12th Down Under Feminists Carnival. With cake. « In a strange land

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Wouldn't mum be proud! Her birthday is also the 1st birthday of the Down Under Feminists Carnival hosted beautifully by Chally at in a strange land, who is not just referring to NZ.

Posted via web from andragy's posterous

Vale Dorothy Porter 1954 - 2008

True original ... Dorothy Porter.
Photo: Steve Baccon

An extraordinary writer and warrior has died. I didn't know her but part of my surrounds has vanished and I don't know which I regret more, the empty shape or something else eventually filling it. Bloody breast cancer.

Her works live on but who and what she was were very important to anyone, any female, who savored words and wildness; australia, sex and cigarettes on the night wind.

I'm female
I"m not tough
droll or stoical.

I droop after
wine, sex
or intense conversation.

The streets coil around me
when they empty

I'm female
I get scared.

an excerpt from Dorothy Porter's mesmeric poem novel, The Monkey's Mask.

more from the world today (abc) "Poetry has always dealt with taboo material from way back. That's part of its sort of holy nature, its vocation is to tackle huge and morally ambivalent themes."
wikipedia "Porter was a self-described Pagan, committed to pagan principles of courage, stoicism and commitment to the earth and beauty." Perhaps the best definition of woman warrior I've found.
and sydney morning herald and herald sun "she was a grand theme person, a sensualist and romantic"

Sunday sports and Monday thoughts

So much for my new world order! I was going to blog on Sport on Sunday, Thoughts on Monday and then do real work for a couple of days. And maybe catch up on my commenting. And maybe blog again on Thursday or Friday if inspired.

In fact, I dream of starting the new Woman Warrior Feature with some in depth interviews with any woman warrior who crosses my path. But that's a Thursday Thing... Or should that be the Wednesday Woman Warrior. Yep. Alliteration wins hands down over convenience.

But so much for my Sunday. The TIVO ate the last 6 weeks W League coverage and I'm so far behind the season that my dreams of being a W League blogger have disintegrated like a biodegradable shopping bag. Only a damn sight faster.

Just found Cyberfamilias

OMG my mom joined facebook is very very funny. ROFL.



I'm an official Michelle Slatalla (of the NY Times) fan. Until I read the rest of her articles - which will put an end to my constructive evening catching up on the w-league!

Beware the church of climate change!

Bloody good article actually. Imagine my shock when I discover the author is Miranda Devine, whom I love to hate. What that does prove however is that being female does not make you an authority on feminism. Perhaps it will encourage more men to become such. LOL.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/miranda-devine/beware-the-church-of-climate-alarm/2008/11/26/1227491635989.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Vernacular Video

more from Howard Rheingold of Smart Mobs and other fame.

also Vernacular Video - by Tom Sherman, [Note: the following is an expanded version of "Vernacular Video," originally published in shorter form in Les Fleurs du Mal, issue #2, Montreal, Quebec, September 2006; and is now in print in the Video
Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer
(eds.), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.]

This is a post punk post

I met an old punk bandmate, 

in playground of kids' school.

Needed photographic proof,

which was forthcoming.

Look scarily like my eldest is

... exactly right now.

Found old punk graffiti 

on another outspoken female's blog.

That's a whole nother story 

still to come.

Singularity

Synchronicity

Zeitgeist

Whatever!

The Hollowmen - Waste of Energy

I love The Hollowmen - ABC Wednesday 8.30 - season finale next week. I just caught some of Season 2 Episode 5 "A Waste of Energy".. describing the PMs new strategy on promoting reduced carbon footprints and solar panels in schools.. or something similar.

They've been to our school under cover, I reckon. I thought it was Peter Garrett launching the Schools Solar Initiative AND opening the school garden... but wait there's more. We can't fund an OOSHC extension to give our kids more than .5m space each indoors, and yet we've just received another $50,000 grant to put more solar panels in or on.

I've suggested that we fund the whole OOSHC extension as a support mechanism for solar panels cause by now we must have run out of roof anywhere else. I haven't yet been taken seriously.

Dr Who's Companions POST SEASON FINALE

SCREEAMMMMMMM!

Donna Noble: you are now 1 SWORD of awful. You had me going there. For a while, I was thinking 4 SWORDS... maybe this is it, even 5 !!!! then...

Catherine Tate: you have 4 SWORDS of awesome for your rivetingly versatile performance as Donna Noble. You were BATHETIC at the end and became horribly stupidly trivial leaving me in tears. You reminded me of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes




Rose Tyler: I'd retract your SWORD AWARD for that horrible last scene, where you find true love with the part human doctor but then, it's HIS fault. You know who!

