What I’ve noticed

Obama is considering a drug czar who opposes needle exchange programsNeedle exchange programs are very effective HIV prevention tools and help slow the spread of of other diseases such as Hepatitis C.

Not long before the Transgender Day of Remembrance police brutally beat Duanna Johnson, a transwoman.  She was found dead recently. Sublimefemme links to a powerful post about mourning by queenemily.

This is not Pride. This is remembering our dead. This is not something you can make fucking upbeat and acceptable and call “awareness.”

Grace the Spot has a useful guide for surviving and possibly even enjoying a holiday with your family.

Luxury handbag designers tell their customers not to buy counterfeit bags because they come from places that horribly exploit their workers.  Well, turns out the factories of Prada, Mulberry, Louis Vuitton, Samsonite, Aspinal of London, Nicole Farhi and Luella are pretty horrific too:

Workers earn poverty wages, work long hours, and suffer from a variety of health complaints linked to poor health and safety conditions. They complain that there are not enough toilets for all the workers and those that exist are filthy. The only drinking water is from a hose on the toilet floor.

Justin tries to find the best time to drink coffee.

Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes’ failure.

Democrats, homophobia isn’t ok.

Actors, sexism isn’t ok.

Princeton has their own version of Proposition 8 – and it’s just as silly as the one in California.

Sublimefemme has an awesome post up about femme invisibility, prompted by the response to Lindsay Lohan.

There seem to be two dominant schools of thought about Lindsay’s sexuality, both of which turn on the “problem” of her femininity.  The first position, which I’ve written about before, is that she couldn’t really be a lesbian because, hell, just look at her!  The other position is the inversion of the first.  It claims that Samantha Ronson is a real lesbian (hell, just look at her!) and Lindsay wouldn’t chose a girl like that unless she was herself really queer.  In this reading, it’s the butch’s supposedly irrefutable lesbian appearance that provides evidence for the femme’s queerness.  However, in both cases, queer femininity is fundamentally framed not just as a contradiction in terms but as a disappearing act.

Comments

  1. Mike says:

    That van Damme thing is fairly creepy, but something I’ve never seen an adequate answer for, inside or outside of the feminist community, is if a male is never supposed to see a woman as a sexual or romantic object, then how is it possible for the two to get together?

    That’s the type of question I’ve been thrown out of feminist communities for asking, but I tend to be thrown out of any community I’m a part of because I’m not very doctrinaire.

    I’m not condoning what van Damme did, but it did make me think of this question. It’s no one’s duty to answer it, but I am very curious about it.

  2. Sublimefemme says:

    I had no idea about the DESA workers in Turkey and am appalled by the working conditions you discuss as well as the obstacles these workers face in their efforts to unionize. Thanks so much for helping to get the word out about this!

    xo Sf

    Glad you liked my last post on LiLo and femme invisibility 😉

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