Auralisings

Mutiny puts Work on Trial on 4th July

2011-07-01T14:20:00.002+01:00

In the wake of the huge public sector strikes over pensions on 30th June, Mutiny puts work on trial.

Hosted by journalist Brendan Montague and featuring Green politician Sian Berry, Selma James, author of several seminal texts on sex, race, class and work, founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, first spokeswoman for the English Collective of Prostitutes and coordinator of Global Women’s Strike, activist Anne-Marie O-Reilly from Boycott Workfare and London Coalition Against Poverty, trade union representatives and a host of other special guests, Work on Trial is a carnivalesque evening of live entertainment and discussion providing a whistle-stop tour of contemporary political issues at work. The night begins with speed debating, followed by three interactive debating sessions interspersed with performance poetry, theatre, readings, and live music. Set in the East-End's avant-garde Resistance Gallery against a backdrop of topical art displays, Mutiny's Work on Trial promises to be a political event like no other.

So how do we win the fight against racism, sexism and anti-immigration attitudes in the workplace? Must our experience of work be one of exploitation and frustration? Is work the moral issue it's often made out to be, and if so what does this imply about those unable to participate? Can we imagine a better system for creating value and providing life's essentials? Could trade unions really be the driving force behind implementing a more utopian vision of work? What would *you* do, given a genuine choice as to how much to work and what on?

'Work on Trial' begins at 6pm on Monday 4th July at the Resistance Gallery in Bethnal Green.

For more information, visit our website and sign up to the facebook event at:https://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=129691263775075.

Tickets available buy-one-get-one-free £5 from www.jointhemutiny.org.

Attend, debate, perform, organise: Join the Mutiny...

Prophylactics and the Pope: Why I'll be protesting on Saturday

2010-09-15T18:14:00.002+01:00

Pope Benedict XVI begins his costly state visit to the UK today. Activists will be using this opportunity to make their voices heard about LGBT equality, abortion rights, child abuse within the church and the Vatican's powerful and inaccurate stance on condoms.

The Vatican's position on sex education and condoms is outdated and damages international efforts to promote safer sex practices to prevent the spread of HIV, STIs and unintended and unaffordable pregnancies.

The Pope's well-reported gaffe last year that distributing condoms 'aggravates' the HIV/AIDS epidemic was not an isolated incident, but indicative of a core problem with the Vatican's position on the provision of contraception. The Vatican uses unsubstantiated claims about the permeability of condoms and promotes abstinence and fidelity as the solution to the epidemic. While it is fair to say that if you don't have sex, you will be less likely to be exposed to sexually transmitted HIV, telling people that condoms do not work prevents them from accessing life-saving information to protect themselves. Anyone who believes that proclaiming fidelity will prevent infection would do well to read Jennifer Hirsch and colleagues case studies of migration, fidelity and HIV risk.

Research exploring the efficacy of abstinence-only education in the US has found that it provides false information and does not reduce unintended pregnancy and STIs. I am not suggesting that HIV prevention can rely solely on condom distribution. In order to have enjoyable, consenting and safer sexual relationships, people need information about both risk and pleasure, and how to negotiate and use condoms and other forms of contraception to protect themselves.

The Vatican's position on condoms is damaging as it spreads false information about the fact that condoms are, if used correctly and regularly, effective. Research into regular use of condoms for vaginal intercourse has found an 80% reduction in HIV transmission (these studies were not able to examine whether condoms were used correctly). Most of the research looking at whether availability of condoms increases sexual activity finds that availability of condoms does not increase sexual activity.

Pope Benedict XVI represents a damaging view of sexual safety that affects millions of people's lives as health agencies attempt to provide accurate information and services across the world. We should make a stand during the Pope's visit in favour of comprehensive, accurate and consistent sex education and provision of adequate contraception globally. While anti-retroviral drugs certainly help survival for some sufferers of HIV, the 2008 UNAIDS report on the global AIDS epidemic painted a devastating picture in which 2 million people died because of AIDS in 2007, with global health disparities affecting the kind of support those living with HIV are able to access. Such inequality points to a much greater problem faced by the global community. Protesting about the Pope isn't enough. We need a fundamental change to a system that exploits those with less for the profit of the few. And that change needs to start at home.

What's the alternative to Trident?

