California Feminist Blogs

I can't believe I've never posted on Bjork or at least reposted this song. Bjork is my hero because a. she destroys stereotypes about women in technical and/or musical fields and b. she is pretty well-respected in the mainstream but continues to defy the very structures that define and perpetuate a "mainstream" in the first place. Perfect example: "Declare Independence" (" don't let them do that to you!"):

The audio quality is pretty poor in that video so if you have Mog, Spotify, Rdio, or Hype Machine, you can listen here as well.

Bjork's newest album, Biophilia, is a concept album exploring music, nature, and technology. She kicked off her world in July, unveiling custom-made instruments like these tesla coils, which translate electric energy into musical sound.

She used the tesla coils in her opening song that kicked off the Manchester International Festival, "Thunderbolt" (she also sounds AMAZING live).

She also used this "gravity harp" in a song about gravity, "Solstice."

The album makes use of a few more custom-made instruments, which you can read about here.Follow her on Facebook for recent updates, including info on her interactive Biophilia app. Taken from the iTunes description,

Each in-app experience is inspired by and explores the relationships between musical structures and natural phenomena, from the atomic to the cosmic.

Damn.

Falling asleep to this documentary on Delia Derbyshire, "the woman who, in 1962, used feedback and bits of tape to create the authentic sound of traveling through space and time:"

I wrote about Delia here and also found another great post on her at The Vinyl Consultancy.

Sweet dreams.

Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

Last week, the University of Utah Law Students for Reproductive Justice chapter held its first panel with the support of the awesome Women’s Law Caucus.  Why am I excited about the panel you ask? First, the panel was a discussion of what plans the Utah state legislature has in store for us in 2012.  We had an illustrious set of panelists that included: Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon, State Representative Rebecca Chavez-Houck, Kimberly Myers from the Utah Health Policy Project, and Heather Stringfellow from Planned Parenthood Action Council of Utah.  All of the panelists provided insight into the political realities of working with the legislature and many issues that our student body did not know about, i.e., how do health care exchanges work.

Second, the panel added diversity to the routine doldrums of law school panels.  In my two years at the University of Utah, my peers and I have been inundated with panels that focus on job prospects in various legal fields and how to prepare oneself for these fields. With that being said, these panels are important, but at a certain point as a 3L, you already know what the panelists are going to say and you’re there because you didn’t bring any lunch.  I am glad to say that the UULSRJ panel turned out to be a panel that 30 other students wanted to attend.  It could be possible that they came for the food, but given the questions and comments that were said, it seemed like everyone really cared about women and families.

Third, the panel provided a forum to discuss women’s and family health issues that are rarely discussed at the law school.  This was the first time that the words, “abortion” and “family planning,” were publicly spoken outside of Constitutional Law I in a respectful and engaging manner.  There were many laughs but there were also many furrowed brows.  In essence, the panel established that UULSRJ will be an active, permanent addition to the student organizations at the University.  More importantly, the panel claimed public space for these important policy discussions that impact not just the general population, but that also impact women lawyers as individuals.  I think we have the tendency in law school to distance ourselves from the law to the point that we forget that we will also be personally affected by the law.

As for the UULSRJ board, we are all excited to plan another panel.  In the meantime, have a Happy Holidays!

The Liberator Magazine just posted a great article on Guy Debord of (of Situationist International's) first feature-length film, La Société du Spectacle (1973), based on his 1967 book, published in its entirety here. Society of the Spectacle examines the role of spectacular representations in creating and promoting ideologies that support the dominant, bourgeois culture(s). I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in mass media, communication studies, art activism, and philosophy (Debord was a Marxist theorist and spends a lot of time on Marxism v. Hegelian thought). Here's an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters, Chapter 3: Unity and Division Within Appearance:

Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations — the decisionmaking and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices.

And here's a clip from the film:

Debord also wrote the manifesto for Situationist International, the Report on the Construction of Situations, also available at bopsecrets.org. In it, he discusses the roles of popular culture, families, and schools in promoting conservatism and anti-intellectualism, as well as the compartmentalization of artists and intellectuals (ie. who this serves, what is revolutionary about the artist-intellectual? etc.). I'll leave you with the last section of the manifesto, "Our Immediate Tasks,"

We must call attention, among the workers parties or the extremist tendencies within those parties, to the need to undertake an effective ideological action in order to combat the emotional influence of advanced capitalist methods of propaganda. On every occasion, by every hyper-political means, we must publicize desirable alternatives to the spectacle of the capitalist way of life, so as to destroy the bourgeois idea of happiness. At the same time, taking into account the existence, within the various ruling classes, of elements that have always tended (out of boredom and thirst for novelty) toward things that lead to the disappearance of their societies, we should incite the persons who control some of the vast resources that we lack to provide us with the means to carry out our experiments, out of the same motives of potential profit as they do with scientific research.

