• Reclusive Leftist has a wonderful post that points out the absurdity of focusing on Palin’s violent rhetoric when it is rather ubiquitous. For instance, Olberman’s anti-Hilary Clinton rhetoric a few years ago was quite violent as well. In fact, the left’s obsession with Palin probably has more to do with a patriarchal fear of powerful women than a specific focus on violent rhetoric:

Palin is the left’s Hillary Clinton. She’s the Evil Mother, the terrifying Vagina Dentata, the Monstrous Female who is somehow the cause of everything scary and bad and wrong.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Men run the world, own almost everything in it, hold almost every position of power, and yet these two women—each the first in her party to become a serious contender for presidential office—are somehow responsible for everything bad. Somehow they’re in charge, somehow they’re the worst, somehow they are the fount of evil.

• James Poniewozik at Time has a decent column on violent rhetoric:

Expression has effects. Tremendous effects. Rhetoric shapes our worldview. Narratives change people’s lives. Arguments move listeners and infuriate them. Does rhetoric cause anything? You could make a good argument that, when it comes to human behavior, rhetoric causes everything. [. . .]

Hostile, belligerent rhetoric isn’t wrong for what it causes. It’s wrong for what it is in itself. [. . .]

That reason is not that somebody is going to see that and suddenly decide that murder is a legitimate means to an end. It’s that responsible, grown people don’t act that way in public.

• Tim Wise weighs in on our current political climate and paranoia:

It is not necessary to show that Loughner is a follower of Glenn Beck, or Michael Savage, or any of a hundred or more local variants of the same. It is not, in the end, all that important whether he spent time on right-wing websites, or is (as a Department of Homeland Security memo seems to suggest) a follower of the white nationalist group, American Renaissance, or whether he believes (as some of his otherwise hard-to-decipher internet postings hint) that the Constitution is being usurped by the current government because of its reliance on paper money: a prominent meme among the far-right. What matters is that Loughner, like all of us, has been exposed day in and day out, for several years, to the unhinged and paranoiac ravings of persons who believe America is in its “end days,” and that the sky is falling, at least metaphorically — and not because of global warming, which is just one more piece of the left-wing conspiratorial plot to confiscate all wealth in the name of nature-worship — but because of the communist/socialist/fascist/Marxist/Nazi/Muslim/Kenyan/terrorist/anti-Christ who occupies the White House.

[. . .]

Whether or not Loughner was influenced directly by any of these words, these verbal daggers aimed at civil discourse, is quite beside the point. For these words, these daggers, are the very ether of the political culture in which he has come of age. They comprise the fabric of the larger ideological tapestry to which he has been exposed. And they are, like any toxin, bio-accumulative in the cells of the human animal, even more so for those whose chemical balance is already dicey at best. Especially when such persons have the misfortune of living in a society that has so completely stigmatized mental illness as to guarantee that most who suffer will receive no treatment.

• Jill at Feminste has a good discussion of mental illness:

[. . .] our culture so thoroughly ties mental illness to criminality that we have created an environment of intellectual laziness when it comes to looking at the actual causes of crime. [. . .]

Certainly, some people with mental illnesses do commit crimes — but that shouldn’t really surprise us, since people with mental illnesses are people, and some people commit crimes. I’m worried, though, that “he’s crazy” will end up being the easy card to pull in the particular case of the Arizona shooting, without recognizing that, mentally ill or not, Jared Loughner participated in the same society as the rest of us, and was undoubtedly influenced by the culture in which he lived — mental illness does not typically put one on an island all their own, totally unswayed and oblivious to everything around. We need to take a good look at the culture and sub-cultures we’ve built in the United States; “he’s crazy” is a cop-out, and it’s irresponsible, and it doesn’t alleviate us of our responsibilities.

• And, as Jim Aune at the Blogora suggests, Walter Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence.

Some links:
Pandagon: This appears like it’s going to be much worse than even the worst cynic would have predicted
Shira Tarrant at HuffingtonPost: Sonia Sotomayor: The answer rhymes with “fender”
Female Science Professor: Feelings
ThinkProgress: Liddy on Sotomayor and menstruation
Feminist Philosophers: David Brooks has it almost right: Sotomayor again
Feminist Philosophers: The impartial chief justice, on the other hand
Feminist Philosophers: Sotomayor and standpoint theory
Feministe: Alito quote that sounds like Sotomayor’s empathetic, “identity politics” statements
Feminste: Comparing Sonia Sotomayor to Sarah Palin is kind of insulting
Feministing: a variety of links to articles about Sotomayor

It must be their innate lack of ability, as the tech community is doing everything they can to make them feel welcome– even using images of them in powerpoint presentations! Like this one, from this conference. Reading the comments also reveals such a sophisticated understanding of feminism that one is shocked, shocked, to learn that there are very few actual women at the conference. (Thanks, Lani.)

