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Kimberle Crenshaw on “The Charleston Imperative: Why Feminism and Antiracism Must Be Linked”

Kimberle Crenshaw’s The Charleston Imperative calls on feminism and anti-racism to be linked:

If the reaction to the Charleston massacre is to be realized as something beyond a singular moment of redemptive mourning, then neither the intersectional dynamics of racism and patriarchy which produced this hateful crime, nor the inept rhetorical politics that sustain the separation of feminism from antiracism, can be allowed to continue.

Decisions about where to live, how to identify a “safe neighborhood” or a “good school,” whom to police, and to whom police are to be accountable, also rest on a longstanding demonization of Black bodies. These choices, grounded in ideologies of Black threat, frame separation from Blackness as a rational choice.

Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity — whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics or white wealth — to justify the brutal assaults against Black people of all genders.

Why Stand Your Ground laws, white masculinity, private property, logics of threat and security, human capital social mobility, and so much more are gendered and raced. I’m not sure what it means to sign the petition other than adding to a long list, but I thought it might both spread the message and make me available to them for further organizing efforts so I signed.

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What’s slowing down the slow computing movement?

flickr light Nathan Schneider’s article about the Joy of Slow Computing is a fantastic first step to the book the world needs on this subject! It’ll be like the Joy of Cooking or the Joy of Sex (definitive informative work on going deep on the topic in a way that is engaging and timeless). The brogrammer culture that further genders am already male identified dominate culture has made the tech/geek space hustle and unfriendly to folks” the learning curve as people like Lilly have already pointed out. There are of course other intersections of identity to consider in this quest such as race and class. Taking hours to switch your digital life over is something of a luxury for the middle to upper class who either have savings or one job around which they can work on such a time heavy hobby and endeavor. Similar to low income individuals being separated from the tech community because of the high entry price of time that folks need to work their jobs while going to school, etc. There is also the hegemonic nature of tech groups, thankfully changing to better reflect the population at large. But as a black woman, I’ve already experiences how I have to pay a black tax and a gender tax (work twice as hard to get half as much) in other areas of my life and tech spaces are very similar. The proving of oneself already inherent in such spaces is coupled with the surprise, shock, or distrust that a woman, a BLACK one no less can hold her own as a coder/programmer/gamer etc makes that learning curve more like a black diamond slope I’m at the bottom of (as a beginner) and have to schlep my way up to the top without one of those handy ski lifts. More of the culture, as ppl like me join and participate, is forced to change and hopefully together we can flatten the learning curve and lower the cost of entry to slow computing.

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Laura Portwood-Stacer on the Stakes of Media Refusal

This is one of the best things I’ve read on social media refusal. Lisa Nakamura made similar points informally many years ago, but Portwood-Stacer has gone a long distance in theorizing the stakes of refusal for those invested in care work, for identity, community, or wages.

To resist what we might identify as an exploitative labor relation by walking off the job—by refusing social media participation—would mean giving up at least two sources of value that settle on the workers themselves…Professional and Social Payoffs

Read Care Work and the Stakes of Social Media Refusal at The New Criticals

a modest proposal

I’m new here on Difference Engines—you can think of me as a 12th century physician of Constantinople, if you like— so first I’d like to say hello to everyone before plunging in.

I’ve been increasingly horrorified at all that is being done to persecute women of child-bearing age in the United States, and I’m just sick  of reading stories like this one. Reducing access to contraception, chipping away at the right to abortion: the list goes on and on, a relentless rollback of women’s rights. I will leave aside questions of the soul or the viability of a fetus;  I consider these red herrings. Whether the discussion pertains to fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus, the arguments around limiting women’s choices ultimately turn on a single point: the devaluation of the actual woman in favor of her potential offspring. I do not see a sound ethical argument for such a position. A woman may choose to risk herself for a potential child, but such a sacrifice should not be forced on her.

The risks of child-bearing vary from person to person but in all cases there is at least some chance of long-term disability or death for the woman.§ To refuse a woman full autonomy in deciding, with her physician, whether to carry forward a pregnancy and how to terminate an unwanted or problematic pregnancy is to force her to undergo this risk (as well as the risk of serious complications). I do not think it is right for 40% of all U.S. citizens‡ to be legally required to risk death in quite this way, through denial of simple, relatively inexpensive options that we know can greatly reduce her health risks.

For these and other reasons, I believe we must make a stand against all forms of reproductive coercion enshrined in law, and to this end I make the following proposal. It is time for women of child-bearing age to go out on strike. Literally. Together, we should refuse to bear any more children until all the laws standing between us and our child-bearing decisions are struck down. We should take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that we do not get pregnant. It won’t be perfect, and it won’t be pretty, but we could collectively crash the national birth rate overnight if we put our minds to it. True, it would be an enormous sacrifice for an entire generation of women to give up children altogether. But between the frustrations it will create at the family level and the likely economic consequences at the national level, it may be the surest way to get results. (Remember Lysistrata?) There are many people who urgently need to be reminded that there are no children without the bodies and labor of women, and that women are citizens, not chattel. We cannot continue to allow real women to be trumped by phantom children in the framing of our laws. A strike by today’s potential child-bearers would be in line with a long American tradition of organizing in the name of fair treatment, from the labor strikes of the early 20th century through the marches and sit-ins of the Civil Rights era.

Women of child-bearing age, withhold your labor. Both kinds.

 


§ The U.S. maternal mortality rate, at 12.7 per 100,000 births in 2010, is double what it was a quarter-century ago and puts the U.S. in a disgraceful 50th position among all countries.

‡Women make up just over half the U.S. population, and about 80% of women now bear children, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

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Gender on Ice

Gender on Ice (great title) is an upcoming conference at Barnard College, New York (Nov. 20-21) focusing on “the intersection of science, policy, race, and gender in the way the Arctic and Antarctic are studied, represented, inhabited, and imagined.” Participants come from an unusually wide array of disciplines — photography, women’s studies, astronomy, filmmaking, philosophy, art history, geography, environmental studies, science writing — so it looks to be an interesting conversation at the very least.

The conference kicks off with a screening of True North, a film about Matthew Henson, the first African-American to explore the Arctic with Robert Peary in 1909. For more information, check the Gender on Ice website.