2010-09-15T17:32:00.001+01:00

Report from the CND TUC fringe meeting.

By scrapping Trident Britain could become a leading expert in tidal
and wave energy, Professor John Foster told the CND fringe meeting at this years TUC. The UK is currently a key site for research in this area but lacks the funding to put the sustainable plans into practice. Scrapping Trident would enable workers skilled in marine technology to use their skills to manufacture and support green energy, reinvigorating industry in the UK.

Professor Foster, along with UNISON's Heather Wakefield and CWU's Tony Kearns were speaking at the launch of CND's report on the impact of scrapping Trident on jobs and the UK economy. The panel argued that the Government is in a unique position to fulfil international
commitments on climate change and nuclear non-proliferation in addition to releasing public funds that could be better spent on
providing vital social housing, hospital staff and social workers.

Renewing this weapon of mass destruction would cost in excess of £100 billion, Wakefield told union representatives. Scrapping Trident on the other hand will free up public funds to retrain workers and invest in renewable energy to protect our future.

The Government decision to make the MOD pay for Trident will destroy communities that rely on shipbuilding and manufacturing in favour of an outdated and dangerous US-led foreign policy, Kearns argued. The CND report presents the Government with a progressive, sustainable and safe alternative.

Worries about job losses were raised at the meeting by a former
Faslane worker and member of Prospect Union. The ensuing discussion showed the importance of dialogue between workers and campaigners against nuclear weapons. Only through dialogue can common ground and shared goals of safe, sustainable jobs for all be expressed.

General Secretary of CND, Kate Hudson, urged union representatives to affiliate to the campaign and communicate to their members that scrapping Trident would lead to more jobs and a sustainable economic
future.

This report on Trident and Jobs comes at the same time as the TUC voted to back the PCS and CWU led campaign for 1 million green jobs. Unions and the peace movement have shown that there is undeniably a
viable alternative to cuts and war.

Out of the bars and into the streets? Pride in San Francisco

2010-06-30T15:53:00.006+01:00

Rainbows are lining the streets of the city that gave birth to the famous flag back in 1978. In the 30 or so years that have passed since then, Gilbert Baker's beautiful creation has become a powerful symbol of LGBT empowerment across continents.

I was excited to be in Harvey Milk's city, held up as a place of progressive politics and radicalism, critical mass, the beat poets and the summer of love. But while I enjoyed the partying as the sun broke through the fog, the politics of pride still left me feeling a little cold.

The Trans and Dyke marches on Friday and Saturday were peppered with banners and placards, and the queer community took to the streets together, joined in solidarity with a sense of common purpose. This was reflected in many of the countless arts events, workshops and the huge frameline LGBT film festival over the past month.

Sunday's parade was a theatrical affair, where organisations drove floats and walked (or danced) the spectator-lined Market street to the packed celebration in the Civic Centre Plaza.

Being a parade spectator is markedly different to taking to the streets on a demonstration.
Behind barriers we watched the beautiful, sparkling spectacle and danced to the music as the floats drive by. Many of the placards called for gay marriage, recently outlawed in California by a constitutional amendment ruling that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." One group carried a rainbow Israeli flag with flyers outlining Israel's sexual equality legislation, while another pointed to the human rights abuses in Israel calling for 'queers against Israeli Apartheid'. Political placards and advertisements for banks and corporations sat uneasily together. While some were protesting, it was certainly not a protest.

But why not just have a parade – a celebration? There are many gains for the US LGBT movement to celebrate. In a city which 30 years ago suffered at the hands of violent homophobic policing, SFPD cops walked hand in hand wearing rainbow sunglasses. Where Harvey Milk was once assassinated as the first out gay man in Californian public office, out LGBT public officials and candidates rode in open-top cars and high-fived the crowd.

The most extravagant floats were sponsored by big banks – glittering on the streets which on any other day are the homes of people who have nothing but the items in the shopping trolley they are pushing. The bankers' crisis is hitting the US hard, where the public sector faces draconian cuts, and where the welfare system is unable to provide support for many people living below the poverty line.

As pride parades in many countries become part of the establishment, the message of system change gets replaced by one of individual expression through consumption. We are what we buy. We buy what we are.

