*UPDATE 05/15/13: With Christy Clark’s amazing upset I am happy to admit the below post is wrong. BC has its first popularly elected female Premier. Congratulations, it is an incredible victory. Christy Clark had as much chance of winning BC’s election today as Canadian politics has gender equality, and that’s
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The Scott Ross: Christy Clark Loses & So Does Gender Equality
*UPDATE 05/15/13: With Christy Clark’s amazing upset I am happy to admit the below post is wrong. BC has its first popularly elected female Premier. Congratulations, it is an incredible victory.Christy Clark had as much chance of winning BC’s election …
Continue readingArt Threat: Little girls are better at designing superheroes than you are
“Little girls are better at designing superhoroes than you are” is a part-time project of California based artist Alexandria Law. Of the project she says: “Kids are more impressionable than you, but kids can also be less restricted by cultural gender norms than you. Kids are more creative than you,
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: DWR PSA – Helpful Gender Toy Chart
Filed under: Gender Issues Tagged: Gender, PSA, Toys for Girls and Boys
Continue readingMelissa Fong: Nina Kraviz: Why did Feminism go down the drain of a Bubble Bath?
This is one of those rare moments where my off-time interests mix with my academic work. I have seen some good commentary on the Nina: Bubble-gate but nothing from a point of view that considers systemic sexism, Feminism and male domination. Last month Resident Advisor (RA) released a feature on
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: When Men are Raped
A man was sexually assaulted by four women in Toronto, and the story is make the facebook rounds. I hate to say “of course,” but of course people think it’s hilarious. Here are some choice comments directly copied and pasted without names – but these were all written by men
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Change will not come from government and this policy or that – only from extra-congressional, extra-parliamentary strategies.
Here is a two-part interview with Stephanie Seguino, who, though focusing squarely on income inequality and its racial and gender implications, is not a revolutionary transformer of capitalism but a technical reformer in the Krugman Keynesian tradition. Like Krugman, she advocates closely monitored public spending as a way to stimulate the economy. An interesting argument
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Change will not come from government and this policy or that – only from extra-congressional, extra-parliamentary strategies.
Here is a two-part interview with Stephanie Seguino, who, though focusing squarely on income inequality and its racial and gender implications, is not a revolutionary transformer of capitalism but a technical reformer in the Krugman Keynesian tradition. Like Krugman, she advocates closely monitored public spending as a way to stimulate the economy. An interesting argument
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Change will not come from government and this policy or that – only from extra-congressional, extra-parliamentary strategies.
Here is a two-part interview with Stephanie Seguino, who, though focusing squarely on income inequality and its racial and gender implications, is not a revolutionary transformer of capitalism but a technical reformer in the Krugman…
Continue readingMelissa Fong: Deafness, speech and the Performance of Gender
Deafness, speech and the Performance of Gender This weekend I had the privilege of participating in a conference on Disability and Ableism at Ryerson University. Let me just say first that it is an incredible feeling to be among people fluent in American Sign Language (ASL). To see them speak
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: In Canada, Indigenous youth fight for rights of women (VIDEO)
by Obert Madondo | The Canadian Progressive, Feb. 3, 2013: Andrea Landry, a member of the Anishinaable people and Youth Executive of the National Association of Friendship Centre in Canada, recently attended a meeting for Indigenous youth at the UN Headquarters in New York. In this interview with UNTV Multimedia Producer, Mary Ferreira,
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Powerful Women Shouldn’t Be News
Kathleen Wynne becoming our sixth female premier isn’t newsworthy, what will be, is when a premier’s gender doesn’t make headlines. It’s of course understandable why newspapers should report on Ontario’s first female premier, it is historic, but ultimately what will determine progress on gender equality is whether the media and
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Media Gender Gap
The red pen of justice is wiggling, but I’ve run out of time. We’ll make do with this rage building infographic while I see if I can scrape some time together during the week to compose the piece that is swirling in my brain. Filed under: Feminism Tagged: Feminism, Gender,
Continue readingCanadian Progressive: The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities
By South End Press Publisher: South End Press Pages: 368 ISBN: 978-0-89608-794-1 Format: Paperback original Release Date: 2011-05-01 Synopsis: The extent of the violence affecting our communities is staggering. Nearly one in three women in the United States will experience intimate violence in her lifetime. And while intimate violence affects relationships across the sexuality
Continue readingArt Threat: Girls with guns, boys with blow dryers – Is this gender-neutral toy catalog just a holiday publicity stunt?
Designing a toy catalog — or most any mass-market consumer catalog for that matter — is usually an exercise deeply rooted in the status quo. Top-Toy, the largest toy retailer in Northern European and licensee of the Toys “R” US chain in that region, is gently disrupting some of society’s
Continue readingArt Threat: Skyfall a great romp but a gender bust … not to mention the faint aroma of homophobia
The thing is, I like these films — for the gorgeous cityscapes of great metropolises (London, Beijing and Macau), for the eerie and yet fascinatingly glimpses into the slick and opulent interiors where the ultra-rich live and play, for the beautiful cars (the 1965 Aston Martin DB5), even for the craggy medieval landscape of Scotland where Bond finally retreats for his emphatically low-tech final showdown with Javier Bardem. I am a sucker for Bond’s supernatural fighting and survival skills. It all works for me. But that’s why the obvious gender stupidity and not so obvious homophobic taint are so irksome. There is intelligence at work in this script, and talent in the filmmaking, so why the vacuum of intelligence on this score? Why, like Bond’s suits and cars, do the gender and sexual politics have to be so thoroughly rooted in the 1960s?
Continue readingEclectic Lip: Lana Wachowski, Joe Simpson and our evolving social mores
The recent release of Cloud Atlas, piqued my interest in writing some thoughts about sexual identity. As has been fairly well publicized leading to the movie’s opening, Lana Wachowski (born Larry) underwent a gender transition (“sex change”) a few years ago; and from all accounts, seems the happier for it. The
Continue readingSong of the Watermelon: The Persistence of Misogyny
It has been fashionable for as long as I can remember for bitter males, along with a few reactionary female allies, to claim that the feminist movement not only succeeded in eliminating the traditional gender power structure, but inverted it. Women, they complain, are now on top, occupying the positions
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: In 2012, Only 27% of New Federal Judges are Women
Earlier this fall, the Harper regime appointed a new Supreme Court judge, Richard Wagner, who sits on the Quebec bench and is the son of a former Progressive-Conservative leadership contestant. At the time, the Globe & Mail defended the appointment on the grounds that the Supreme Court had suddenly developed
Continue readingFive of Five: Rebecca Watson on Harassment
Rebecca Watson speaking at the Humanists of Florida 2012 Conference.
The talk discusses sexism, harassment and threats directed towards many visible women in the atheist and skeptic communities. Youtube comment threads are one of the last warm re…
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