Russell T Davies! Wow, I bet the swords have been out for you! I daren't read the forums. I really love your writing but why can't you stretch yourself a little bit. Go on and try out more different gender roles.

I guess The Doctor is so lovingly constructed as tragic father figure (western hero) that any other strong figure can not survive in the same series. That's why I say, "Hey, Russell, try a woman next time! AS THE DOCTOR!

Fly by Night - Frances Hardinge

Cheap book shops are one of the world's great mysteries and joys. Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge is the best book I've read for a long long time. It was on the discount table. Go figure.

An oddly ironic place given the nature of the book itself and the free exchange of ideas and literature.

Orphaned daughter of an exiled intellectual, Mosca Mye runs away from home, pausing only to collect her sidekick, a pugnacious gander, and to burn her uncle's mill to the ground in vengeful remembrance of things past. An overheard conversation sends her to rescue a travelling con-artist from the stocks, in the belief that he might prove useful to her, and together they leave the waterlogged village of Chough, where the petrifying springs bleach everything chalk-white, and head for a life of opportunity in the riverside towns and cities of the Fractured Kingdom.

.. from a rather sour review in the Guardian by Jan Mark. The Written Nerd has a more interesting review (to my mind) as he/she likes the book and is comparing two recent childrens works around the theme of censorship. Fly by Night and The Lost Colony by Grady Klein.

Strange Horizons' review by Farah Mendelsohn touches upon Fly by Night in a review for Hardinge's more recent book, Verdigris.

20 something bloody bloggers

The only requirement for membership is that you are between the ages of 20 and 29. How long do you reckon it'll be before that is loosened up a bit? OHH the angst as they slide into 30 something boring bloggers!

Hey KJ. Let's just stick "I'm a 20 something blogger" buttons on our pages for the heck of it.

Not that I'm not enjoying reading the mhfs but I think Rage Against the Menopause is more fun.

Are you deliberately barren?

This blog author, Another Outspoken Female, is one of my favourite woman warriors. I don't know who she is but she gets 4 SWORDS on my newly invented scale of awesomest women warriors!

Go to Deliberately Barren or email her at otherrants at gmail dot com.

clipped from deliberatelybarren.blogspot.com invitation to join deliberately barren I’ve hidden this blog away like a treasure to be explored on a rainy day. That day has now come (though there is more wind than rain) and I am opening deliberately barren to become a collaborative blog with any other women who are child-free, child-less, infertile or just didn’t quite get around to having children, to join in. The title is in honour of Australia’s first female deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, jibe from the enlightened Mr Heffernan – stating she was unfit for leadership because she was ”deliberately barren”. This forum is open to be read by all – men, women, parents, step-parents, bereaved parents – with contributions by women who fall into the category of barren whether through choice or circumstances, deliberately or not. There is the opportunity to celebrate, grieve, laugh, rant, raise awareness and much more. But most of all, it is time for us to come out of the shadows.

blog lockdown starts now!

I mean tomorrow. Really really really really.

From tomorrow, these are the rules:

1. No more than 3 posts a day.
2. No more than 1 hour TOTAL. (unless i happen to get really highly paid job blogging lol)
3. 1 hour spent in exercise each day. (without sneaking off to the computer or the notebook or the chips and bikkies)
   
4. Alcohol intake to be severely reduced... ditto chips
5. Real writing to be done for 4 hours/day, 5 days/week
6. Daily blog/log/survey to be kept ... without wasting valuable exercise or writing time on it.
   

This will be an interesting exercise! When i did more exercise I thought less in general. Daily survey of thoughts vs actions to be kept!

Now if I can add quality time with my loved ones I might achieve beatitude and simply cease to exist in this time and space as we know it.

Apologies to my Eldest - Young Woman Not So Wasted

Not that I'm going to wallow in motherhood here. This is a place of sharp & bitter commentary. Just remember that I called you first to explain that it's not personal no matter what I say about young women. It's an opinionated opinion formed by you, me and everything else around me. My first thoughts were to say please don't ever think badly of you or me because of my sharp tongue. For my next icon: introducing mother in law's tongues aka the snake plant!

scarily slowing down - glorious zeitgeist or entropia

My blog is whirling outwards and I feel the impending entropic collapse. I googled entropy for another noun, verb or variation and found the Entropia Universe. I haven't been to the real one yet. Only the one inside my own head.

For rather a while I've rationed my music and reading to give my own head a chance to think about something other than trivial mundanity. I have a shocking propensity for repeating whatever I last heard as if it were somehow my own marvellous creation.