Such an individualised model of sexual liberation will only ever deliver freedom for the few. It does not take into account the structural ways that LGBT people are oppressed differently across axes of racism, sexism and class discrimination. We should fight for a world in which we all have freedom. This bank-sponsored liberation on offer through consumption is reserved for those who can afford the price tag of pride.

Back to Basics: What about women?

2010-04-28T11:51:00.003+01:00

Equality minister Harriet Harman last night attacked Tory plans for married couples tax breaks, accusing the Conservatives of "Back to Basics but with an open neck shirt and converse trainers".

The Fawcett Society and LSE Gender Institute election debate was more engaging, witty and intelligent than the televised leaders' debates have been. But fundamentally Harman, Theresa May and Lynne Featherstone floundered on how they would protect women from sweeping public sector cuts after the election.

Questions on issues like the gender pay gap, division of labour in the home and violence against women were put to the panellists. All women claimed a commitment to increasing women's participation in parliamentary politics, with Harman arguing for all-women shortlists, May promoting careers advice and mentoring, and Featherstone asserting the egalitarian potential of electoral reform.

However, Harman's grand claim to stand "shoulder to shoulder with women in the developing world" conflicts with her pro-war voting record in parliament which has had a devastating effect on the lives of women in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As I heard Harriet call us "sisters" from the stage, I wondered how she thinks of the women's rights campaigners in Afghanistan whose struggles are knocked back with every day the military occupation continues.

The ways that gender, race and class operate as systemic oppression in society went curiously unspoken by the representatives, despite the repetition of 'fairness' and 'change' throughout their election rhetoric.

I enjoyed Harriet's sideswipes at the Tories, but such claims to sisterhood will always be empty while the wealth and power rests in the hands of a tiny global minority.

Shame on mooncups

2010-04-14T22:40:00.007+01:00

I am a die-hard mooncup fan. I'm one of those women who graffitis toilet walls urging women to get one. But the latest swarm of advertising for menstrual cups is making me see red.

Mooncups have launched a poster and online campaign to encourage more women to use their eco and body-friendly product. The premise is that they want women to 'love our vaginas', asking us to vote for what we 'lovingly call' ours.

Now, I'm not against us loving our (or other people's) vaginas. But seriously, I have only just recovered from Bodyform's 80s neoliberal take on us hiding our bleeding from the world. It was a long time ago when I sat guffawing with my mum at a Jo Brand sketch in which she ridicules 'panty-liners' by nicknaming them 'fairy cradles'. While Bodyform encouraged us to get rollerblading in white trousers, using doilies, fluff, flowers and glitter circling euphemistic names for vaginas still reflects prevailing cultural representations of menstruation as something that needs to be talked of in hushed tones: as something fundamentally 'unclean'.

Part of me feels I should just be happy that the word 'vagina' has even appeared on a poster. Particularly given the recent news that a Kotex advert was banned in the US for using the V-word.

But it seems to me that while the mooncup adverts purport to engage women with their bodies (by asking them to give their vagina pet-names), it maintains the usual media silence on the fact that menstruation is about a bodily function: about bleeding.

It is perhaps more upsetting because the way that mooncups work involves a very real engagement with your body. You fold and insert the silicone cup into your vagina, and empty and clean it. It is far removed from the blue-inked dry-weave topsheets and individual floral wrapping of most menstruation products.

Until now, they have languished outside the mainstream, caricatured as a 'hippy' product. Whenever I have heard them discussed in person or online, their mention is usually met with a barrage of revulsion and squeamishness. It is this reputation they are trying to combat when they soothingly joke with us on the website: "We bet you winced when you saw this, everyone does."

Euphemistic advertising about menstrual products is a symptom of a much wider issue in cultural representations of women's bodies. While it is deemed appropriate for Marks and Spencer to devote billboard spreads to disembodied breasts (to high media coverage last year and again now with their nautical 'hello buoys' billboards), women's bodily functions continue to be represented as things that should be hidden: where lack of control is seen as a symbol of failure. Comics Mitchell and Webb have produced a fantastic sketch that parodies the gendered imbalance in advertising.

Hyper-capitalist society commodifies our bodies into parts that need constant perfection. It creates ever-expanding markets of self-improvement and grooming, stoking our anxiety that we will be found out as leaky, unclean and failed women instead of the perfect consumer citizen: forever improving on her worth by buying products from the cosmetic industry and living up to the normalised white, wealthy, thin, young and able body.