Update: Mr Jender tells me there were 6 women out of the 200 at the conference, and he’s referred me to this post on the topic by one of those women.

• Slate’s new women’s website doesn’t seem very feminist according to Feministing—or perhaps downright anti- or post-feminist. UPDATE: Read Anne Friedman’s post at The American Prospect, which asks why sites like Slate don’t just offer more content for women rather an a whole new site.

• Inside Higher Ed on the new book New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion by Rich Ling. Looks interesting.

• Google Search gets cooler. Of course, this opens all sorts of information literacy potentials.

• Onward State: a judge punished a student for tweeting during the trial. Seems like an infringement on free speech to me.

• Here’s a great parody of Miss California USA Carrie Prejean’s press conference the other day. The original can be seen here. Also, I think Donald Trump is creepy.

• Oh, and in case you thought that perhaps politics wasn’t still a man’s club, read this.

• New York Magazine has a brief story on gay-related zines out of New York. Towleroad includes links to various zines. I might have to make a trip to NYC sometime soon to visit Printed Matter.

• Aaron Bady at The Valve has an interesting read/analysis of A Christmas Story, aired on repeat on TBS every December.

• In Other Words, the last remaining non-profit women’s bookstore in the country, is struggling to stay open. They have to raise more money by February, so consider helping out!

• Via Queers United, here’s the blog Community Psychology at Penn State Harrisburg, a blog about a woman doing graduate work at PSU Harrisburg who’s experienced discrimination for wanting to do queer studies work. In her words: “I am a graduate student who faced discrimination at Penn State Univ. of Harrisburg for creating a graduate project focused on Queer Studies. I was told my project had to be a ‘Women’s Studies’ project because ‘Penn State Univ. as an institution does not support Queer Studies.’ While at PSH I faced verbal abuse and sexual harassment due to my gender expression as a working-class lesbian.”

• Via Pam’s House Blend, Rex Wockner’s take on Stonewall 2.0, a phrase I am incredibly uncomfortable with. Wockner claims the movement “isn’t fizzling.” An excerpt:

Stonewall 2.0 may or may not be inextricably wed to Join The Impact, the viral entity that coordinated the massive, 300-city, 50-state demos on Nov. 15, but what happened from Nov. 5 to Nov. 15 in California and across the country indisputably fired up a new generation of activists and lit a fire under complacent, comfortable older generations. It was a 2.0 moment — different from the gay marches on Washington, the AB 101 protests, the White Night Riots and other post-Stonewall historical moments precisely because it took place from coast to coast and border to border, and because the method by which it was organized (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, e-mail, text-messaging) can be reactivated in minutes whenever the moment strikes.

• Nan Hunter at the Bilerico Project discusses the California Attorney General’s brief in the Prop8 legal battle. Pretty much, the AG argues that Prop8 should be invalidated on the grounds that marriage is a natural right. Interesting argument, but worrisome from the vantage point of someone who wants to disentangle marriage from the state.

But the thirty-second commercials during these three-hour commercials for professional sports were awful. This is a reason not to watch television. According to the TV, jewelry means love, love means commitment of the monogamous type, and that means men buy women stuff!! Especially shiny things!

The most disturbing commercial I saw, though, was for the DVD of the recent movie/musical Mamma Mia. The commercial begins with words across the screen: “You know she wants it.” Then: “Give it to her.” Then some stuff from the movie. And closing: “Be a man.” “Buy Mamma Mia for her.” So let me get this, uh, yes, straight: First, being a man means not wanting to see a musical for yourself — it means letting your manhood down long enough to buy a musical for your female partner. Not only that, but the commercial has to tap into the rape culture: You know she wants it — Give it to her!

Wow. Not Cool, TV. Not Cool.

• According to Queers United, Winq has become the first ever global queer culture magazine, though it appears to be mainly gay and bi male focuses. QU notes that it’s more influenced by queer theory than most other LGBTQ publications.

• CFP: The Palin Factor: Political Mothers and Public Motherhood in the 21st Century. Sounds pretty interesting.

