Subjects Archives: Feminism

If you reject from the outset the idea of uniting a majority based on shared economic interests, then pretty much all you’ve got left is the “thoughtful and humane co-optation” of racism and xenophobia.

The host of the daytime NPR program asked his guests how serious, and how “unprecedented” Trump’s decision to fire his FBI chief was. The guests answers were strange: they spoke about “rule of law” and “violating the Constitution” but then switched to Trump “violating norms”—and back again, interchanging “norms” and “laws” as if they’re synonyms. One of the guests admitted that Trump firing Comey was 100% legal, but that didn’t seem to matter in this talk about Trump having abandoned rule-of-law for a Putinist dictatorship. These guys wouldn’t pass a high school civics class, but there they were, garbling it all up. What mattered was the proper sense of panic and outrage—I’m not sure anyone really cared about the actual legality of the thing, or the legal, political or “normative” history of the FBI.

Something new is taking shape in the world: in more than 30 countries, people are calling for an international women’s strike on the 8th of March.

This dream.  Something is in the house, something’s breaking, the things I love are going away.  I reach for Laura, she becomes translucent, evaporates.  I wake up, telling myself this dream means I’m worried about how tired and worn Laura has grown from years of activist work trying to get people out of prison.  I’ve […]

Time to vote for our next president!  Time to choose just the right person to lead our world’s most militarily advanced superpower.  That’s why presidential elections should be nonviolent and fulfilling on a deep personal level!  O whom, shall I choose?  Let’s see. . . Hillary Rodham Clinton: Democrat and fellow feminist.  Speechifies against poverty, […]

Joan Acker, who died on June 22, 2016, was one of the foremost socialist feminists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  Her work about gender and class drew much of its creativity from a continual though uneasy engagement between feminism and Marxism.  She was one of the initial subscribers to Monthly Review, beginning […]

Dear Hillary Rodham Clinton, I am voting for you to be our first woman president because Sisterhood is Powerful, and who doesn’t love power?  For a woman to be accepted as “one of the boys,” she has to be twice as good at the things boys like.  War, for instance.  That’s you, Sister! As Senator, […]

A television news program opens with a clip of marching soldiers, an obligatory image when the subject is North Korea.  A voiceover intones: “A bold, ambitious plan apparently sanctioned by Kim Jong Un.  Is he in league with the women’s group to promote peace between North and South Korea?” The program in question is the […]

The Pillager band was the advance guard in the mid-eighteenth-century Ojibwe migration into what would become the state of Minnesota a century later.  According to Ojibwe mythology, the Great Spirit (gichi-manidoo) had told them to migrate to a place where “the food grows on water.”  Minnesota, with its plentiful wild rice (a sacred plant to […]

  Introduction This article, titled “A Chapter of Russian Reaction,” translated into English here for the first time, was written in German by longtime homosexual activist Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) from London and published in the Swiss gay journal Der Kreis in 1946.  Hiller had been active in Germany’s first homosexual-rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific […]

Harvard University remains shut down one day after a lone woman wielding a Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle broke through security at the university’s elite, men-only Porcellian Club and shot 14 white male students to death. The female — of indeterminate age, race, and sexual attractiveness — was described as wearing a torn leather jacket emblazoned […]

  Christmas has just gone by, and we’ll soon be ringing in the New Year, a time when a “profound feeling of consolation and peace” overwhelms the faithful.  But the buzz, created by Pope Francis’ “apostolic exhortation”, Evangelii Gaudium (EG, translated as “The Joy of the Gospel”), issued in late November, and the subsequent clarificatory […]

George Zimmerman Proclaimed Honorary White Man SANFORD, FL — The Volunteer Fire Department and the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution have united across class lines to declare George Zimmerman, recently acquitted of murdering African-American youth Trayvon Martin, an “Honorary White Dude.”  Mr. Zimmerman, whose driver’s license lists him as Hispanic, was […]

May 27, 2013 When she was 24 years old, in 1979, Fahima Vorgetts left Afghanistan.  By reputation, she had been outspoken, even rebellious, in her opposition to injustice and oppression; and family and friends, concerned for her safety, had urged her to go abroad.  Twenty-three years later, returning for the first time to her homeland, […]

The following comments were made at a panel on the topic “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” May 19 at a conference titled “Which Way Forward for Psychoanalysis?” and sponsored by the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry at the University of Chicago.  While Freud and psychoanalysis were a focus on the event, other themes running throughout […]

I. The Globe See the Globe.  More than half the 7 billion people on the Globe are women.  Women are different from men.  Why are women different from men?  Because, according to international humanitarian agencies, women have special percentages that stick out.  See women’s percentages: Women make up 70% of the world’s poor. Women do […]

Nicaragua’s adoption this year of a sweeping law for prevention and punishment of violence against women marks an important gain for women’s rights in this Central American country, says Sandra Ramos, founder and director of the “Maria Elena Cuadra” Movement for Working and Unemployed Women (MEC). Addressing a meeting at Casa Maíz in Toronto on […]

Women With a Vision (WWAV), a New Orleans advocacy and service organization that provides health care and other support for poor women of color, was the victim of a break-in and arson late Thursday night.  A small organization that has won a national reputation for its work, WWAV was founded in 1991 by a collective […]

  “What this is about for me most is exercising our long-sleeping democracy muscle.” — Marina from Brooklyn Video by Naomi Less.  Music by Glenn Grossman.  For more information, e.g. <anonops.blogspot.com>; <occupywallst.org>. | Print  

The video is profoundly disturbing.  It shows four men, identified as Uruguayan troops from the UN mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), apparently raping an 18-year old Haitian youth.  Two of them have the victim pinned down on a mattress, with his hands twisted high up his back so that he cannot move.  Perhaps the most unnerving […]