Mooncups, in some ways, offer a challenge to this rhetoric. The silicone cup lasts for years - a very different model to the hoard of disposable products such as tampons and sanitary towels. It also doesn't shy away from the function it serves, in catching blood.

But instead of competing with dominant notions of femininity as alienated from our bodies (as either mysterious gardens of eden, or hypersexualised sex machines), the company who create mooncups stick to safe ground in an attempt to get their share of the squeamish market.

It is unlikely that any company will take on the powerful constructions of femininity that dominate mainstream media culture. As we challenge the capitalist premise that we are commodities for upgrading, improving and marketing we must remember to challenge the shame and secrecy historically associated with our bodies.

Instead of floral advertising, I'd love to see mooncups given out to women for free: a cunt-cup for life.

Sex, sales and morality tales: the 'sexualisation' of young people

2010-03-25T13:28:00.008Z

Sex is everywhere. I did an actual double-take when I saw an arched and airbrushed woman on the back of a Manchester bus promoting their new environmental fuel, with the tagline 'Green is the new Black'.

So you would assume that I'd been jumping for joy at the recent independent Sexualisation of Young People Review commissioned by the Home Office.

Psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos led the year-long consultation for the review, which included a literature review of the field, focus groups and evidence sessions with practitioners, academics and activists.

I had to think quite hard before writing this piece, as I am troubled by the overwhelmingly homogeneous notions of sex, sexuality and gender that confront me every day. The kind of images that present the goal of femininity as white, heterosexual, slim, pubescent, rich, hairless, and up-for-it (but not too up for it).

But the Sexualisation of Young People Review also troubles me. The review may well have implications for policy – David Cameron and Gordon Brown have both weighed into recent moral panics about childhood innocence, and the report carries nine pages of policy recommendations for education, media, business and research. Yet it is confused, simplistic and fails to situate sexual representation within a historical and social understanding of power and inequality.

What is 'sexualisation' anyway?

The term 'sexualisation' has been flying around the research world for a few years, but academic Feona Attwood has argued that it is more of an umbrella term than a straightforward definition. Broadly, it tends to be used to describe the process of something becoming sexual – whether that be the increased mainstreaming of sexualised images and texts, or the 'imposition' of sexuality onto a group of people, for example children and young people. As with many broad terms, the word is often used in different ways by different people, which has important implications for any claims being made by researchers, or attempts to compare research in this broad area.

The term is central to an often polarised debate about the 'pornification' of culture, in which feminists are divided over whether an increase in sexual representation is about empowerment and choice, a form of 'retro-sexism' or something more complicated.

What was the purpose of the review?

The review is situated within the Home Office's Together We Can End Violence Against Women consultation. As such, it sets out its scope as “how sexualised images and messages may be affecting the development of children and young people and influencing cultural norms, and examines the evidence for a link between sexualisation and violence”.

This is an ambitious goal. Researchers across disciplines have been divided over the possibility of determining the impact of representation on attitudes and behaviour. The review is part of a heavily contested debate about the relationship between our development as human beings and the world around us.

Troubled

While Papadopoulos is clearly aware of the theoretical debate about what sexualisation means, she decides not to engage with complexity and uncertainty, presenting instead a dazzling 'review' of literature that leaps across the subjects of body image, objectification, child sexual development, pornography, media consumption, eating disorders, the sex industry, bullying, adult sexual violence and child abuse.

Unlike the recent research on Sexualised Goods Aimed at Children conducted for the Scottish Parliament, the Sexualisation of Young People Review rarely critically evaluates the existing research, but rather combines the findings of work from different national and historical contexts, amalgamating research on adults and children as transparent 'facts' to illustrate the growing menace of sexualisation for the monolithic group of 'young people' in the UK. Most noticeably, the review presents a range of statistics about music videos that spans over 20 years as a reflection of current media culture.

Dr Linda's underlying premise is one that I identify with: the constant reproduction of sexual, racial and gender stereotypes must surely be related to how we can make sense of the world: it can open up or limit who we can be, and how we can behave.

But this research feels like the journalism that I get so fed up with in the news – where a premise is decided upon and research is found to 'back it up'. Although the review engaged with qualitative research with focus groups, including with young people, we don't get to evaluate the methodology, the kinds of questions asked or how the sample was devised. All research is necessarily partial and involves decisions about what is included, so this process should be out in the open.

