Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Úr frétt á www.nyt.com
"To tell you the truth, I am not a feminist," Ms. Musawi said in a recent interview, speaking in English, and dressed in a black abaya. "I don't want to commit the same mistakes Western women have committed. I like that family should be the major principle for women here."
Restin er hér: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/international/middleeast/13women.html

Konur í Írak misskilja líka femínisma. Hann gengur ekki út á að brjóta niður fjölskylduna heldur treysta jafnan rétt allra meðlima hennar. Merkilegt hvað margar konur, t.d. Ásdís Halla og fleiri, gangst upp í því að segja að þær séu ekki femínistar. Flestar slá þær ekki hendinni á móti þeim breytingum sem femínistar hafa náð fram með sinni þrotlausu baráttu s.s. fæðingarorlofi, rétt til menntunnar og jafnra launa.
Ég skil ekki hvernig fólk, bæði karla og konur, geta EKKI verið femínsitar!

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Andrea Dworkin, djarfasti femíníski hugsuður 20. aldarinnar er látinn. Ég efast um að jarðaförinni hennar verði sjónvarpað eða að fólk minnist hennar sem dýrlings, samt á hún það frekar skilið en margir aðrir. Hér er góð grein úr The Guardian um til minningar um þessa umdeildu konu. Spennandi verður að sjá hvort Fréttablaðið og Mogginn fjalli eitthvað um þetta, ég er efins en það kemur í ljós.

