Monthly Archives: July 2007

Two Items on the News Tonight

1) What you can earn – selling you body — as a world top model

2) What profits a team of two NZ women entrepreneurs are making selling sexy lingerie to pregnant women (advertised in dominatrix pose)

Is this women’s empowerment today? I’m in two minds.

Jacqui

Taking the Everyday World as Problematic

The sociologist, Dorothy Smith, argues that we are all expert practitioners of our everyday world, knowledgeable in the most intimate ways of how it is put together and of its routine daily accomplishments. But our aim as scholars or analysts is to find the objective or generalisable correlates of what seem to be a private experience (of oppression).

In Tania’s experience this morning, encountering the father with the obnoxious t-shirt, we can find some “truths” of our gendered everyday world. That father, also a police officer, (and we know about police officers in New Zealand) was expressing his masculine gender identity. The T-shirt associates political expression and power (party-partisan, “Anti-Bush”) with female sexual subordination. And it’s relevant to our understanding of gender and politics.

This makes me wonder whether movements to replace Bush, i.e. the Democratic Party or the anti-Iraq war movement, will be any less masculinist in the way they wield power in the world than the Bush administration.

I like better the “My love” union of Bush and Blair. It puts both their “manliness” in question…Maybe you could get a T-shirt printed Tania??

– Jacqui

Bjork interviewed in UNCUT magazine, June 2007

In a recent article in music magazine UNCUT, Bjork reveals how having a daughter has made her connect with feminist issues:

“Having a little girl changed my perspective on everything. As a woman, you start thinking about the relationship between you and your mother, and your mother’s mother, and a gate opens up to the past and the future. My mother was pretty fierce about feminism and I reacted against that a bit. I felt that her generation had achieved a lot but now it was my turn to get on with it and not moan. Now I’m not so sure. I go to the toy shop and everything is pink, all the stories are about how the most important thing in the universe is for girls to find their prince. And I hate that”.

Isn’t it the case that our personal lives and day to day experiences are often what makes us think (and hopefully act!) politically? The personal is political indeed!

Tania

Sexual Objectification in the Playground

I was dropping my six year old girls (twins) at school this morning when I came across the father of one of the boys in their year mingling with other parents in the playground. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what was on his t-shirt: a picture of George Bush with the slogan BAD BUSH next to a picture of a woman pulling her knickers down with the slogan GOOD BUSH (see attached link: http://www.phatpimpclothing.com/hi/phatpimp/getgoodbushbadbush.html )

Quite apart from how seeing that t-shirt made ME feel (and I’m sure the many other mothers and teachers who saw him), how incredibly WRONG to wear it to a PRIMARY SCHOOL!! Will parents this evening have to handle some tricky questions from their kids around the dinner table? How on earth does he explain its meaning to his son and will this boy start referring to my girls in this way? Oh, and guess what? This guy is a member of the New Zealand Police Force!

I told him I didn’t think much of his t-shirt, but he said it was “a good one”. Not sure I did the right thing picking a fight with a parent at my kids’ school (!) but for me feminism is something that is practiced every day in a variety of different contexts. You know, everyday feminism…

Tania

Welcome to Semester Two

Hello fellow bloggers

I would also like to welcome you to the site – I think it is great that Jacqui and Tania have invited the Gender and Politics class to the site and hopefully this will be a dynamic shared space.

I found this blog today from a student at the University of New Brunswick that I thought we would all find inspirational, including some great links to feminist websites, blogs and journals. I like her discussion of the idea of space, and I think the notion of a safe feminist space is an important one to explore.
http://v37s3b4h7dn47s37hg1br4h7rs7n3du7s8nu.unbf.ca/~o52mv/
Cheers

Anita.

Welcome to Gender and Politics (213)

What do you think “politics” is about? What’s your definition? For me, its about the power relations and social hierarchies that underlie our social and political institutions, including, the family, civil society, the church, business, public organizations and political institutions.

What are your thoughts?

Jacqui