The questions posed for the fact finding review (which are not published in the final review) illustrate why it is important for methodology to be transparent. For example, contributors were asked to consider 'how young people's exposure to overtly sexual and other media content negatively affects them' (2009, Invitation to evidence sessions). In contrast, Sara Bragg and David Buckingham, who worked on the Scottish review, have done some great work with young people that examines the often multiple and complicated readings that young people have of media representations.

Ghettoised panics

The flaws in the way this review was conducted and presented reflect a much bigger problem in this debate, which was articulated brilliantly by Nina Power at the launch of the Feminist Manifesto for the 21^st Century. When we take the debate on sexualisation in isolation from a structural analysis of power, as feminists we end up as uneasy bedfellows with the moralistic arguments of the right. This leads us to categorise and police 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' sex, which is particularly evident in the review regarding sex outside of a long-term monogamous relationship.

We cannot examine the impact of sexual representation, whether that be consumed by children, young people or adults, without contextualising it within the changing structure of identity in late capitalism. In a society increasingly characterised by the requirement to improve ourselves and find identity through our consumption, the commodification of sexuality is intertwined with unequal power relations.

This has an impact on the kinds of recommendations we can make for change. As the authors of the Scottish review argue, the limited framing of the debate “may distract attention from other, more fundamental – and perhaps more intractable – social problems”. In that sense, the Sexualisation of Young People Review is a classic New Labour product – it gives the impression of 'seeming to' make change, without having to deal with the inherent inequalities of a hyper capitalist society.

Finally, the review raises questions about the role of the academy in policy. The Government has begun to slash the budgets of our universities. This destruction takes place within a much longer-running managerialisation of the Higher Education sector, in which research is only deemed useful if its 'impact' on society can be measured. We must fight back against this simplistic view of research and education, or we will increasingly find that universities will be called upon to use their research to provide simplistic buzzwords and justifications for the decisions made by government.

I was lucky to have on hand the excellent guidelines put together by Dr Petra Boynton for reading and assessing consultation papers. I recommend that you read the report yourself, and post your conclusions here.

Evolutionary chains

2010-03-09T09:29:00.005Z

The Guardian has always enjoyed a bit of essentialism next to a picture of some hairy primates. The latest dose of evolutionary psychology to hit their pages is no exception. Alison Flood's article uncritically lays out the conclusions of research conducted by Anthony Cox and Maryanne Fisher in Canada, who analysed the words of 15,019 Harlequin romance books and found that the novels were "congruent with women's sex-specific mating strategies, which is surmised to be the reason for their continued international success".

I'll have to read the actual research, as the papers are fond of missing the nuance in research for a headline, but on the face of it the conclusions make my blood boil. They've taken romance novels as though they are separate from the social structures they developed in - the historical, social, economic factors that have lead to the well-worn tale that women want a big strong man's arms to sink into (before their arms end up in his sink).* Their conclusions read as though romance novels are somehow an organically developed window into the minds of 'women' who apparently all have identical desires, which we cannot escape as they are part of a natural evolutionary process.

I find the success of Harlequin novels fascinating, not because they hold the key to an evolutionary 'female instinct', but because they can tell us a lot about social norms, power and romantic ideology. The prevalence of certain characters and story lines is part of a conscious formula by publishers, which writers for the genre have to stick to.

Far more interesting to conduct textual research alongside research with the readers of the genre. Janice Radway was doing this in the 80s, and while I didn't agree with everything she said, she at least pointed out the position of the romance novel as the product of an industry (a very profitable one at that) rather than holding them up as analogous to all women's desires. She also pointed to the pleasures that some readers found in the formula of the genre - judging novels to be 'good' or 'bad' romances, much the same as readers of many cult genres revel in weighing up how different titles work with the conventions of sci-fi, detective fiction and so on. Radway read the success of romance as a form of temporary escape from a life in which the predominantly female readership were (still are) laden down with housework. As Ien Ang argues, an approach that gives voice to the readership of the romance genre complicates simple analyses of the readership as either passive dupes of romantic ideology, or, as the Canadian study suggests, of the novels as the lived evolutionary experience of all women. Radway argued, however, that while the romance narrative presents a form of escape, it can also distract women from changing the material circumstances of oppression.