We must everywhere present a revolutionary alternative to the ruling culture; coordinate all the researches which are currently taking place but which lack a comprehensive perspective; and incite, through critiques and propaganda, the most advanced artists and intellectuals of all countries to contact us in view of a collective action.

We should declare ourselves ready to renew discussion, on the basis of this program, with those who, having taken part in an earlier phase of our action, are still capable of rejoining with us.

We must put forward the slogans of unitary urbanism, experimental behavior, hyper-political propaganda, and the construction of ambiences. The passions have been sufficiently interpreted; the point now is to discover new ones.

Enjoy!

Mallory Carlberg, University of Oklahoma

For the most part, our Law Students for Reproductive Justice (LSRJ) chapter at University of Oklahoma received positive feedback this semester. One person even said they liked being part of a group with “balls.” I, of course, corrected him and said we were a group with balls and ovaries. However, not everyone has enthusiastically supported us. Some groups fear working with us will alienate their pro-life members. A leader of one of these groups recently approached me about co-hosting an abortion debate. From previous experience as a student organizer, I know that debates about abortion are usually not a good idea. The debate tends to focus on religion and when life begins. In the process of debating, I have seen “pro-choice” groups lose sight of their original goal of supporting people with unplanned pregnancies.

Engaging in a pro-life/pro-choice style debate strays too far from the reproductive justice movement’s focus on ending reproductive oppression for my comfort. Instead of agreeing to an abortion debate with this group, I offered to discuss goals we can both work toward, such as comprehensive sex education, improved access to birth control, and improved maternal and infant health outcomes. This person was a proponent of abstinence until marriage and even suggested that some common forms of birth control were abortifactants. It was hard to find common ground, but I know there are other students who can look past LSRJ’s stance on abortion rights.

Since we are a new group, we’ve mostly focused on finding students who we consider our natural allies in the reproductive justice movement: feminists, progressives, people of color and LGBTQ-identified students. Next semester we want to co-sponsor events with groups who we might not initially consider as our natural allies: religious groups and conservative groups. We have to be strategic about what events we bring to campus. Organizing for reproductive justice in a conservative state means we must be careful to stay true to our beliefs, while, at the same time, not reinforcing the beliefs of students who have preconceived ideas of us as man-hating, baby-killing feminists. Sometimes we do the stereotypical thing (we’re excited to be the group handing out condoms on campus!), but sometimes we must decline invitations to cosponsor events because it will hurt our objectives rather than promote them.

Have you successfully organized with conservative groups on your campus? Please send your advice my way!

Joanne Caceres, Harvard Law School

Things are busy as ever as the members of HLSRJ finally dive into our long planned Speak Out Week, which aims to engage the HLS student body in honest exchanges about reproductive health, listen to and share personal stories about reproductive choices, and explore the ways in which access to abortion and other reproductive services intersect with larger social movements. Kicking off our week, our first event was “Bro-Choice,” an event geared towards men and their role in the movement. I am happy to report that we had exceptional attendance and that several men signed up for our weekly email list. We are excited for further exploration into engaging men on campus!

Other events this week include two intersectional panels, one featuring women of color and the pro-choice movement, with Gretchen Sisson, Reverend Penny Willis, Jasmine Burnett and Kaitlyn Soligan; and one featuring different religious perspectives on reproductive justice, with Reverend Marvin Ellison, Rabbi Peter Stein, Reverend Matthew Westfox, and Prof. Daniel Dombrowski. As with all of our events, cross promotion and co-sponsorships greatly contribute to our success. Thanks to our partnership with students from the Harvard Kennedy School, we will be screening of 12th and Delaware followed by a conversation with NARAL Pro-Choice MA.

We are also speaking out using Facebook, our LSRJ website, posters, and word of mouth. We have asked HLS and other greater Boston students share their own reproductive health stories, in the hope that doing so will open up a more honest and nuanced conversation regarding the choices women make throughout their lives. To contextualize these stories more effectively, Julia Reticker-Flynn from Advocates for Youth will join us for a strategy discussion regarding how and why to share abortion stories. We encourage all students reading this to also contribute to our survey or tell us what pro-choice means to them in our new tumblr! We hope our events will inspire other groups on other campuses to Speak Out as well!