Tuesday April 12, 2005The Guardian
'She never hated men'
Andrea Dworkin was attacked as much for her personal appearance as for her uncompromising views. But the death at the age of 58 of 'the most maligned feminist on the planet' has deprived feminism of its last truly challenging voice, says Katharine Viner Dworkin: 'the most misrepresented writer in the western world' Like most, I feel a shudder of shock whenever I read the words of Andrea Dworkin. On crime: "I really believe a woman has the right to execute a man who has raped her." On romance: "In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine." On sexual intercourse: "Intercourse remains a means, or the means, of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her, cell by cell, her own inferior status ... pushing and thrusting until she gives in." Her radicalism was always bracing, sometimes terrifying; and, in a world where even having Botox is claimed as some kind of pseudo-feminist act, she was the real thing. Her death at the age of 58 deprives us of a truly challenging voice.
But Andrea Dworkin was always more famous for being Andrea Dworkin than anything else. Never mind her seminal works of radical feminism, never mind her disturbing theorising that our culture is built on the ability of men to rape and abuse women. For many, Dworkin was famous for being fat. She was the stereotype of the Millie Tant feminist made flesh - overweight, hairy, un-made-up, wearing old denim dungarees and DMs or bad trainers - and thus a target for ridicule. The fact that she presented herself as she was - no hair dyes or conditioner, no time-consuming waxing or plucking or shaving or slimming or fashion - was rare and deeply threatening; in a culture where women's appearance has become ever more defining, Dworkin came to represent the opposite of what women want to be. "I'm not a feminist, but ... " almost came to mean, "I don't look like Andrea Dworkin but ... "
In 2001, the critic Elaine Showalter said: "I wish Andrea Dworkin no harm, but I doubt that many women will get up at 4am to watch her funeral." A couple of years ago, in an article in this newspaper on hairiness, Mimi Spencer wrote: "The only visibly hairy woman at the forefront of feminism today appears to be Andrea Dworkin, and she looks as though she neither waxes nor washes, nor flushes nor flosses, and thus doesn't really count." She didn't count because of how she looked; she only cared about rape because no man could fancy her.
The attacks on Dworkin were not only personal; they also applied to her work. John Berger once called Dworkin "the most misrepresented writer in the western world". She has always been seen as the woman who said that all men are rapists, and that all sex is rape. In fact, she said neither of these things. Here's what she told me in 1997: "If you believe that what people call normal sex is an act of dominance, where a man desires a woman so much that he will use force against her to express his desire, if you believe that's romantic, that's the truth about sexual desire, then if someone denounces force in sex it sounds like they're denouncing sex. If conquest is your mode of understanding sexuality, and the man is supposed to be a predator, and then feminists come along and say, no, sorry, that's using force, that's rape - a lot of male writers have drawn the conclusion that I'm saying all sex is rape." In other words, it's not that all sex involves force, but that all sex which does involve force is rape.
She continued the theme in 1981 in Pornography, possibly her most influential book. She wrote: "Pornography is a celebration of rape and injury to women; it's a kind of union for rapists, a way of legitimising rape and formalising male supremacy in our society." She said that pornography is both a cause of male violence and an expression of male dominance, that women who enjoy porn are harming women, and that lesbian porn is self-hating. She had no time for the textual analysis of porn so beloved of academia; what she cared about was the women performing in the films, the harm they suffered, and what other women had to suffer as a result of men watching porn.
While much of this was brilliant, there are few who could agree with all of Dworkin's work. Her exhortation to vengeance was unpalatable to many; she said that "a semi-automatic gun is one answer" to the problem of violence against women, and that she supported the murder of paedophiles: "Women have the right to avenge crimes on their children. A woman in California shot a paedophile who abused her son; she walked into the court and killed him there and then. I loved that woman. It is our duty as women to find ways of supporting her and others like her. I have no problem with killing paedophiles." And her 2000 book, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation, suggested that women should follow the same path as Jews did in the 20th century: they were abused and fought back, and so should women. Her analysis of the situation in the Middle East - an analysis which, according to Linda Grant, "many Zionists, non-Zionists, Palestinians, scholars of the Holocaust, pacifists, the left, women, men, are bound to find offensive" - concluded with a call to women to form their own nation state.
In an interview with Grant, Dworkin described a Jewish childhood dominated by family memories of the Holocaust. At a time when the subject was simply not mentioned, Dworkin says she was obsessed: "I've been very involved in trying to learn about the Holocaust and trying to understand it, which is probably pointless," she said. "I have read Holocaust material, you might say compulsively, over a lifetime ... I have been doing that since I was a kid." Her mother was often ill, but her childhood in New Jersey was happy, until the age of nine, when she was sexually abused in a cinema.
From then on, it was a life full of horrors. After an anti-Vietnam protest when she was 18, she was sent to prison and was assaulted by two male prison doctors: "They pretty much tore me up inside with a steel speculum and had themselves a fine old time verbally tormenting me as well." She bled for 15 days and her family doctor told her he had "never seen a uterus so bruised or a vagina so ripped". She married a Dutch anarchist who beat her savagely; she managed to escape from him, she said, "not because I knew that he would kill me but because I thought I would kill him". She said that she never stopped being afraid of him.
Then, in 1999, Dworkin was drugged and raped in a hotel room in Paris. It was an attack that was to devastate her. In 2000 she wrote an account of the rape for the New Statesman, which ended: "I have been tortured and drug-rape runs through it ... I am ready to die." Her account was questioned by some commentators, who wondered why she hadn't told the police, how she could be so sure she was raped since she was drugged at the time (she cited vaginal pain, bleeding, and infection; bruising on her breast; "huge, deep gashes" on her leg). But the undercurrent, tapping into the myths that Dworkin herself had so carefully undermined in her work, was this: how could she be raped? She's old, she's fat, she's ugly. As if anyone still thought that rape was about sex and not about power.
This response, though, did not surprise Dworkin. "If the Holocaust can be denied even today," she said, "how can a woman who has been raped be believed?" But the impact of the rape and surrounding controversy was severe, and Dworkin withdrew from public life for several years. Her health was bad: she had a stomach-stapling operation because her obesity had reached a dangerous level, and had severe knee problems which made it difficult to walk. She became invisible in the US except among those for whom her name was what she called "a curse word", and her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Militant Feminist, still does not have a publisher in the UK. But she was coming to terms with her disability; she was being taken seriously again by newspapers, at least in this country. In September, she told the Guardian: "I thought I was finished, but I feel a new vitality. I want to continue to help women." She also said: "At first [after the rape] I wanted very much to die. Now I only want to die a few times a day, which is damned good."
This black wit is remarked upon by everyone who met Dworkin. During the Clinton/ Lewinsky affair, when Dworkin was vocally opposed to Clinton, she said: "What needs to be asked is, was the cigar lit?" When I asked her if her abusive ex-husband had remarried, she said: "Oh yes, and very quickly. After all, the house was getting dirty." I remember being in a restaurant with her in London when she joked that she really ought to go on a diet, and did I know of any good ones?
People were startled by her gentleness and vulnerability; were surprised that her friendships included the British author Michael Moorcock and John Berger as well as feminists Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan. And although she once said she was a lesbian, she lived with the writer John Stoltenberg for three decades, saying: "It's a very deep relationship, a major part of my life which I never thought possible." As Julie Bindel, feminist and Dworkin's friend of 10 years, says: "She was the most maligned feminist on the planet; she never hated men."
Dworkin's feminism often came into conflict with the more compromising theories of others, such as Naomi Wolf. "I do think liberal feminists bear responsibility for a lot of what's gone wrong," she told me in 1997. "To me, what's so horrible is that they make alliances for the benefit of middle-class women. So it has to do with, say, having a woman in the supreme court. And that's fine - I'd love a woman, eight women, in the supreme court - but poor women always lose out." She did concede, however, that her radicalism was too much for some: "I'm not saying that everybody should be thinking about this in the same way. I have a really strong belief that any movement needs both radicals and liberals. You always need women who can walk into the room in the right way, talk in the right tone of voice, who have access to power. But you also need a bottom line."
It was this bottom line that Dworkin provided. She was a bedrock, the place to start from: even when you disagreed with her, her arguments were infuriating, fascinating, hard to forget. Feminism needs those who won't compromise, even in their appearance; perhaps I'm alone, but I find it pretty fabulous that, as a friend told me, Dworkin would "go to posh restaurants in Manhattan wearing those bloody dungarees". She refused to compromise throughout her life, and was fearless in the face of great provocation. In a world where teenage girls believe that breast implants will make them happy and where rape convictions are down to a record low of 5.6% of reported rapes; in a public culture which has been relentlessly pornographised, in an academic environment which has allowed postmodernism to remove all politics from feminism, we will miss Andrea Dworkin. She once said: "What will women do? Is there a plan? If not, why not?" And indeed, who is left to replace her?