I've come to a point of equilibrium. I don't own an original thought. I do just seem to express things that bloody bucket loads of people somewhere or other have just expressed (only better) and I have probably just crimped, cadged and cheated it from them, unless I happen to be an unwitting trendsetter.

You can glorify it by calling it zeitgeist all you like. I am torn. Every post I write, I find links to other blogs, books and clips that I am never going to finish getting through. Do I enrich my entries? Do I go back to ignoring others so that I have space to breathe?

I love the freedom (recently felt) of writing whatever I felt like without a fear. I've always been my own worst critic and I've stopped (am stopping). I pity my friends with blogs of note. I don't know if I would survive being overseen by anyone else. Luckily no one else is ever likely to read this.

Honestly, if school P&C meetings send me into a spiral of self doubt and loathing, how on earth could I ever want to write something for other people to read!

I have a sudden great sympathy for David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) and a wish for silence.

Right after I work out how to trackback my next post.

Feminism and Science Fiction part 4

Chapter 10: Feminism and Science Fiction part 4
from In the Chinks of the World Machine by Sarah Lefanu

Rhoda Lerman (and Tanith Lee and Angela Carter, as mentioned earlier) is concerned with the body's interchangeability. In Lerman's Call Me Ishtar the movement is between goddess and mortal, the queen of the heavens and a middle-class American woman. In The Book of the Night a girl child, Celeste, is brought up as a boy and accepted into the monastery on Iona where she subsequently lives. At puberty she is transformed into a cow. While some of the tenth-century monks are attracted by the increasing power of Rome, for others ancient Seth still roars from the chaos. The forces of disorder and entropy are marshalled against the order of language, progress and rationalism.

As in the Zoline story, language takes on a logic of its own that is unrelated to the objects to which it was formerly tied. From this follows a breakdown, not just of women's role in the order of human society, but of the very nature of femaleness. As with Zoline, it is not only culture that is interrogated but nature. But the pivot in Lerman's work is the powerful awakening of sexuality, which transgresses linguistic and cultural codes.

So, too, with Angela Carter, who takes the anodyne out of fairy tales and re-euips her young girls with claws, teeth and a powerful desire. There is an element of violence in Lerman's work which is traditionally not a quality of 'feminine' writing: such an element appears in the work of other women, for example Octavia Butler and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, as well as Carter, Lee and Tuttle. It too is transgressive; the construction of the inviolable body is a corollary of the construction of the coherent self. Woman as 'woman' is interrogated as well as woman as self.

Perhaps it is the position of science fiction on the periphery of mainstream fiction that makes it so open to borrowing from elsewhere, from physics and fairy tales, from philosophy, folklore and myth. And perhaps it is the position of women on the periphery of mainstream (patriarchal) culture that makes SF so suitable a genre for them to work in. For women have not had to bear the awful weight of the Great Tradition, and so have been free to experiment, to riffle through, stopping here and there to work in odd corners, as Tiptree's Ruth describes to Don how women live, 'by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine'."

Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres is often included in discussions of feminist utopias of the 1970s (see for example Joanna Russ, 'Recent Feminist Utopias'), but I think it is more fruitful to read it in the context of the 'disintegrationist' writers. Like Carter, Lerman and Russ, Wittig questions the laws of language and difference that govern our place in the world. Les Guerilleres gets included under the 'utopian' label because it shows a future, separatist, almost women-only world. But the guerrilla fighters of the title are not simply waging a war against men (who appear only peripherally anyway) but a war against the language that constructs them as women and then contains, or encloses them. They are trying to get back to point zero, denying even the names that women have given to themselves in defiance of men, and questioning in particular the metaphors that bind women to the processes of Nature.

Les Guerilleres does share a certain dream-like quality with Gerhart's The Wanderground: a similar circular structure with the story unfolding through many different voices; but its aims are quite different. Where Gearhart seeks harmony and synthesis with nature, Wittig questions the possibility of such a notion.

Monique Wittig's most recent novel, Across the Acheron is a fierce and witty re-enactment of Dante's journeyings through the circles of Hell. Wittig herself is the vengeful voyager, her anger, passion and contempt for sexual slavery held in check, not always successfully, by her guide Manastabal, and resting from her labours every so often in the lesbian bars of limbo.

None of these writers is concerned with the conventions of the 'feminine' in terms of construction, imagery or language, yet all of them, I think, are powerfully feminist. If we want to see what women writers of science fiction have to offer the reader, then we shouldn't be sidetracked by essentialist, and finally moralistic notions of 'feminine' and 'masculine', although the appearance of such a dichotomy is understandable, given the received view of science fiction as a male bastion. We should be looking instead at how science fiction, true to its tradition (not always exploited) of political as well as scientific speculation, can be grasped and used by women writers whose ideas are rooted in a feminist analysis of the world.