Shandanette Molnar, George Washington University Law School

As a labor and birth doula and pro-choice advocate, there are many times where the rhetoric used to advocate for the right to terminate a pregnancy safely can also be used to advocate for the right to choose healthy and safe birthing options. Both birth options and pro-choice movements center on the idea that it is important to trust individuals to make decisions for themselves and their reproductive health. Particularly, when a pregnant person decides to choose a more natural approach to childbirth or wishes to avoid a Cesarean birth, there may be obstacles to achieving those goals. Unfortunately, many times these obstacles are institutional or placed by care providers. As an advocate, my goal is to assist clients to empower themselves and make informed choices, whether it be an choice related to birthing or terminating a pregnancy.

Of particular interest to me is the high rate of Cesarean births in the United States – 33%. This figure, double-to-triple the rate recommended by the World Health Organization, is complex and likely attributable to many causes. However, in many cases, a pregnant person’s wishes are not honored due to policies that are in place, such as bans on vaginal births after Cesareans (VBACs) and/or mandatory Cesarean births. When a pregnant person is unable to make decisions related to their reproductive health – or is unable to have their decisions honored – this issue oftentimes fits into a larger RJ framework.

Birth is a tremendous power that female-bodied persons possess. Unfortunately, much of this power remains unrealized due to the culture of fear around birth. Media depictions of birth often portray an angry woman, begging for drugs, and at the mercy of her care providers. For many, these images serve as the only reference to labor and childbirth, and therefore, many individuals remain unaware of how normal pregnancy and childbirth can be. With increased access to information and body-positive education and more “woman-centered care” allowing individuals to make informed choices, birth stories could be transformed into empowering experiences.

As I mentioned in my first blog post, I chose to go to law school in order to become a legal advocate for midwifery care, better birth and breastfeeding practices, and the rights of individuals to make decisions related to their reproductive health. For the 2011-2012 school year, I am working on a note for a government contracts publication, in which I will argue that if the government were to set aside certain contracts for midwives opening birth centers, healthcare costs and the national rate of Cesarean births would lower. In undertaking this project, I have been presented with fantastic opportunities to discuss the issue with professors and classmates. Additionally, if the note is deemed worthy of publication, it will be a great opportunity to draw attention from government procurement professionals to reproductive health issues and the right to exercise birth options.

Burke Bindbeutel, University of Missouri School of Law

Although Mizzou Law is located in what some call “red state America,” our LSRJ chapter has seldom encountered any hostility or opposition from anti-choice groups. Even the picketers outside Columbia’s Planned Parenthood have a dogged, resigned vibe. The hardest thing for our reproductive justice activism to overcome is the visceral reaction that our issues can induce in students.

I was making my schpiel for LSRJ at 1L orientation, taking care to maintain a friendly and upbeat tone. When I mentioned awareness of sexual assault, I heard sharp intakes of breath from several different points in the room, and a softly muttered “Jesus!” Perhaps I was too imagistic in describing a problem that is a serious issue on ours and every campus. But I was disappointed in the hypersensitivity of the student body. Don’t lawyers have to deal with uncomfortable subject matter all the time?

Martha Nussbaum takes on just this kind of kneejerk dismissal in her book “From Disgust to Humanity.” Nussbaum takes a cue from the New Hampshire legislator who denounced at a state Judiciary Committee hearing the act of “taking the penis of one man and putting it in the anus of another man and wriggling it around in excrement.” It’s only natural that someone who can barely countenance the idea of homosexual contact is light years away from asserting the reproductive rights of her constituents. Nussbaum describes a serious need to break through the reflex of revulsion in order to ensure the reproductive rights.

I have detected the same reflex in the law school building where I lately spend all my waking life. It’s not that my peers are stridently or unanimously anti-choice, or believers in the personhood of fetuses. It’s that they would prefer to think about anything other than forced Caesarean sections or syphilitic penises. (Prison rape jokes bafflingly remain in bounds).

At our screening of the Wednesday webinar “If You Care About Criminal Justice, You Should Care About Reproductive Justice,” we had a first-time attendee who took notes and appeared to have a thoughtful and critical attitude. He seemed like just the sort of curious and open-minded student that we seek to reach.

We were sharing reactions after the program’s conclusion, and our visitor confessed to shock over the suggestion that a mother could ever opt for a vaginal birth after having had a past Caesarean. I responded that the speaker phrased the issue not as a recommendation of vaginal birth, but as a defense of the mother’s bodily integrity. Reproductive justice would prevail, I offered, once the decision belonged to the mother, rather than to the health care provider, law enforcement officer or judge. But it was all our visitor could do not to shake his head in disgust.

I believe that the issues LSRJ has identified and pursued have workable solutions that are politically feasible. But meaningful engagement of future lawyers is so difficult because of a firewall of disgust that prevents them from taking positions. Nonetheless, university campuses are places to wrestle with ideas, and Mizzou LSRJ has a great opportunity to engage students and change minds.