either: so everyday, some new fuck-you Tweets for @SouthwestAir.

Right on. Smith has no reason to be embarrassed — Southwest does. They’ve been actively trying to dehumanize fat people for some time now, and you just knew eventually they’d dehumanize the wrong one; here’s hoping that Smith’s very vocal and justified outrage over this will lead the airline to remember that fat people are, in fact, people. We shall see.

No matter what, it’s got Smith angry — and not just for his own situation. His last two tweets, condensed:

Hey @SouthwestAir? Fuck making it right for me just ’cause I have a platform. I sat next to a big girl who was chastised for not buying an extra ticket because “all passengers deserve their space.” Fucking flight wasn’t even full! Fuck your size-ist policy. Rude…

Word.

Incidentally, the title of this post is a play on a line from one of the great films in cinematic history.

Posted in Fat, fat and more fat | 3 Comments

Cancer Update!

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

So when last we chatted about my balls, I had just had surgery, which had gone pretty well, and my pre-op CT scan had come back normal. All indications were that the cancer hadn’t spread, and I was awaiting the pathology report and the post-op blood work to determine what my treatment regimen would be. I was hoping to end up on surveillance, which basically is just what it sounds like — they watch you carefully, you do tests every month, get a CT scan every couple months, and if the cancer doesn’t show back up, you win.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Instead, starting in about a week, I’m going to get two rounds of chemotherapy.

That’s mainly due to what they found in the pathology report. The good news is that my blood work went back to normal after the surgery, so if anything’s metastasized, it hasn’t gone very far. But the tumor itself was pretty far advanced, and it had at least one, and possibly two kinds of tissue that spread easily.

The first kind — the kind I certainly had — was enbryonal carcinoma. If that sounds like “embryo” to you, you win 80 Fecke Points. Yes, my cancer was mostly made up of placental tissue with some yolk sac and random tissue thrown in. Indeed, according to my blood markers, I had the level of alpha-fetoprotein of a woman in her second month of pregnancy.

The jokes pretty much write themselves; I choose to believe that I’ve had the mythical Gay Abortion. Okay, I’m straight, but the cells that made my wacky, potentially-life-threatening fetusoid were all male.

Anyhow, EC is pretty nasty and tends to hang around and cause trouble for some time, so that alone would be call for chemotherapy. I also might have had some choriocarcinoma, which spreads differently than testicular cancer usually does (by blood rather than lymph nodes); while the pathologist couldn’t say for sure that I did, he evidently couldn’t say for sure that I didn’t. And again, that argues for chemo.

So chemo it is. I’m not looking forward to getting poisoned for a week, and then doing it again three weeks later, but if that’s what I have to do to live cancer-free, I’m willing to put up with it. The good news — there’s always good news with testicular cancer — is that the regimen of bleomycin, etoposide, and cisplatin (BEP) is really, really effective in killing this stuff off. I have a better than 95% chance of needing no further treatment after this — and a nearly 100% chance of long-term survival which, I keep telling myself, is all any of us has.

So it’s not the best possible news, but it’s not the worst possible news, either. And hopefully, in about eight weeks, I can close the book on the treatment phase of this, and start celebrating milestones. Believe me, I’m really looking forward to it.

Posted in About the Bloggers | 16 Comments

Open thread (Goaty goat goat edition)

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Ampersand

Wish I had time to post some links or something — but maybe you could do it for me. Post whatever you like in the comments. Self-link love is most welcome.

Oh, and check out the gallery of goat photos at Damn Cool Pics. The one I’ve put in below isn’t even the best (or most unbelievable looking) one.

Posted in Link farms | 17 Comments

Come on Baby, Put the Rock in the House

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

The Winter Olympics have their opening ceremonies tonight, and that means we’re just days away from the most important competitive event in the history of the world. I refer, of course, to Olympic curling. This year, the U.S. women’s team will be trying to improve on their disappointing finish in Torino, when they failed to qualify for the semis. Meanwhile, the U.S. men’s team will be trying to improve on their fantastic third-place showing in 2006. As in ’06, the men’s team is made up entirely of Minnesotans, and the Land of 10,000 Lakes is hoping for gold this year, which, in true Minnesota fashion, we will share with the other 49 states because, hey, you might like to see the gold medals too, and we don’t like to be greedy.

Curling is one of those sports that the Olympics was made for. Nobody is going pro at curling. Nobody’s going to get a huge endorsement deal out of it. At best, the men and women competing in Vancouver will get a brief moment of national recognition before they go back to their day jobs.

Well, I for one will be backing Team USA all the way, and in honor of Team McCormick and Team Shuster, here’s Jonathan Coulton’s ode to chess on ice.