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Loksins er búið að setja upp varanlegt ljós á baðið og setja þar upp viftu. Pabbi kom og kippti þessu í liðinn. Tók ekki nema tvo tíma. Hann setti líka upp reykskynjara í sameigninni. Nú er allt voða öruggt.
Mér gengur betur með BA-ritgerðina núna en það er enn nokkuð í land. Ég er samt ekki jafn svartsýn og áður.
Góðar fréttir, þetta er prógrammið sem ég er að fara í haust, vei!

Ph.D. Program in Anthropology Ranks in Top Five in Recent Doctoral Program Survey
The results of the 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey, funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, place our Program in the top five of forty-one Anthropology programs surveyed across the country. Altogether, over 32,000 doctoral students and recent Ph.D.'s evaluated their program's educational practices. The survey was specifically designed to assess student perceptions of the educational effectiveness of their doctoral programs based on the adoption of widely accepted best practices in doctoral education, as recommended by the Association of American Universities, National Research Council, and others.
Visit the survey website

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Djöfull er ég farin að hata BA-ritgerðina mína. Heimildaskráin er þegar orðin 6 bls en textinn bara 10 bls, það er ekki gott merki. Argh!
Ég horfði á hinn ágæta þátt Queer Eye for the Straight Guy endursýndan á Skjá einum í gær. Það er svo sem ekki í frásögu færandi nema af því að viðfangsefni þáttarins var 66 ára slökkviliðsmaður í New York. Mér fannst afar merkilegt að 66 ára Bandaríkjamaður í dæmigerðu karlastarfi skyldi hleypa 5 hommum inn á heimili sitt og leyfa þeim að gjörbreyta öllu þar. Mér finnst ótrúlegt að þetta skuli hafa gerst í Bandaríkjunum þar sem hommafælni er með mesta móti sbr. nýlegar lagasetningar í nokkrum ríkjum sem banna hjónabönd samkynhneigðra. Kannski þetta sé ekki svo slæmur heimir eftir allt saman.

