I feel a special insert coming on!

Resist 2010: Eight Reasons to Oppose the 2010 Winter Olympics. (LOW RES) from BurningFist Media on Vimeo.

The Link will resist, if I have anything to say about it.

plane stupid

While booking a ticket home for the holidays I stumbled upon this.

So I'm thinking about thumbin' it?!

LB

what am I bitching about, again?

"outside man"

"rewrite man"

SET IN TYPE?

the ladies: 

"women find it difficult to compete with men in general reporting jobs, so girls 

who want to be successful in journalism should prepare for work in the special 

women's departments. 

Home decoration, child care, gardening and household hints are found in the 

homemaking section, a deptartment handled by women, 

also included are cookery, meal planning suggestions, menus recipes 

and attractive ways of arranging the table. 

Work in fashion, beauty care and merchandise reporting affords further opportunities, 

almost exclusively for women!

"If you don't like to write, you won't be happy in journalism."

lezzie haircut update

Here is the final (written) result

and here is the final (haircut) result

& if you're curious to read the rest of my queer labour of love, it's HERE

LB

cool climate kids

Moms are the best.

the politics of follicles

Later this week I will be getting a "lesbian haircut." 

Writing for The Link's annual Queer Issue, I think this will be a pragmatic approach to understanding the mysterious "lesbian" identity, not to mention my own. 

Can't wait to dyke it out in the barber's chair, LB 

it's true...

Today I used The Gazette as a shelter from the pouring rain.

I found this:




& this



What's going to happen to the newspapers?

Aspers! Conglomeration! The Internet!

Stay tuned... LB

theory query

Journalism and Women's Studies. A match made in any scholars dreams, right? right.

School began with a kick in the pants, covering gender advocacy & the gentrification of kink

Something great has registered in the last seven days and it is this: you can't learn about theory without thinking about theory.

That sounds redundant, but give it a minute. Apparently the point of theory is not to figure out its content, but rather how to think theoretically about our natural, illogical, explanatory society. It is a tool to navigate the world of information and experience.

According to a guy by the name of Craib, there are four theoretical traps that one may fall into while trying to wrap their heads around thinking about or creating our own versions of empirical sociology and its associates (theories about men, women, society, technology, medicine et al.)

The first trap is the crossword puzzle. I know what you're thinking and I agree: these are integral to Sunday afternoons with the paper & the puzzlols are my favourite part of The Link. You have a coffee, a clue, a slot, and you think like a thesaurus. good times.

When applied to theories, however, this pre-existing framework-style of of trying to fit information about our illogical, natural world into a nice paradigm is, quite frankly, reductionist. Theories are supposed to be engaged with an open mind and be as fluid as our crazy world. So add that extra letter to seven down. It works in theory...

the second trap is the brainteaser, or another fun Sunday afternoon puzzle gone to hell when applied to theoretical thinking. Getting lost working out the little problems is not theory, actually. Losing yourself - and your sight of the world and what understanding you are searching for- in the intellectual exercise of theory puzzlin' is a waste of brainpower.

number three is the logic trap. We live in an illogical world where, sometimes, logical sense is inapplicable to the reality at hand. Theory must be capable of allowing room for flexibility.

finally, number four has us lost in the details of things. Sometimes description doesn't tell us anything new. academics sometimes just like listening to themselves theory-speak.

-----

Now that the traps are revealed before us, the basic epistemological questions remain: what is theory? what does theory do? who gets left out of the theories? why? how do we know that this theory is right? How did we come to know what we know? What is the criteria for this knowledge?

Theory is not only about the social processes and problems that exist, but also a part of these things. think about it...

-------


welcome back to school, fem thought 1 & 2,
LOCO

frequent flyers

found flyers never get old.
LOCO

signs

shalom


now what do you suppose is going on here?

velorevolutionare

RIP Claire Morisette

role research!

to check du monde is the double entendre and key to even remotely understanding this post. 
This planet can be a stupid sexy place. Thank you YouTube.

LOCO

savvy HIV

Despite the probability of my post title being TOTALLY un-PC, I do find the following pretty effective:






These ads have been popping up all over the village and have even replaced skanky American Apparel girls on the back of Le Voir. The boy-on-boy is a HUGE mural you can find in the Beaudry Metero.