• via Orosco, this Pinky Show episode discusses the ways in which museums construct our experiences while visiting them and create value.

• via The Blogora and The Valve, Adam Kirsch’s piece The Deadly Jester, in which he critiques Zizek. I’m ambivalent about the piece.

• 365gay.com: Gay Rights in a Post Modern World. There are some pretty screwed up ideas in this (like, that racism is over, according to some).

• The ReadWrite Web: The end of online anonymity. Hmmm…

• Hugh McGuire at the Huffington Post: Why Academics Should Blog

And that ends my link dump!

• Oregon State has joined iTunes University! I had students give a pretty good presentation on this arguing that OSU should start using iTunes U in my business writing class last year next year, arguing that OSU should get involved with iTunes U. I wonder if they were involved in this getting OSU on the iTunes boat at all (I somewhat doubt it, but I hope they were). I didn’t realize it until I just searched, but Penn State is on iTunes U as well.

• Stanley Fish discusses a new book on academic freedom. I generally agree with his (and the books’) take on the topic.

• via the Blogora, Texas A&M adviser to student conservative group resigns because he’s ashamed of the group’s tactics (especially after they publicly attacked four professors who signed a petition supporting William Ayers).

• New York Times: Blogging at a Snail’s Pace

• A Marriage Manifesto… of sorts: a young gay man decides he’s going to stop using marriage terms for married folks. Instead of “husband” and “wife,” he’s referring to people as “domestic partners” and the like. I kind of like this approach.

While I agree with Lloyd that we must understand domination as localized and multiple, and that Ebert’s theory is problematic, I am concerned that Lloyd might also too quickly dismiss Ebert’s understanding of patriarchy—though my understanding of Ebert comes solely from Lloyd’s exegesis and critique. Ebert’s theory of resistance postmodernism sees patriarchy as a systemic economic system that subjugates and exploits women and “is ‘necessary’ to the very existence and prosperity of the majority of socio-economic systems in the world and is fundamental to the global expansion and colonization of capitalism” (Ebert, qtd. in 80). Ebert’s theory, as Lloyd conveys it, admits itself to differences throughout time and location, meaning that patriarchy is not the same in every context. While all women are oppressed under patriarchy, they experience that subordination in various ways (80-81).

Lloyd claims that Ebert is working under some “questionable assumptions,” including the possibility for objective critique, the conflation of the economic with the material, and the belief that the cultural is not material and not as important as the economic (81-82). These critiques seem valid to me. However, unlike Lloyd and in line with Ebert, I do see patriarchy as a part of “the majority of socio-economic systems in the world” (80). For example, I see those “instances” cited on page 87 (legislation preventing women from entering certain occupations, compulsory sterilization of African-American women, etc.) as “necessarily originat[ing] as part of a system organized to subordinate women” (87). Of course, I am not saying they solely originate from that system, for other systems are at play as well. My point is that I do think we need to understand patriarchy as “a totality in process” that plays out differently in different contexts (Ebert, qtd. in 80).

Griffon’s discussion in particular helps us to understand the ways in which privacy, including the privacy of our bodies, is publicly mediated. She questions her own complacency in the narrative that women can be successful despite pregnancy (203) as well as the normative heterosexual narratives that she works in. Citing Robyn Wiegman’s “On Being Married to the Institution,” she notes that public enactments of family-making, such as pregnancy, exclude certain kinds of experience and have a certain privilege of being legitimate in public (205). This is a nuance missed by Wallace-Sanders, who rightfully sees pregnancy as disrupting the norms of the public/private distinction but overlooks the ways in which her body is already public. She writes that “My body threatened to reveal my secret and make my private life public” (190) and that she, her husband, and their expected baby “were becoming a family—in public” (189). These statements imply that our bodies and families are a priori private until a woman becomes pregnant. What Wallace-Sanders misses that she was already becoming a family in public: dates, engagement, marriage are all public in many ways. The ability to have a family in public is predicated on the heterosexual privilege to claim that your family is a private matter—a privilege that Griffon understands is not available to many in society.

My point here isn’t to simply point out Wallace-Sanders’s heterosexist assumptions about privacy, but rather to call into question the humanist notion of a private body altogether. Other essays in this collection give us hints that privacy is publicly mediated: certain diseases is disabilities are private because of public shaming, while others are forced to be public because of visibility; students interact with teacher’s bodies differently, respecting bodily boundaries differently based on perceived sexuality, for example.