gender violence

According to an AP report at the NYT, it looks like the six West Virginians arrested for the kidnapping, rape, and torture of a young African American woman, Megan Williams, may soon appear in court. There is concern, however, that the trials may be delayed, as at least two of the defendents’ lawyers in the case have had to recuse themselves, because they have already worked as public defenders in past cases involving the defendents, who have been brought to court on a total of 108 charges since 1991.

I have been trying to decide if these are the most disgusting people on earth, because this really is the stuff of nightmares. We all talk about racism, and hate, and the persistence of our violent national past, but this is nonetheless an exemplary crime. Not unimaginable in its occurrence, but, still, the worse of the worse: a group of people who kidnapped a black woman, with no intention but to harm, degrade, and destroy. Leonard Codispoti, the local Magistrate in this jurisdiction,

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Chloé A. Hilliard has a nice story in this week’s Village Voice, about five girls who are interns at Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn. They’ve made a video, inspired by Maggie Hadleigh-West’s War Zone (which is totally interesting and should be checked out as well!) Their video is titled Hey…Shorty, and is part of their larger campaign to get boys to recognize their own potential relations to gender violence and oppression–i.e. figure out that girls don’t like be yelled at on the street, or having shit thrown at them when they don’t respond…

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Christina Olivares has a pretty fabulous post over at Cypher&Syllable titled “On Boxing,” in which she takes us through an afternoon as a novice boxer. Her post got me thinking about my class on girlpower just this past semester, and how I would go on these tangents about how boxing, like many other contact sports, fundamentally affects women and girls’ relationship to their bodies, and how transformative that can be. Such activities change one’s relationship to one’s body because it makes more opportunities for being experience the self as a subject rather than as an object, as able to make and take blows– rather than only subjected to blows.

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So, I was thinking about how, by the end of my recent post on feral supermodels, I had become interested in how ‘heroin chic’ or ‘poverty chic’ had become, well, just chic. That is the first thing.

The second thing I was thinking about is why I am obsessed with chicness as feral. To be ‘feral,’ as you probably already know, is be wild. But not quite wild like “girls gone wild,” (although…) but more like raised in the wild, like raised by wolves.

According to feralchildren.com, feral children “are children who’ve grown up with minimal human contact, or even none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves) or somehow survived on their own. In some cases, children are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people.”

Hmm. Today’s celebrities: survivors? — check (Kate Moss has been in the news for almost 20 years!) Denied normal interaction? — check. Raised by animals? — well at least there’s a good metaphor there. Read the rest of this entry »

I just caught this link over at Racialicious, and followed it over to The Louisana Weekly, where Charreah Jackson has an article titled “Education equals higher chance of abuse for black women.” In the article, Jackson cites this quite startling statistic, that black women with college degrees are “145 times more likely to suffer sexual, domestic or other abuse than those who did not finish high school, according to a recent study.” It continues:

One reason offered for the major increase of the likelihood of college-educated Black women being abused sexually, among others, is the backlash theory. It states that as women become more successful outside of the home, men become abusive due to resentment of their move outside of the traditional roles of women.

The article is quite interesting, and also talks a bit more about how the statistics were collected, as well as also discussing how part of the problem is linked to ways in which abuse is not discussable in many black households. Check it out!

[I have friends hopping all 'bout the globe, doing creative, legal, and educational work on women's and race/ethnicity issues. Every once and a while I'll be posting dispatches. This one is from one of my old college roomates, Supriya Pillai. We lived right here. Anyway, below please find her impressions on this March's meetings held by the UN Commission on the Status of Women. I wonder, Eyes on Hillary, First Wives Club Contenders, Politicas, and Are We Ready? has there been anything from any US candidates on any international women's issues?]

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by Supriya Pillai

I’ve been in the basement of the UN for all of last week and I’ll be there until the end of this week. The Commission on the Status of Women meets every year to discuss government’s various commitments to a particular theme having to do with women. General, I know and, annoyingly, pretty non-binding, but the theatre I have been witness to has really been something. Watching world politics unfold in one room as people comb through language and text, the silent fights become more vocal. Diplomacy is just a nice way of fighting. Like, when most delegates take the mic, they respectively thank their other delegates, the chair and then they proceed with their “fuck yous”– but ever so gently.

This year, the theme is the Girl Child. Interesting to note, there are no international treaties, documents, etc that indicate that girls can express their human rights. Rather, there are places where girls are protected (i.e. by their families), but in and of themselves, they are not entitled to inalienable human rights. Read the rest of this entry »

Sara Libby at Pop+Politics, which is out of USC’s Annenberg School, has a nice post on images of dead women on TV, which has come up in girlpower.

Bonus: It’s also about ANTM and NOW in The NY Daily News! Interestingly, there are no references to the episode on any ANTM site. I put some of the images after the jump, in case you don’t want to see it. Dorothy Snarker at After Ellen has more pix, and some commentary thereon.

Also, WPIX, The CW’s NY affiliate has this poll (if you vote you can see the results).

Finally, because once one is in the CW it’s hard to get out, I can’t resist this gallery of pix from the top model’s “political issues” shoot.

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