So wrap it up, kids.

LOCO

class pride

loblawbla's

LOCO

& more recently

CK has done it again!

alternate title to this post: J'ai faim pour sex.

j'ai faim.

no worries, babe. you can eat me.

oldie goodies, LOCO

SEX STRIKE

go here

HELL YAH LADIES

one down...

... the rest to topple!

no 2010!

Not worth a Bailout: Olympic Village


Despite a claim of sustainability, environmentalists and urban planners are unconvinced that the Vancouver Olympic Village is worth the $875 million price tag.

“There has been an attempt, at least on a symbolic level, to make the Olympic events and infrastructures about the environment and therefore worth the money, but ultimately, the people saying that sustainability is the primary goal of these projects are green-washing” said Dr. Craig Townsend, a professor of Geography, Urban Planning and Environment at the University of Concordia yesterday afternoon.

“This Village is ultimately a mega real estate project which has used the games to generate a support that would have been difficult to generate at any other time, especially in a global recession,” he added.

In a secret meeting on January 19th, the provincial government of BC passed Bill 47, allowing the Millennium Development group to borrow $458 million from the province to pay for the remaining construction of the Olympic Village after the original lender, Fortress Investment Group, backed out of the deal last fall.

“This is a lot of money that the provincial government could be spending in other areas,” Townsend continued. “In terms of the traditional lasting impacts on the urban environment, mega-events like the Olympics leave a legacy of infrastructure that influences where future growth and spending occurs, but not much else; certainly not sustainability!”


Citing “The Big Owe” Olympic Stadium of Montreal, which was built for the 1976 Olympic games and amassed a debt of $1.5 billion which was paid off in 2006, Townsend was wary about the over-ambitious government spending on these types of consumption projects.

“Building something this expensive and permanent for a short-term event is bound to be problematic. Quite often the scale of these facilities is beyond the size of regional or local communities. In the case of Montreal, the Olympic Stadium was premised on an anticipated rapid growth post-games that never really arrived. As it turned out, Montreal had a decade of slow growth and we were stuck paying for these facilities that didn’t have any use.”

Townsend, who specializes in urban transportation systems, was also quite skeptical of the other projects currently siphoning provincial money in preparation for the Games, which he believes have been underreported in lieu of the Village scandal.

Specifically he considered the $600 million sea-to-sky highway renovation project from Horseshoe Bay to Whistler ‘the exact opposite’ of sustainable operations, arguing that there is “something perverse” about building a highway that connects the suburbs with an elite resort.

“Why should the public be putting this huge amount of money into something that is going to benefit just a very small number of people? Is that fair from a societal perspective? No. Sustainability is not just about preserving the environment. It is about the ways to build equality. The Olympics celebrate lifestyles that are inherently problematic for sustainability and this project specifically endorses the current inequities.”

Despite his criticisms of the ‘sustainable irony’ inherent to the 2010 Olympic plans, Townsend believes what it all comes down to is business as usual.

“I appreciate the attempt to brand the games with environmental initiatives, but if BC wanted to promote sustainability, they would have done something else entirely. I find it depressing that the people in charge have been dishonest in telling people how much they love the earth one day and then funding an eight-lane highway the next. This is, quite simply, superficial marketing. To a certain extent, the concept of a sustainable Olympics is just an add-on of selling the project.”

The true costs of the infrastructure projects initiated by the Games cannot be known until well after 2010, according to official reports from the Vancouver Olympic Committee.

the new new journalism

Everyone is freaking out about the state of journalism and wondering if blogs can really pick up the slack.

I heard about the CBC cuts two days before they were announced in the news due to an inconspicuous location while waiting for an interview. I was told that it was strictly off the record, but didn't realize at the time how breaking it could be.

What will happen to the institution now is anyones guess, but the experiment of letting advertisers run the media needs to end.

This article has some ideas and I recommend it. Normally, I would do a little review, but I have two take-homes and a two papers in front of me.

So enjoy.

911. A gendered emergency.

Image: Scott Reeder. "American Dick," 2007. Courtesy of Adbusters


Using gender as a tool to interpret and explain ideological issues in contemporary society can be very effective to discover patterns, archetypes and power relationships.