I have grappled with the feminist arguments about romantic ideology for a long time. The romantic novel remains an extremely successful genre, as does its cinematic counterpart, the romantic comedy. While I would caution against a dismissive analysis of romance readers/viewers as recipients of a hypodermic needle of sexist ideology into our brains, it is important to maintain a historically located, critical eye towards such a ubiquitous genre.

The central themes of the romance narrative are still the heterosexual acquisition of The One, the essential ('natural') differences between men and women and the ultimate goal - the wedding scene (credits roll). As Tanya Modelski has argued, much of the sex in the romance genre treads very close to a rape narrative, in which women's cries of "no" invariably mean "yes". The Guardian's reporting, as with most coverage of evolutionary psychology, ignores the power inherent in the constant reproduction of institutions such as marriage and compulsory heterosexuality, and ignores too the lengthy history of protest against the way that socially constructed ways of being and living are presented as a-historical, naturally occurring 'common sense'.

For an analysis of the relationship with this kind of biological determinism and capitalism, see Eleanor Badcock's excellent post over at Counterfire.org.

*I tried to find out where this excellent feminist slogan came from, but no joy. Answers on a postcard please.

Anti-Blair protests at the Chilcot Iraq inquiry | Politics | guardian.co.uk

2010-01-31T16:07:00.000Z

Anti-Blair protests at the Chilcot Iraq inquiry | Politics | guardian.co.uk

Multidimensional women

2009-11-20T13:08:00.003Z

Some thoughts provoked by reading Nina Power's 'One Dimensional Woman'

Nina Power takes us on a whirlwind critique of 'contemporary feminism', picking apart the broken pieces of feminist goals from hawkish politicians, neoliberal bosses, consumer culture and the porn industry. For such a short book, it covers a huge amount of ground, introducing readers to the messy intersections of capitalist and gendered exploitation, and arguing, hopefully, that another future, and another feminism, is possible.

I had much to agree with in Power's analysis of some of the failures of contemporary feminism - that when we dig under the surface of our celebrated 'empowerment', 'choice' and 'liberation', much of the old oppressions remain, reworked but now perhaps much harder to argue against for us angry feminists left behind. Ariel Levy and Imelda Whelehan have also written popular feminst books about their anger when faced with a world that calls on us to take up pole-dancing with an ironic grin on our faces. I found Power's book more enjoyable than Levy's 'Female Chauvinist Pigs', in the main because I felt that Levy spent an awful lot of time criticising women, rather than the system, for the rebranding of sexism-as-empowerment. Power instead opts to show us the 'intimate link between sexual relations and social relations', arguing that the former can only change with a radical reconstruction of the latter.

As the-sauce.org notes in their review, Power adeptly links from the potential of sexual transformation to alternative modes of family and a rethinking of the way we structure both 'home' and 'work' in society. The Toni Morrison interview reproduced in chapter 3, in which Morrison questions the interviewer's assumption that teenage pregnancy is a 'bad thing' brought to mind a brilliant article I read not long ago by Imogen Tyler. Tyler rips apart the classed and racialised disgust operating in the rising use of 'chav' and 'chav mum' as terms of abuse. Echoing Morrison's observation that nobody 'cares about unwed mothers unless they're black - or poor', Tyler argues that

'The mass vilification and mockery of the chav mum can be understood in relation to what Wilson and Huntington (2005, p.59) have argued is the emergence of a new set of norms about femininity, in which the ideal life trajectory of middle-class women conforms to the current governmental objectives of economic growth through higher education and increased female workforce participation'

In this reworking of feminist goals of equality, it is women's job to produce ourselves as productive, fashionable, sexy (sexpert) commodities, rather than question the very structure of the system we live in.

Where Power is at her best, is in her analysis of the potential for human transformation by looking back through history. She brilliantly explores the differences between the silliness and bawdiness of French silent pornography from 1905 - 1930 and the grinding taxonomy of much of the multibillion porn industry today.

