The Transgender Sista Among Us

A blogger at Black Women, Blow the Trumpet, blogs about MtF transgendered women within the Black community:

The church folks who read this blog and who know me personally have noticed that I have a few transgender friends. I never set out to find transgender friends, but life has a way of bringing us into situations that are intended to teach us. My transgender friends have always created a huge scene whenever they visit my church. People seem to become nervous and afraid when seeing transgenders. I think that our natural instinct is to fear whatever we do not understand. There is a blog that addresses transphobia. Click here to read the writings of a 30-something transwoman.

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“Hands Off the White Woman!”

Brother Peacemaker blogs about America’s infatuation with white women:

It would be easy to blame the media for such obvious white women favoritism. But the real problem is our culture that places such emphasis on looks, youth, sex, race, money, and other features and factors people use to compensate for the shortcomings of their character. Media is only a hapless pawn serving to feed the insatiable hunger of its master the character weak, wealth exchanging, public so tremendously concentrated in the white community. Until we have a more even distribution of wealth among all racial communities and/or a realignment of people’s priorities away from the secular and more towards a true all encompassing community oriented spirit, be prepared to hear more stories in the news from the undiscovered Susan Smiths and Natalie Holloways that are destined to become pawn in society’s perpetual endeavor to make pretty white women the focus of our attention.

40th Carnival Against Sexual Violence

Marcella Chester hosts the 40th Carnival Against Sexual Violence which deals with sexual violence issues involving: gender, the law, the media, personal stories, and other subjects.

South Asian Studies

Zooey Live blogs about being a South Asian graduate student and South Asian Studies, one of her points is this:

[T]here is also something else which intrigues me about the South Asian departments. Something that’s also very visible in this class. So few of their students work on modern and/or contemporary South Asia. It’s not that I think working on pre-modern South Asian texts or societies is inherently bad. But there is also this general reluctance to acknowledge the existence of a modern South Asia. Very similar to the project of classical Indology. Which relegated India perpetually into the realm of “ancient.” And my pea-sized brain tells me this is not just an innocent fascination with the pre-modern past. But indeed, this is a very problematic manisfestation of an evolutionary understanding of the world and not totally unconnected to the racial-colonial politics which attempted to colonize non-Western territories by claiming that the people in there are not that “modern.”

Transgender/sexual Bashing

Apurva posts a cartoon from amptoons.com on the absurdities of feminists criticizing trans peoples.

“We had Nina.”

Ann blogs about Nina Simone:

There is a quotation attributed to Richard Pryor that states that: “White people had Judy Garland — We had Nina.”  Nina Simone (born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, 1933-2003) was a masterful, superb singer-songwriter, pianist, arranger, composer,  goddess, a civil rights activist, “High Priestess of Soul”, and a beautiful woman the likes of which the world will never see again. There are so many of her songs that I love, including, “Four Women” (a song of four different women who epitomize America’s racist, sexist mistreatment of black women), “Mississippi Goddamn” (a scathing indictment of white America’s racist mistreatment of her black citizens), “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”, her black ballad which would become Black America’s national anthem,  “Strange Fruit” (her inspiring rendition of the legendary Billie Holliday classic), and my favourite, “My Baby Just Cares For Me”, a song that is an homage to the beauty of black women (ironically the song appeared in a Chanel No. 5 commercial decades ago).

“We had Nina.”

Ann blogs about Nina Simone:

There is a quotation attributed to Richard Pryor that states that: “White people had Judy Garland — We had Nina.”  Nina Simone (born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, 1933-2003) was a masterful, superb singer-songwriter, pianist, arranger, composer,  goddess, a civil rights activist, “High Priestess of Soul”, and a beautiful woman the likes of which the world will never see again. There are so many of her songs that I love, including, “Four Women” (a song of four different women who epitomize America’s racist, sexist mistreatment of black women), “Mississippi Goddamn” (a scathing indictment of white America’s racist mistreatment of her black citizens), “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”, her black ballad which would become Black America’s national anthem,  “Strange Fruit” (her inspiring rendition of the legendary Billie Holliday classic), and my favourite, “My Baby Just Cares For Me”, a song that is an homage to the beauty of black women (ironically the song appeared in a Chanel No. 5 commercial decades ago).

Essentialism and Gender Roles

The Wannabe Indian Punkster, over at Days in a Wannabe Punk’s Life, blogs about gender roles and essentialism:

Basically, the essentialist position on gender states that there are distinctively feminine and distinctively masculine traits that exist outside of social and cultural conditioning and because of such qualities being wired into our brains, we must irrevocably accept gender oppression simply as part of who we are as a species. This stance is outrageous, primarily because it offers little or no insight as to how women and men can work towards changing or improving the status quo or even human nature, come to think of it. This asinine line of reasoning has been used for thousands of years to perpetuate patriarchy as a universal system ‘rooted’ in human essence and it has also been used to corroborate sexism and discrimination against women be it financially, emotionally, politically, mentally or physically.