14th & 15th Carnival of Radical Feminists

The 14th Carnival of Radical Feminists is being hosted by Meta Watershed:

Welcome, good folk, to the 14th Carnival of Radical Feminists! I am very honored to be your host for this month’s excellent spread of feminist thought. I’ve selected a bumper crop of 28 submissions for your perusal — one for each day of our lunar cycle. I earnestly hope you will use this opportunity to not just read some choice posts, but to also discover new blogs, add them to your links and blogroll, and continue to grow our community in all its diversity. It’s been a tremendous experience this month. Pass it on! — Maggie Jochild

And the 15th is up at Rage Against the Man-chine:

Hello, my fine-feathered friends, and welcome to the Fifteenth Carnival of Radical Feminists. I’m Nine Deuce, and I’ll be your guide through this round-up of some of the best current radical feminist writing on the internet. I am, quite simply, stoked to be hosting this installment of the Carnival, and I’d like to thank all of the women who submitted these excellent posts, as well as Heart at Women’s Space for putting the whole thing together. I won’t bore you too much with corny platitudes, but I do want to say that I am thrilled that this Carnival exists to provide women around the world with a means to share their experiences, thoughts, and feelings in a free and supportive environment, and to allow us the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with each other in our efforts to make the world a safer and better place to be a woman. That’ll be enough from me. On to the posts…

Advertisement

Radicalism and Women, Action, and the Media Conference

“Sudy” blogs about WAM and what radical feminism means to her:

Radical is not negative, folks. There seems to be a misunderstanding that when womyn of color are angry, it’s all negative. From the WOC I am in community with, there is anger. Lots of it. It’s in our blood from a life line of violence, rape, and racism. I think people hear what they want to hear and what they want to hear is the anger, it makes WOC easier to dismiss. But, the creative energy, the laughter and light is ten fold the anger. I’m angry, sure, but I’m much more than the anger and I believe in more positivity than I do in bitterness.

How does that relate to WAM?…

[Hat Tip: Zenobia of Mind the Gap]

12th Carnival of Radical Feminists

Debs hosts this months carnival over at The Burning Times:

Welcome to the 12th Carnival of Radical Feminists – a celebration of radical feminism! We are sisters, all of us, and with our hearts and minds and actions, we can change the world.

On (White) Feminism

BrownFemiPower blogs about the book Full Frontal Feminism, on teaching it at university women’s studies classes, her own experience as a woman of color in such classes, and the overall arch of teaching feminism in general:

It’s time for all of us, but in particular, women’s studies departments, to stop pretending that these interactions between women of color and white women never happened or don’t count. It’s time to stop pretending that the voices of white women speaking about women of color is sufficient enough of a history for women of color. It’s time to stop pretending that universal agreement between women of color is necessary before white people can interact with an engage with a particular critique of women of color. It’s time to stop pretending that any critique by women of color exists within a timeless vacuum that demonstrates some ancient racism of a feminism from time past.

Prostitution: Economic Savvy or Economic Slavery?

Bridget Crawford writes about the debate between feminists who call prostitution slavery and third wave feminists who view it as just simple economic savvy:

Third-wave feminists for the most part ignore or gloss over the social and economic conditions that lead to prostitution…For third-wave feminists, it is the prostitute, not the john who has the morally (and perhaps economically) superior position in the relationship. Yet the voices of the third wave are the voices of privileged women who have the time, education and economic ability to write for publication.

bell hooks and Outlaw Culture

Jeff, at the blog Feminist Allies, posts a video of bell hooks:

This interview/speech is a few years old now, but it’s always a treat to listen to hooks. In this video, hooks gives us a sort of video companion piece to her book, Outlaw Culture. In the first section, she explains why studying popular culture is important for critical thinkers, feminists and (yes) even literary critics to do. The short answer to why is: Popular culture is where hegemony works its evil magic.

Black Feminist Organizations

Queer Dewd blogs:

I finished Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968 – 1980 last night and started in on Tricia Rose’s Longing to Tell: Black women talk about sexuality and intimacy. I don’t know how I could do what I normally do with a book reivew with Rose’s book. There’s little discussion from Rose. Rather, she has simply compiled the stories of the women, told in their first person voices, with little structure. They talk about a range of things, often family relationships, first experiences, first orgasms, interracial dating and sex, experimentation with lesbian sex if they’re straight, pregnancy and childbirth, and often feeling very unfulfilled in their relationships.

…

Meanwhile, I left y’all mostly with an overview of the rather thick first chapter. I think I need to first start with an overview of the black feminist organizations (BFOs) she deals with.