I was disappointed, however, that 'One Dimensional Woman' did not spend more time exploring the multiplicity of feminism, and the sites for potential sexual and social transformation existing today. It seemed to me that the 'one dimensional' feminism laid out for criticism was not 'feminism' at all, but the capitalist theft of feminist language. To take just a couple of examples from the world of current feminist thinkers, Feona Atwood is one of many brilliant feminists who have looked at the complexity of porn, particularly the potentials of alternative porn, without resorting to the old porn bad/porn good dichotomy. Heidi Mirza and Gail Lewis have both written extensively on the intersections between 'race', class and gender. Meg Barker puts her academic work into activism and therapy practice, exploring different ways of structuring relationships and families. While we must continue to highlight the co-option and depoliticisation of feminism by the war-mongerers, advertisers and sex industry, there are activists, communities and writers who are challenging this brand of cut-price feminism.

Power concludes by arguing that 'If feminism takes this opportunity to shake off its current imperialist and consumerist sheen it could once again place its vital transformative political demands centre-stage, and shuffle off its current one-dimensionality for good'.

I'd make just one amend to this call-to-arms. 'Feminism' doesn't exist somewhere outside of us. We must make these demands of feminists: ourselves to grab back our language from the marketplace, and bring about change through creative, collective and angry action.

I recommend you read 'One Dimensional Woman', it is refreshing to see angry, constructive and hopeful feminism in print. It's published by Zero Books and out now.

Why we need to fight Miss-Ogyny

2009-03-10T13:18:00.006Z

Tonight I'm joining lots of other feminists in protesting against the final of the 'Miss University of London' beauty pageant. There has been a lot of press coverage of this event, mostly thanks to the great efforts of feminist activists across London Universities.

"Oh" I hear you cry "haven't we got past all that feminist anger?". Well in short, no. Our response to the backlash against feminism should be to fight back harder.

The sexism of judging women on narrow standards of beauty is repackaged and presented to us as 'empowering' by Christian Emile, the founder of the promotions company that runs the events. This incorporation and depoliticisation of feminist goals is not just happening tonight, at the Miss-Ogynist University of London final - it is a trend throughout representations of women in the popular media.

I fully understand that the entrants to these contests present their involvement as a matter of 'choice' and 'just a bit of fun', but to allow these kind of events to take place is to accept the view that women are objects, judged and accepted into society based on a compartmentalised slicing of their bodies into 'assets' - a collection of parts which we can never be happy with.

The misogyny - literally, hatred of women - is turned inwards throughout these narrow conceptions of 'what a woman should be' - we learn to hate ourselves as our legs, breast, bums and skin fail time and time again.

This contest reflects and reproduces powerful discourses about the worth that women hold in society - should we be content in being leered at, not listened to? Some of the comments made in debate about this issue have trivialised it - "why is it" say critics "that you focus on this, and not more pressing concerns facing women"? Aside from the fact that many of the activists who will be there tonight work, volunteer and campaign around a wide range of pressing issues facing women, the issue of objectification should not be viewed as separate from other dynamics of gendered oppression in our society. The degradation, subordination and violence against women happens in the context of our position in society, and happens differently across social categories of sexuality, ethnicity, class, geographical location, age and (dis)ability. Homogenous notions of 'appropriate' beauty are an exclusionary tactic that privileges the few far beyond a simple pageant, but into the way that we can live our lives.

Update: Miss Jessica Sparkle, a drag queen who won the final at Heythrop College, was banned from attending the final. Christian Emile responded with

"There are two types of people, those who build things up and those who tear things down."

What exactly is it that Miss Sparkle would be 'tearing down'? What does Christian find so troubling about a drag queen if his event is 'just a bit of fun'? Miss Sparkle's exclusion illustrates that contests like this seek to police the boundaries of normative gender categories.

The really positive thing around these contests has been the creative protest that has sprung up against them. At least there is some hope, among a sea of sexism, that women are fighting back.

Join in the protest - starting at SOAS from 7pm, whose excellent activists have organised an art exhibition, music and rally - then at 10pm onto Crystal Club (with feminist choir, the Muffia and Krispy Kreme Stand) for the protest.

What a Swell Day

2009-03-03T14:30:00.004Z

A friend of mine was working at the Wedding Show in London recently, and noticed a stall promoting Skin Revive, who offer surgical and non-surgical cosmetic 'treatments' to brides-to-be.

The two procedures which they promote most obviously on their website are the use of Belotero and Restylane.