In Iris Marion Young’s article “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State,” she uses the lens of gender to help interpret and critique the principles of war and security in a post-9/11 era. Exposing the “patriarchal logic” of protectionism, which is constructed by the rhetoric of popular culture and war propaganda as inherently masculine, Young argues that under this system, women, children, and (by extension) citizens are “paradigmatically in a position of dependence and obedience.” (1) The construction of a masculine protector creates a binary of power and subordination between men and others. In this system, women, children, and (by extension) citizens are understood as vulnerable and thus requiring the security of men or government bodies.

By explaining how democratic citizens permit their leaders to protect them using the same practices that a patriarch would use to protect his family, Young discusses a “particular logic of masculinism” that associates the two. (7) The rhetoric of war and security mobilizes fear to gain support from the masses for a male government. Naturalized by pop-cultural construction of the male body as heroic, tough, or chivalric, these patterns suggest something important about the gendered relationship between the government and its citizens.

In discussing the events of 9/11 in the United States, Young exemplifies how “states often justify their expectations of obedience and loyalty, as well as their establishment of surveillance, police, intimidation, detention and the repression of criticism and dissent, by appeal to their role as protectors and the presumption of a threat.” (7) This can certainly be seen in the multitude of ways that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was packaged and sold to Americans. If you turned on the television in the last ten years you could tell how many mass media outlets had very clear ideas about who was a ‘terrorist’ and who was a ‘hero.’ This media angle focused on protecting the United States, spinning and selling the war as a positive and necessary humanitarian effort, even though we know now (and knew then) that it was unwarranted. The United States bargained with people’s fear and branded an unnecessary war with this language; it is in this example we can interpret a deep connection between the constructs of protection and the obedience of a nation. (They called it 'The Patriots Law,' for goodness sakes.)

Young also argues how, very often obedience within a country legitimizes its aggression and violence abroad. We have discussed in class how “loyalty at home legitimizes a governing body’s power over citizens internally and justifies it externally.” In the same authoritarian and paternalistic manner that a patriarch would run 'his' household, government war bodies are able to accomplish and normalize the subordination abroad.

There is something that happens when people think about women and war. Often, there is an assumption that women are inherently peaceful, and obviously this idea is contentious.

It's hard for me to discuss how women are associated with the peace movement without feeling frustrated with a professor I once had. I raised a point about the dangers of associating women and peace, and was immediately accused of 'not accepting that inequality exists' for some reason. The bottom line is (and was) that I am with bell hooks on this argument:

"Dualistic thinking is dangerous; it is a basic and ideological component of the logic that informs and promotes domination in Western society... it reinforces the cultural basis of sexism and other forms of group oppression. Suggesting, as it does, that women and men are inherently different in some fixed and absolute way, it implies that women by virtue of our sex have played no crucial role in supporting and upholding imperialism or other systems of domination."

photocredit: http://www.mrdowling.com/images/706unclesam.jpg
http://www.womenaustralia.info/exhib/war/gifs/ARTV00332.jpg

Nevertheless, the deconstruction of war and security with a gendered lens help broaden the issue using theoretical context. The connection is deep, and it suggests how patterns within a patriarchal home have manifested.

you've come a long way, baybay.

thank goodness for feminism

motherhood?

motherhood.

wow. the media really took THIS one on a spin, hey? do we ask for this, as news consumers?

these are the mere ideas of the moment:

the ethics of care: the constructs of female emotion

marxist feminism: the production of reproduction. subornation is maintained materially and maternally. "women's work."

the construction of 'dependence' - when does autonomy take place? when our milk runs dry?

the backlash of biology. convenient physical manifestation to generalize women as mothers. behavior expectations.

the 'double bind' of tradition and career.

marriage as industry.

alright, that is about enough for one night, I think

my feminist guilt list

I have been list-making in my SLEEP.

Lately, we are learning about feminist issues of unity, of intersecting oppressions, of race, of class, of location location location. In accordance, I feel it necessary to purge myself. so here it is, on the table: my feminist guilt list.

