White Liberal Feminist Imperialism & Torture

*If you want more info on the white liberal feminist imperalism that’s splattering all over the feminist blogosphere, here are a couple more links for you. Again I encourage people to click on the links in each article.
Brownfemipower, Amanda, and Thieving WoC’s Efforts: Publicity or Plagarism???

Feminism and Appropriation

This has not been a good week for woman of color blogging - Acoording to some folks this one includes some comments from Marcotte herself which basically have consisted of her whining about how it’s all a personal attack. I don’t have the constitution to actually look right now but if y’all wanna check it out and report back to me, feel free.

*Daily Kos has a post which includes a memo signed by Dubya allowing torture. There’s been a lot of talk about how he was insulated from the decision in a effort to protect the resident from rightful censure, well that was a lod of lies and BS. WARNING! – The comments contain pictures of torture performed by America which may be triggering for some.  They’ve been altered so they read ”Autorized by the President of the United States of America” w/ Dubya’s signature across the bottom. Powerful and if you can stomach it look at what our government is doing in our name.  

 

Maximum-Extreme-Linkage!

Okay so first off this is a very sad day in the blogosphere because BrownFemiPower of the La Chola/WOC Blog has left the internet. There was a lot of drama going on in the feminist blogosphere that left a lot of WOC feeling unheard and the victims of constant aversive (if not overt) racism. Of course this is not the first or last time that this has happened but it was particularly bad this time around . (If you guys want to know what went down go here: http://highonrebellion.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/intellectual-theft-is-still-theft/ and make sure to click on the links provided) I completely understand her decision to leave, you can only feel attacked so many times before you realize that maybe it’s not worth all the pain that you have to go through every single day. I wish her massive success in all her endeavors. A moment of silence for one of my favorite bloggers.

Micole (Coffeeandink on LJ) has a very interesting post Are Jews White? where she breaks down a lot of the ideas around Jewish folks and discusses the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardic jews. This is always an interesting topic because there’s generally been a disconnect between WOC feminists and Jewish feminists around white skin privilege and solidarity. Micole breaks down a lot of the complex issues that exist around Jewish identity. My experience with Judaism (which includes intending to convert at one point in my life) was generally around Sephardic Jews who as Micole states tend to identify as People of Color so it was a very different experience meeting an Ashkenazi Jew in one of the organizations I volunteered with that very vehemently identified as white (she did so very specifically to acknowledge the white skin privilege that she possessed). Any way, go read.  

Saskaia shares a letter she wrote discussing Stephanie Meyer’s use of Quileute characters over at the LJ community DeadBroWalking. Meyer’s urban fantasy series has been gaining quite a following from what I understand, I personally have never been tempted to read them but Saskaia breaks down some of the issues she has with the NDN characters within the book and the way they are represented. Warning contains spoilers for the series.

Was Stanley Kubrick killed by the Illuminati for exposing their Masonic orgy rites? I’m just gonna say that I personally don’t really believe in hidden organizations that control the world (Shadow governments? maybe, conspiracies? definitely) but y’all just head over and read through that, decide for yourselves what you believe.  Because the blogger does make some intriguing assertions.

More fiction online, an anthology about body alteration/modification and more, Unwelcome Bodies by Jennifer Pelland has several of the stories online for your pleasure. Go check them out, I know I will when I have a spare moment.

Linking?

OKay so I’ve realized that lately I’ve been posting a lot of links and am rethinking if I should do that. This was started as a blog that was supposed to be a personal log of my writing and just personal stuff in general not a political blog as such. I should have remembered the old adage that the personal is political and I find myself wanting to share political links I find enlightening for myself. However I realize that it’s making me a little insane to always be up on every blog so I’m trying to decide if I should limit my linking to a certain day of the week or to a certain amount a day. We’ll see.

 

NaNoWriMo!

It is National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org) y’all! I have signed up for yet another year but going in I know I won’t get 50,000 words there is simply no way with everything going on. That does not however mean that I cannot try! My project for NaNoWriMo is neither of the novel ideas I’ve mentioned here before (for a variety of reasons none of which include me no longer being interested in them) instead I want to work on a collection of short stories all inspired by Linh Dinh’s poem “Borderless Body”. We’ll see how it goes.

So that post I’ve been yammering on and on about for Feminist SF will be up in the next two weeks. Have I started writing it yet? No but I’m making a vow. I feel I’ve been ignoring the blog and I love it so that cannot be allowed to happen. I’m going to make an effort to post a new entry every two weeks and see how that goes.

Currently Reading: Catherynne M. Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales – In The Cities of Coin and Spice It is a sequel (and the concluding volume) to The Orphan’s Tales – In The Night Garden an amazing Tiptree award winning novel that I adore. Valente is a poet as well as a fiction writer and that comes across in these books. Just amazing imagery that leaps of the page and descriptions that make my creative side salivate. She breaks “writing rules” like too many metaphors with impunity and it works so well. It simply adds to the fantastical and fairytale nature of the work. Also I got to hear her read at the last WisCon and she is an amazing reader.

Back to homework but I hope you all are well and writing (if that’s your thang).

I have not been abducted by aliens…not that I know of…

Sorry I’ve been gone so long just been super busy getting a lot of stuff done. I have a new job interning for a new Science-Fiction blog that has yet to launch. It should be going public at the end of November, it’s going to be super cool and I’ll be sure to point y’all in that direction when it goes live. That was the fourth great thing that was happening, remember waaaaay back on my last post. So anywho besides that I’m trying to get my packets together for applications to grad school and finishing up my WisCon essay which is due tomorrow (yikes!) but I tend to work well under pressure.

Also Nov. is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) I am signed up. It’s to motivate people to write 50,000 words in the month of November though I don’t know how much I’ll be able to get done with school and everything but I’m sure as hell gonna try. I’m signing off cause I have to write a Biology paper right now but next week things should slow down, if only a bit (Please universe let it slow down) so I should be able to get back to blogging at least twice a week.