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Fréttin var fyrst birt: 06.04.2005 11:30
Síðast uppfærð: 06.04.2005 11:24
Víetnam: Stúlka deyr úr fuglaflensu
Tíu ára stúlka sem lést á spítala í Hanoi, höfuðborg Víetnam, fyrir nokkrum dögum var með fuglaflensu. Rannsókn hefur staðfest sjúkdóminn og er hún 50. manneskjan sem deyr úr veikinni í Asíu frá því að hún kom upp í hittiðfyrra. Stúlkan var frá héraðinu Long Bien þar sem fuglaflensa hefur greinst á tveimur alifuglabúum. Þar hefur þúsund kjúklingum og öndum verið fargað. Fuglaflensuveiran berst ekki auðveldlega úr fuglum í menn og hættan er minni ef fuglinn ef vel soðinn. Vísindamenn óttast hins vegar að veiran stökkbreytist þannig að hún geti borist milli manna og valdið skæðum faraldri.

Þessi frétt birtist á ruv.is, ef þessi víetnamska stúlka hefði dáið úr hungri eða einhverjum auðlæknanlegum sjúkdómi hefði hún ekki komist í fréttirnar. Dálítið umhugsunarefni.

Ég kláraði The Womens Room eftir Marylin French á sunnudaginn. Mæli með henni. Nú vantar mig eitthvað nýtt að lesa.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Já það hefur ýmislegt á daga mína drifið. Mamma vann miða á Houdini á föstudaginn svo við skelltum okkur. Ég mæli ekki sérstaklega með þessarri sýningu ég myndi segja að hún höfðaði helst til ungmenn og barna frá 5-16 ára og svo til karla á öllum aldri. Þetta var svona ekta helgarpabbasýnign, skemmtun fyrir börnin og brjóst fyrir pabbann.
Á laugardaginn tókum við Stefán meistaraverk, Inherit the Wind með Spencer Tracy. Algjör snilld, myndin fjallar um The Monkey Trial þegar réttað var yfir kennara í Suðurríkjunum fyrir að kenna þróunarkenningu Darwins. Myndin hefur allt til að bera, frábæra leikara, gott handrit, skarpa ádeilu aðeins einn galli er á gjöf Njarðar það eru kallar í öllum aðalhlutverkum.
Á sunnudagskvöldið fórum við mamma á Edit Piaf. Leikritið er ágætasta skemmtun en Brynhildur er algjör stjarna og ber sýninguna algjörlega uppi. Leikararnir standa sig reyndar allir með ágætum en handritið er ekki það beisið enda stendur sýningin vart án tónlistarinnar.

Ég er alveg á móti veðrinu núna.

Friday, April 01, 2005

Ekkert kalt vatn

Þegar ég ætlaði í sturtu í morgun kom í ljós að búið var að loka fyrir kalda vatnið. Var það vegna þess að einhver gröfukall hafði hakkað í sundur leiðslu við vinnu niðri á Hlemmi. Ég brá á það ráð að skoppa niður á nálæga sólbaðsstofu og fara í sturtu þar. Það var ágætt. Á leiðinni heim rakst ég svo á fyrrum sveitunga minn og skólafélaga úr MR. Hann hafði ég ekki hitt lengi. Við spjölluðum saman um daginn og veginn. Við hefðum ekki hittst þarna nema vegna klaufaskapar gröfumanns á Hlemmi. Svona er lífið nú skrítið og skemmtilegt.

Þetta blogg er skrifað í Öskju. Svolítið gaman að koma hingað því hér er allt öðruvísi og annað fólk en er í Árnagarði og Odda. Góð tilbreyting.