1) I am white
2) my family is middle class
3) I am university educated
3) There was a time where I once enjoyed sex and the city.
4) I believe that children are wonderbread.
5) I am bound, as we are all bound, by our history. I feel terribly sorry about that.
6) I do believe in Satre's 'look,' but only when I FEEL it. and I feel it. we're still being watched.

but I keep asking myself (another question that dogs my second undergrad) what am I going to do about this big, feminist mess? Am I the only one to feel this? Does this have another name? Is it right to be so subjective, so inverted?

as bell hooks (who is saving me from myself) rightly writes, there is no liberation based on 'I'; no collective movement based on 'everyone.' we cannot compare the struggles of women to the struggles of Aboriginal, or blacks or jews, or palestinians, or chinese, or any 'minority group' or those who experience classism, racism ageism, homophobia, oppression, everything. is there a point to contest who got more fucked over by institutions, industries, governments, social bodies, the media, the nuclear family, oppression, exclusion, everything.

I want action!

--- but first?
the feminist challenge of radical self-criticism: to confront the oppressor within. to confront the private lives, to confront experiences.

(read bell hooks.)

gender and journalism

I would like to introduce you to e. cora hind, epic agricultural expert slash manitoba suffrage sister. 1861-1942

randomly in a class I was assigned to read up on this fine woman and to my delight she comes where I come from, happening to be the first western female journalist to boot. 1882 - came to winnipeg to become a teacher but didn't cut it, wrote an earnest letter to the WFP but was told that journalism was no place for a woman. Became a stenographer, opened her own typing bureau, published anonymously, made famed crop estimates & participated in the manitoba mock parliament with nellie. love her. I dug up a couple quotes:

- there is much more interest in breeding hogs in western canada than there is parenting children

- the usual statement is that I am a remarkable woman because I can do it; the implication is that the average woman is too dumb to succeed at a mans task & I resent that implication, for it is false.

---

I think I would like to start some 'mock' public institutions, inspired entirely by her & something I saw the other day... while spending an afternoon eating free peoples potato and gallery hopping around concordia I was a witness to a live-art situation of sorts. Walking through the new, artsy EV building the stream of students and we were blocked by bodies sticking out of garbage cans, mail slots, recycling bins; receptacles. there they stood, in the trash, recycling, letter bags, motionless. Still. Their lives were simply part of the bureaucratic system of waste, renewal and paper trail. fascinating.

--- --- this is what I have been working on in school:

Outlaw Culture: bell hooks

Through my recent studies in journalism, it has been made clear that modern representations in the western mainstream are overwhelmingly consolidated and capitalist driven. Mass media, advertisements, TV shows and newspapers have a huge amount of power to both construct a symbolic reality and to neutralize counter-hegemonic or radical discourses. It is these institutions that are the primary inventors of inequality, and due to the scale of these operations, their patterns are set up as the norm.

Just as the media is consolidated, so is the face of oppression. It is poignant that hooks has re-named equality antagonisms as a ‘white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy’ because domination is never a secular issue. Echoing the conviction of Barbara Smith in Across the Kitchen Table, “[contemporary feminists] are not one dimensional, one-issued in our political understanding… the more wide-ranged your politics, the more potentially profound and transformative they become. ”
In terms of terms, I have to say that I consider hooks use of the word ‘outlaw’ to describe transformational properties of the critical spectator particularly interesting, primarily because it has a criminal essence to it. She was possibly meaning to express a ‘guerilla’ movement of cultural critics, or one who is rebellious in nature, because of their anti-hegemonic approach to the media, but I found the word ‘outlaw’ a glaring term in discord with the rest of the video. A critical mind, as she argued, has a sense of entitlement or agency to engage in the critical process, and control the interpretation of propagandist messages. This person, for me, is not an outlaw - but an active participant in a semiotic struggle of meaning-making. Being ‘culturally vigilant,’ in my opinion, is a right, not a crime.

Access to enlightenment, specifically media literacy and education programs, clarify the messages that have been normalized in our culture. A critical understanding of an image transforms it entirely because it reveals its false truths and inherent biases. When this occurs, media loses its power by becoming much more than a top-down system of ideas from maker to consumer; the roles of ‘critic,’ ‘intellect,’ or ‘activist’ allows for media to become a participatory practice.

