Small Strokes Big Oaks

Don’t forget!  There’s still time to donate to my Avon Walk for Breast Cancer AND to RSVP for the #chifems April Tweetup!

The Impact of Twitter on Feminism: Its Facilitations & Limitations by Emily Heroy

Feminism makes it way all across the internet–in universities all over the world, news articles posted online, in forums, on Facebook, and (as the title suggests), Twitter. I’ve talked about the impact of social media and feminism in a video interview I did awhile back. But for this post, I want to stress the impact of Twitter on feminism.

Teenagers and Reading by Justine Larbalestier

1. There seems to be an implicit assumption that all teenagers are the same.

2. There’s also an assumption in all these discussions about YA that it is primarily read by teenagers.

3. Another assumption is that a) only reading fiction counts and b) reading is better for you than any other pastime.

4. Then there’s the assumption that there is such a thing as good writing and bad writing and we all agree on what those are.

Smarts, books, teens and fairy dust by Chally

There’s a particular trend in the challenging of teenagers’ reading choices. Everything teenagers read – or everything teenagers are supposedly reading – is baaaaad. It’s immoral! Or it’s sapping their minds! Or they could be reading something better! say the older folk. We must question where such valuation of these books comes from. Is there something particularly wrong with Harry Potter or Twilight?

Beyond the Pale: Is white the new black? by Kelefa Sanneh via The New Yorker

In a marvellously splenetic essay, “On Being White . . . And Other Lies,” James Baldwin argued that America had, really, “no white community”—only a motley alliance of European immigrants and their descendants, who made a “moral choice” (even if they didn’t realize it) to join a synthetic racial élite. And, in the nineteen-nineties, a cohort of scholars took up Baldwin’s charge, popularizing a field of research that came to be known as whiteness studies. In 1994, the white labor historian David R. Roediger published an incendiary volume, “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.” Paying special attention to unions and strikes, he traced the unsteady growth of American whiteness, a category that eventually included many previous identities that had once been considered marginal: Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish. “It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false,” he wrote. “Whiteness describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.”

What Makes a Great Teacher? by Amanda Ripley via The Atlantic

For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t. Now, as the Obama administration offers states more than $4 billion to identify and cultivate effective teachers, Teach for America is ready to release its data.

Five Years by Danine Spencer

Sunday was the anniversary of a really good day. A great day, in fact. It was the fifth anniversary of the day I was admitted to Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee, Wis., where I where I stayed for the next two months. I’m sure most people wouldn’t commemorate the anniversary of the day they entered a hospital for two months, but April 11, 2005, was a day that changed my life.

Guest Post: Interview with Julie Zilinger, teenage editor of top feminist blog, the Fbomb from Veronica Arreola

We had the opportunity to talk to one of the busiest (and youngest) bloggers on the web, Julie Zeilinger, sole founder of the Fbomb, a feminist blog for teenagers. Let us rephrase: while the blog may be run by a teenager and posted from a teenage perspective, the content is relevant for any feminist young and old.  Zeilinger attracts an international array of young feminists while posting from Pepper Pike, Ohio. In this interview, she tells us how her feminist outlook was shaped,  juggling school, the blog and the way her peers and parents view her.

SAFER: Beyond the Campus by Amanda ReCupido

I recently volunteered with SAFER (Students Active for Ending Rape), where I’ll be writing a weekly blog post that collects news of sexual assault from “beyond the campus” (their mission is to improve college sexual assault policies). Below is my first post, cross-posted here.

Food and Moral Weight by s.e. smith

But the thing I really like about Michelle is that she talks about the structural systems behind the food we eat, and she specifically addresses and refutes the commonly held idea that individual eaters should be held morally culpable for the system they are trapped in. She does not, in other words, think it’s very productive to judge people who don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to what they get their stomachs around. In fact, she thinks, as I do, that it’s actually pretty counterproductive to be berating people for not eating “right” when “right” may not be an option for them.

Take Care of Your Eyes! by Danine Spencer

More women than men are diagnosed with eye diseases such as glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy

Women may experience changes in vision in various stages of their lives including pregnancy and post-menopause.

More than 2.3 million women (out of 3.6 million people total) live with visual impairment, including blindness

6 million women (vs 3 million men) have dry eye syndrome, a condition where not enough natural tears are produced.

Day of Silence by s.e. smith

Bullying kills. This is not just about kids being kids. It is about unparalleled viciousness and horrific behaviour. It is about violence and rape and hatred. It is about school districts which stand by and do nothing while their students are literally bullied to death and people are begging for help; the ‘not my business’ attitude harms youths who are being bullied in particular because they are counting on the adults around them to do the right thing and when they don’t it is an act of betrayal. An act which can’t be made up later, when the victim is dead, I would like to point out.

Following up on the F Conference by Chally

But a problem with feminism is that those “other” issues get treated as pet issues that mainstream feminism can pick up once in a while for minority points and drop again. And the sad thing is, intersectionality isn’t that hard a tool to employ. There are so many conventional sites of feminist activism that could centre, for instance, disability along with gender, but just don’t.