Minorities

The unexamined dissertation: not worth writing?

Posted onMonday 2 June 2014

As some who read my blog may know already, I’m currently struggling with the process of writing my dissertation proposal. Despite writing being one of the things I do best and most easily, and for various reasons that aren’t important right now, I’ve had some nervous procrastination issues with writing this proposal. Thus my adviser…

Poisoning history

Posted onTuesday 25 March 2014Friday 11 July 2014

There’s an odd and disturbing trend I’ve noticed recently in my preferred form of brain candy; e.g.: smart female protagonists within the genre of urban fantasy. From what I can tell, when the author wishes to demonstrate via emotional shorthand just how repugnant a villainous group is, or needs to hastily add a bit of…

Why not pulp

Posted onMonday 24 March 2014

Some years ago a friend asked me why I didn’t like pulp — why, in fact, I pretty much loathed it. It gets stuck in your teeth, and makes the orange juice too thick, I replied. Admittedly, I can now confess my sense of humor still needed work at that time. What can I say……

Slightly groggy book review… ish… ness…

Posted onSunday 26 January 2014

I have a nasty cold. It is no fun. I intensely dislike feeling like my head has been stuffed full of cotton wool and my brain is out vacationing in Timbuktu without me. Regardless, I’m trying to stay awake so I go to bed at a reasonable hour and don’t wake up at 3 am…

Woman in the Shaman’s Body

Posted onMonday 20 January 2014Wednesday 15 January 2014

The apparently overwhelmingly powerful need to control women which some men appear to have is painfully expressed yet again in a form which is recorded by anthropology professor Barbara Tedlock’s research for her 2005 book Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion & Medicine. Granddaughter of an Ojibwe midwife and herbalist, and…

Exploring power with rather than power over

Posted onSunday 19 January 2014Wednesday 15 January 2014

In the same year as Ely & Meyerson’s amazing article regarding the malleability of masculinity, Euro-American columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and Asian-American lecturer and business executive Sheryl WuDunn — both also married, journalists, and Pulitzer Prize winners — publish Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. In a sweeping, journalistic writing style…

Poetry is Not A Luxury & Mighty Be Our Powers

Posted onSaturday 18 January 2014Wednesday 15 January 2014

Closely examining our matrifocal past and present offers a solid basis from which to theorize a possible healthier future — one not damagingly based in androcentrism. Such a future will not come about on its own, of course; if women are to regain their rightful positions as cultural creators and leaders then they will have…

Fascinatingly more on matrifocal societies

Posted onFriday 17 January 2014Wednesday 15 January 2014

Both Sanday (reviewed by me here and here) and Du are anthropologically trained ethnographers researching indigenous societies. As previously noted, their work offers explicit epistemological modifications of great benefit for a more humane, feminized science. This is not the only valid methodology available, however, to a women’s spirituality scholar, as is demonstrated by the next…

Refusing Standard Masculinities

Posted onWednesday 15 January 2014Saturday 11 January 2014

The following was part of a subsection in my comps essay which was titled “Theorizing Patriarchy Past & Present,” which performed said theorizing via a variety of epistemologies. I reviewed the hypothesized roots of patriarchy, surveyed the broad cultural expression of its impact on women of antiquity as well as more recent history, researched its…

A History for Women and a Feminism for Everyone

Posted onTuesday 14 January 2014Saturday 11 January 2014

…and now back to my comps essay book reviews! :) A more sweeping view of women throughout history, including both their loss of power and their struggle to both resist and reclaim it within the kyriarchy, is brilliantly demonstrated by English journalist, broadcaster, and social critic Rosalind Miles’ book Who Cooked the Last Supper? The…