Critical analysis and enlightenment are important, as hooks continued in the video, because media representations are hugely motivated and manipulated propaganda. Specifically in describing how mass media “tries to get women out of feminism” we can see how this matter is manifested. Feminism has been manipulated into the f-word and it is no accident: we have been demonized because we challenge the instituted systems of power. In her book Taking Back, hooks articulates that social punishments such are these are intended to suppress the creation of alternative discourses and in the film she called this the ‘backlash.’ These motivated constructs are so influential and contrived that they derail, distract and divert opinions that attempt to call out the systems of domination. This is especially true with feminism.

For me, a young feminist stuck somewhere in the fourth (?) wave, I feel incredibly burdened by mainstream messages; they neither represent me nor include me in their attempts to silence and normalize a reality of inequality. If we are to put systems of inequality back into equal terms of power relations, it seems as if we need a sponsor, billboard space, commercials on radio, a television station and newspapers; a message en masse. But who are ‘we?’ And, more importantly, do ‘we’ have to participate using ‘their’ devices?

I feel it is particularly important that women (finally) make their dent in the world of media. I feel it is particularly important that women (finally) ascertain public space and discourses that reflect the reality of women. Since the beginning of our inclusion in journalism, which coincided with the beginnings of women negotiating the public sphere, her relationship with advertising has been binding and subversive. Women have been employed, as both the symbol and market of advertisements, to normalize consumption and inequality. I feel it is particularly important that women (finally) undo these binds.

But how? This is the question that dogs my second degree. I am beginning to believe that participation on a grassroots and lo-tech level is what the next wave will use to create new signs, interpretations, and marks on the cultural landscape. I believe also that much will be gained by alternative media practices, which always have the potential in the gaining of critical mass.

Enter culture jamming.

Tom Licacas, who synthesizes the practice of jamming perfectly in his essay 101 Tricks to Play on the Mainstream: Culture Jamming as Subversive Recreation, explains that jamming is a cultural 'backtalk' that uses the language of established power. Similarly to hooks, Liacas asserts there are indeed transformational qualities within culture jamming. Describing it as a trend of cultural self-determination that allows people to break out of their consumer roles, jamming facilitates a creative talkback at culture and moves the participants from critical engagement to constructive engagement.

culture jamming is kick ass for the rush alone, but should abide by a larger picture. In an attempt to subvert the original intended messages on various advertisements and storefronts, an autonomous signature demands that the viewers consider the source in which the images it adorns are realized : the imbalanced cultural environment of media is reinterpreted when you participate with it.

les femmes s'entêntent, sans tête, cent tête

The readers - women or men - who come to these texts in good faith run the risk, when they have finished reading, of feelings like they have been challenged. The anti-sexist struggle is not only directed, as the anti-capitalist struggle is, against the structures of society as a whole; the anti-sexist struggle attacks in each one of us what it is most intimate and what seemed the most secure. It challenges our desires, the very forms of our pleasure. Let us not retreat in front of this challenge, beyond the suffering that it may provoke in us, it will destroy some of our shackles, it will open us up to new truths.

the above is Simone de Beauvoir, exerted from a class in an institute which bears her same name.

it is not only the beautiful prose which comes from this woman's mouth, but the woman. my god! what a woman. she started everything. it makes no difference that she is radiant as well as brilliant, but she is.




more importantly though, I want to pay a tribute to this woman because she was the one who first bound existentialism and feminism. who inspired the questions to be asked. & now, in the tradition of genderfucks who came before me, I ask them.

who really is the subject of women's studies? which woman? what do the assumptions of limited categories for man and women impose? who believes in it? how does it affect culture? who is oppressed? and. what is defined? what is being conditioned? what is signified, distributed, assigned? and, always, by whom? and in the name of whom?

with the sincere desire to search for answers, to break free from things assumed, to explore the myriad of possibility, there is a movement forward. gender studies opens the door ...

I am ready for a hundred heads, loco.

2009: media resolutions.

I found this January first, two-thousand-and-nine, as I sloppily opened up my store doors & thought it to be a sign.

this type of material is what it is all about. seriously. it has clicked.

here's to a year of new medias. loco