Belotero "works in a similar way as Botox, relaxing and paralyzing the facial muscles so that wrinkles become less noticeable, and as long as the patient keeps up with treatments, prevents the formation of future wrinkles"

Restylane is used to 'fill wrinkles' an d make lips look plumper.

Doctors who promote the use of these products before weddings have said such reassuring things as

With three weeks, Restylane or Juvederm would be OK as bruising, if it occurs, will be gone by then and if too much product causes an undesired lump, it can be extracted. One week would not be enough time to play it safe.

Feminists have long argued against cosmetic surgery, as the sharp needle-edge of the beauty industry. As a thriving industry of late capitalism, it survives on the notion that women are never good enough, and must constantly spend and work to obey the internal, disciplinary voice that tells them they must be younger, slimmer and hairless. Cosmetic surgery demands that women become homogenous, airbrushed figurines for consumption by patriarchal society. Eugenia Kaw, an anthropologist who has written on cosmetic surgery, has highlighted the dramatic increase in eyelid surgeries in Asia, in the context of racist assumptions about eyelid shape and 'alertness'.

The pre-wedding promotion of facial procedures that result in bruising and swelling should not surprise us so much. Sandra Bartky, who writes brilliantly on the tyranny of the beauty industry, outlines the 'disciplinary practices' that women are expected to engage in daily, for fear of 'letting themselves go'. This is the needle and scalpal of the makeover genre - in which women are constantly one procedure - one purchase - away from perfection.

The crux of the matter is that in order to maintain the position of the beauty industry, and the millions in profit that it makes each year, this perfection cannot be obtainable, and must be repeated until the day we die. Women, in this conception, are characterised by lack: they are unfinished, abject bodies that should be controlled by the technological advances of capitalist society. As Jessica Ringrose and Valerie Walkerdine have argued about the classed dynamics of makeover, this highlights a social anxiety about women's unruly bodies.

Facial procedures such as these call upon women to 'do their duty' and produce the best product possible for their wedding day (and at 3-6 month intervals for the rest of their lives). They tell women that every line created by thought, or laughter, or anger, should be erased from their faces. They must deny their existance and instead exist as a picture postcard of the perfect day.

Diesel attacks

2009-02-26T13:48:00.003Z

In this latest advert from Diesel, a half-naked woman balances precariously on her tip-toes, with a menacing shadow behind.

She looks terrified, like an old horror movie clip - as though she is about to be attacked.

So by wearing diesel underwear, we want to invite the men gazing on at her lingerie-clad body to 'come and get it'? Is she 'asking for it'?

The backlash against women in advertising is completely out of control. It borrows from retro images to hark back to an imagined past where 'women were women' (they were the ones in lingerie looking pretty who really meant YES when they were saying no) and men were in control.

Playful sex ed from Durex

2009-02-23T13:58:00.003Z

A refreshing change from the usual "sex is scary and bad and should only be had in bed by a man and a woman" rhetoric of sexual health promotion from Durex...

London's rape crisis centre faces closure

2009-02-20T13:21:00.001Z

Every year in Britain, around three million women are raped, abused or beaten by a partner, stalked, forced into marriage or suffer other violence.

London's only rape crisis centre is set to close.

They employ highly skilled counsellors, who provide an invaluable service that needs to continue, and needs stable and continuous government funding to do so. It is absurd that such a fundamental service should be forced to scrabble around for ad-hoc grants. It is indicitative of a society that does not take violence against women seriously.

The government responded to the End Violence Against Women petition by saying that they were committed to supporting victims of sexual violence, but at the same time refuse to guarantee funding for crucial rape crisis services across the country.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission and the End Violence Against Women coalition are mapping services for women who have experienced violence. The situation at the moment is a postcode lottery, with huge gaps in service provision and unstable funding, meaning that sexual violence support services face constant threat of closure. On 30th January, the EHRC threatened legal action against over 100 local authorities over their failure to provide specialised sexual violence support services

Yvonne Trayner, the Chief Executive of London's Rape Crisis centre, says

We do very quiet work, behind the scenes. I think part of the problem is that we are not loud enough. We are too busy doing work counselling to enter into activism. We don't have the time to engage with local government.

We have to act now to save rape crisis centres from closure.

Hate

2009-01-09T14:36:00.000Z

Tahani Salah, Slam poet.

Demonstrate. Boycott Israeli Goods.