Different writers of course hold very different ideas of what feminist SF is. Unlike other forms of genre writing, such as detective stories and romances, which demand the reinstatement of order and thus can be described as 'closed' texts, science fiction is by its nature interrogative, open. Feminism questions a given order in political terms, while science fiction questions it in imaginative terms. I have tried to show the many ways in which contemporary women writers express this, and I hope that I have shown the political and aesthetic vitality of science fiction. If science fiction demands our acceptance of a relativistic universe, then feminism demands, no less, our acceptance of a relativistic social order. Nothing, in these terms, is natural, least of all the cultural notions of 'woman' and 'man'.

Media Tarts by Julia Baird

clipped from www.scribepublications.com.au how the Australian press frames female politicians Julia Baird's Media Tarts is a gripping account of how the media have treated women politicians. While the tone of the book is even-handed, reading the history is at times gruesome, like watching a demolition derby. … In Baird's hands, it is a great political story. Elspeth Proben (Sydney Morning Herald) Julia Baird has interviewed dozens of women in politics, as well as columnists and opinion leaders in the press gallery for this readable, authoritative and thought-provoking book (it has a great cover too). Pamela Bone (The Age Julia Baird has worked as a weekly columnist and as the opinion editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. Her career at the Herald began in 1998. She has a PhD in history from Sydney University and has worked as a history tutor and in radio. She now works as a senior editor at Newsweek, and lives in New York.

Feminism and Science Fiction part 3

Chapter 10: Feminism and Science Fiction part 3
from In the Chinks of the World Machine by Sarah Lefanu

The housewife's struggle for order is renewed each day. Dust creeps in and settles on all surfaces. As with dust, so with death. With the resigned irony with which she accepts the arbitrariness of signs, Sarah Boyle allows death and dust into her fantasies. 'The plants would grow wild and wind into a jungle around the house, splitting plaster, tearing shingles, the garden would enter in at the door. The goldfish would die, the birds would die, we'd have them stuffed; the dog would die from lack of care, and probably the children - all stuffed and sitting around the house, covered with dust.' As the conventions that join signifiers to signified are shattered, so the conventions of sentimentatility are broken apart. Children are the 'too often disappointing vegetables of one's own womb', or, in a reversion to a time of pre-culture, apparently edible.

Sarah herself is a construct, she 'muses or is mused'. Here is no quest for wholeness, rather a doomed struggle against the slipping of self into other, a struggle to set up difference in the face of undifferentiation. Chaos is kept at bay and the elements of dissolution are separated out, paragraph by paragraph, until there is no available energy left. The turtle is dead. The floor is covered with smashed eggs and broken shards of bunny bowls. The stove bleeds, the particles in the universe attain complete disorder, time runs backwards and Sarah Boyle opens her mouth again and again and repeatedly begins to cry.

'The Heat Death of the Universe' was first published in the magazine New Worlds in 1967 and is one of those SF stories that has achieved a small cult status, reappearing every so often in anthologies. It reappears in a New Worlds anthology edited by Michael Moorcock (Flamingo, 1983) where it is one of two stories by women (the other is Hilary Bailey's 'Dr Gelabius') out of a total of 29. I mention this merely to point out the rarity of women participants in the 'progressive' New Wave. While 'Heat Death' is obviously a part of the entropy-orientation of New Worlds, its meditation on entropy is grounded in the organisation of a woman's life.

'Heat Death' achieves two apparently contradictory goals: it deconstructs the notion of woman as a stable centre of family life, subverting the conventional values that are attached to that concept; while at the same time it also subverts accepted notion of what is a suitable 'subject' for a story by focusing on a housewife and housework. It at once centralises and deconstructs 'woman'. This, I think, exemplifies a problem that structuralist and post-structuralist criticism poses for feminists: the radical, or transgressive aspects of the structuralist subversion of the subject do not allow for an analysis that shows 'woman' never to have been the subject in the first place. 'Heat Death' is one of my favourite of all science fiction stories, expressing as it does with such elegance and wit the vistas of emptiness hidden behind the slogan 'a woman's work is never done'.