2nd Carnival of Radical Feminists

The second Carnival of Radical Feminists is up at Feminist Law professors:

The First Carnival of Radical Feminists is a ridiculously difficult act to follow, because Heart did such a fantastic job with it. It is a great resource, and I hope this one will be at least somewhat useful as well. My approach has been to separate the material by broad (yes, bad pun) subject designations, which I have done imperfectly in places, due to overlapping issues. Also I can’t really do some of the linked posts justice by describing them, so in many cases all you have to work with is post titles. I hope you will not be put off by a lack of enthusiastic adverbs or exclamation points, and check them out. You won’t agree with everything you see at these links, but I think you will learn things and be made to think.

38th Carnival of Feminists

Team Rainbow is hosting the 38th Carnival of Feminists:

Team Rainbow has a full tent tonight, what with the philosophical feminists leaping through epistemological hoops, the audience cheering and jeering in the stands, the fire-swallowing radicals compelling us to see it another way, and the multiple oppression trapeze artists leaping across the chaos to make a connection from one oppressive paradigm to another. Over the din, one can barely hear the MRAs from their mindcages, screeching for yet another banana.

Carnival of Radical Feminists

The first ever Carnival of Radical Feminists has been published on the blog Women’s Space/The Margins:

As those of you who have been patiently waiting have observed, putting the First Carnival of Radical Feminists together became far more intense and complex — and time-consuming — a project for me than I had anticipated it would be. It was important to me to at least attempt to lay as solid a foundation for future radical feminist carnivals as I could, to establish a framework which would ground what we post to these carnivals in the work of radical feminist visionaries, leaders, pioneers, herstory and theory-making while continuing to make room for creativity, challenges, and new and different ideas. I wanted women reading to find as many opportunities to connect and engage with what we are offering as a community as possible, not only radical feminist women, but all women and men of good intentions and good will, no matter what their experiences with, or knowledge of, radical feminism have been until now. At the same time, I wanted what is offered to be, again, grounded in the work and thought of radical feminist women.

A Call to Bloggers: Carnival of Radical Feminists

Womensspace, in her blog Women’s Space/The Margins, makes a call out to fellow radical feminist bloggers (and non-bloggers as well) for the upcoming Radical Carnival of Feminists being held at her site:

I’m extending the deadline for submissions to the first Carnival of Radical Feminists (which might be renamed, so stay tuned :)) to Sunday, April 29, to give everyone more time to submit great radical feminist blog posts, which you can submit by going here. The submissions I’ve already received are awesome!

Becoming a “WOC Feminist”

zooeylive writes about her transformation into a women of color feminist after moving from India to the United States:

I never thought of myself as a WOC until I came to this country. Similarly “Women of Color feminism” was not a term that existed in my political lingo until I was 22 or so.I came to the writings of US based wocs during a very crucial period of my life…I began to think that yes, intersectionality is the answer. I tried to embrace bell hooks’ notion of “white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy.” Indeed, there is no way you can analyze capitalism if you leave out race or gender! And this is the approach that I have tried to embrace in my own work—academic, artistic, activist.

Becoming a “WOC Feminist”

zooeylive writes about her transformation into a women of color feminist after moving from India to the United States:

I never thought of myself as a WOC until I came to this country. Similarly “Women of Color feminism” was not a term that existed in my political lingo until I was 22 or so.I came to the writings of US based wocs during a very crucial period of my life…I began to think that yes, intersectionality is the answer. I tried to embrace bell hooks’ notion of “white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy.” Indeed, there is no way you can analyze capitalism if you leave out race or gender! And this is the approach that I have tried to embrace in my own work—academic, artistic, activist.

Radical Views From Women of Color

lex posts a blog about a book she had re-read called This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (which can be found here) on her blog kitchen table: women of color pressed for knowledge:

“I am a revolutionary feminist because I want me to be free. And it is critically important to me that you who are here, that your commitment to revolution is based on the fact that you want revolution for yourself.”

White Feminists

Rosarose07 writes about white feminists and their views:

Sorry, but I don’t care how many black women, Asian women, latina women, other non-white women you know, or how many Men of Color you’ve married, slept with, made babies with, or how you, as a white woman, might identify culturally, you are STILL a WHITE WOMAN. You do NOT know what it is like to really be anything but a white woman, no matter how much you think otherwise, and all the hip-hop, biracial babies, and spicy salsa in the world isn’t going to change that.

Women of Color and the Movement

brownfemipower asks, and answers, some important questions on the women of color movement on her blog Women of Color Blog, especially regarding Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian suicide bomber. She writes:

And it seems that asking this questions has really allowed some very productive, but at the same time, very painful examinations to occur. What women, exactly, are we refering to when we say “women of color”? Do we mean “good” women of color who are working hard but despite their best efforts, unable to move out from under oppressive racist power structures? Do we mean “good” mothers who don’t yell too loud and wouldn’t dream of getting high in front of their kids? Do we mean “good” daughters who go to college and try to represent our race well?

Or are we talking about those women of color who are marginalized even within our own communities? Disabled women? Drug users? Teens who are pregnant, again? Suicide bombers?