Interestingly enough, Pamela Zoline's most recent SF story, 'Instructions for Exiting this Building In Case of Fire', also centralises the experience of women and children, although again, not in any conventional way, as it is about breaking or undermining, the ties that hold together familes and nations. I say interestingly as Zoline does not, I think, consider herself particularly feminist; where some writers, as I have mentioned', centralise women and questions of reproductions as a way of challenging the male-dominated concerns of SF, Zoline, it seems, finds the metaphors of science fiction speak to the fragmentation of a woman's life. Male writers do not, on the whole, write about female experience, but women writers, like Judith Merril and Pamela Zoline, use that experience to remarkable effect, within a science fictional framework. So we have motherhood and nuclear radiation; and housework and entropy.

Dr Who is Phenomenal

Dr Who is Phenomenal. I watch with my children, remembering my childhood. It is riveting exciting and provocative and it seems so appropriate in so many ways. I wonder about writing, I watch the confidential. I think about blogging about feminism i compare Donna Noble, Billie Piper and Martha Jones. I think about family and the nature of time, etc.

Feminism and Science Fiction part 2

Chapter 10: Feminism and Science Fiction part 2
from In the Chinks of the World Machine by Sarah Lefanu

The goal of absolute unity between self and other, or subject and object, that is, the point of maximum entropy, is indeed exemplified by Pamela Zoline's short story, 'The Heat Death of the Universe' and Rhoda Lerman's The Book of the Night, both of which have as their sub-text the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As Lerman puts it in an epigraph: '... the world will eventually die, decay, fall into drift, come to a hopeless end, burn out, slide into disorder.'

The potential implications of this in The Book of the Night are held in tension by a contrary proposition, namely that in certain instances the Second Law fails; that there is within matter an anti-entropy drive. Or as Zoline puts it in paragraph 19 of her 54 paragraphed story:

'The second law of thermodynamics can be interpreted to mean that the ENTROPY of a closed system tends toward a maximum and that its available ENERGY tends toward a minimum. It has been held that the Universe constitutes a thermodynamically closed system, and if this were true it would mean that a time must finally come when the Universe "unwinds" itself, no energy being available for use. This state is referred to as the "heat death of the Universe". It is by no means certain, however, that the Universe can be considered as a closed system in this sense.'

The 'subject' of 'The Heat Death of the Universe' is a housewife and mother, the archetypal figure who brings order out of disorder, life out of death, meaning out of chaos. But, here, housework is a closed system, tending towards maximum entropy. The story describes a day in Sarah Boyle's life, from the dishing out of Sugar Frosted Flakes to her children at breakfast time to clearing up after a birthday party in the afternoon. The paragraphs are numbered; seven of them including the one above, are 'inserts': on entropy, heat death, light, Dada, love, Weiner on entropy, and turtles.

Sarah Boyle's life is a struggle against disorder. Death and chaos are held at bay by cleaning, ordering, measuring and naming. The numbered paragraphs fulfil the same function, as do the 'factual' or scientific inserts, and the careful precision of Zoline's language. But order seeps away, the I tends towards not-I. Sarah has 32 lines on her face (charted in an image on the wall) but isn't sure how many children she has; cancer lurks, perhaps in the Sugar Frosted Flakes; the turtle is dying.

The wealth of metaphor and meaning that make up language, literature and art becomes irrelevant. The touchstone of nature has been replaced as a source of meaning by value-free, culture-free synthetic creations. On the colour of Sarah's eyes, for example:

"24. Sarah Boyle's blue eyes, how blue? Bluer far and of a different quality than the Nature metaphors which were both engine and fuel to so much of precedent literature. A fine, modern, acid, synthetic blue; the shiny cerulean of the skies on postcards sent from lush subtropics, the natives grinning ivory ambivalent grins in their dark faces; the promising, fat, unnatural blue of the heavy tranquillizer capsule; the cool, mean blue of that fake kitchen sponge; the deepest most unbelievable azure of the tiled and mossless interiors of California swimming pools. The chemists in their kitchens cooked, cooled and distilled this blue from thousands of colourless and wonderfully constructed crystals, each one unique and nonpareil; and now that colour hisses, bubbles, burns in Sarah's eyes."

As natural order is displaced so hierarchies of value tumble. The meaning acquired through weight of cultural accretion is wiped out. So, on the Sugar Frosted Flakes packet are squandered 'wealths of richest colours, virgin blues, crimsons, dense ochres, precious pigments once reserved for sacred painting and as cosmetics for the blind faces of marble gods.' As signifiers slip from signifieds, the sign becomes arbitrary. Sarah incorporates this arbitrariness into her ordering activitites: 'Sometimes she labels objects with their names, or with false names; thus on her bureau the hair brush is labelled HAIR BRUSH, the cologne, COLOGNE, the hand cream, CAT.'