How Wonder Woman turned from a Hero to a War Crimes Supporter.

The wonder of imperial feminism

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian writer and the author of the international bestselling novel, Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury 2010). She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an NGO for children.

by Susan Abulhawa  from Al Jazeera with thanks         When I was a little girl, like many women of my generation who grew up watching American television shows (even if they were dubbed in Arabic), I used to twirl and twirl, trying to attain super powers like Wonder Woman. I would twitch my nose to magically transform my surroundings, like Samantha from Bewitched.

These female characters were exceptions among the docile housewives, the efficient secretaries, and damsels in distress that pervaded the popular media of my time. Wonder Woman and Samantha had the power to change their lives, even if that power had to remain hidden, forever a secret.

Who are these Anarchists? and What the Hell do they Want?

 

WHO ARE THE ANARCHISTS AND WHAT IS ANARCHISM?

  By      Thomas Giovanni   at   Black Rose Anarchist Federation: …………..   In the wake of the use of militant street tactics at the Trump inauguration protests, the controversial shut down of two prominent right-wing speakers at the University of California, Berkeley, and a variety of high profile actions against the far right, anarchists have received increased media attention in the USA and sparked widespread debate, particularly around anti-fascist struggles.see also> Murray Bookchin: anarchist heretic who Inspired spreading Revolution in Middle East

But many people are still confused about anarchism, associating it with indiscriminate violence, chaos, and disorder. This distorted image runs counter to more than a century of anarchist activity in and outside the United States.

So if not chaos or disorder, what does anarchism stand for? What do anarchists believe in?

Core Anarchist Values

At the most basic level, anarchists believe in the equal value of all human beings. Anarchists also believe that hierarchical power relations are not only unjust, but corrupt those who have power and dehumanize those who don’t.

Why you Can’t be a Feminist if you’re Not an Anarchist

~ from  VIOLETREVA  shared with thanks

Is every feminist secretly an anarchist?

Feminism is not feminism if it is not antisexist, but also must be:

• Antiracist (for wimmin of color)
• Anticapitalist (for working class wimmin)
• Female+Female love-positive (for lesbians and bisexual wimmin)
• Anti-state (against the state control of wimmin’s autonomy, rejecting patriarchal protection rackets)
• Anti-hierarchy (against wimmin exploiting other wimmin)

I can’t tell you how many wimmin have been turned away from anarchism — the politics of opposing all hierarchy — due to male violence, male abuse, male threats, male testerics. And that is an awful shame, because wimmin have the greatest chance for achieving anarchy.It’s pretty simple… Forget all your preconceptions about what anarchism is. Forget malestream anarchism with its male fantasies of “let’s kill all the bad people and we will win” because that’s just naive. Men are pretty dumb, let’s be honest. They expect everything to be cleaned up after them.

If Prostitution is Legalized…A Personal and Political View

Everyday at lunch when it is nice out, I walk across the street to a little café and buy a bag of chips as a snack. And invariably I end up getting catcalled.

For me, the gauntlet of sexual harassment began early, as I developed beginning around 12, and until about 18 I looked much older than my years (one could say I eventually caught up). This gauntlet consisted of whistles, hoots, lewd comments, stalking as I walked home, groping, threatening comments if I didn’t respond – and many times there was some sort of combination.

Abuse is not always ‘Visible’ as Megan Short was Punished by Death for Realizing

by MEGHAN MURPHY on Feminist Current.. shared with thanks

‘On August 6, Short’s planned moving day, she was found shot to death alongside her three children, her husband, and their dog in the family’s Pennsylvania home. A “murder/suicide note” was found “near one of the deceased adults,”

Megan Short, 33, posted a request to Facebook, asking for help moving on August 6. Only weeks earlier, she had commented under an article posted by a friend, saying she was leaving her husband.

The article, written by Leigh Stein, was titled, “He didn’t hit me. It was still abuse.” In it, Stein explained that, while working at a diner, her boyfriend made her shower twice a day, so she “wouldn’t smell like French fries after work” and so that she could shave her entire body, “or else he wouldn’t touch me.”

He also told Stein she “wasn’t sexy” and that, therefore, he needed to sleep with other women. Stein didn’t see her relationship as abusive, at the time, because her abuse was invisible — there were no bruises to prove it. “I didn’t know what to name what I couldn’t see,” she writes.

Like so many other women, Stein had learned that red flags were, in fact, “romance.” She writes, “I felt like I was in a movie — how quickly we moved in together and isolated ourselves from friends and family, because all we needed was each other.” Women are groomed to become victims of abuse, in this way.

Show #125 Carrie Reichardt’s Revolutionary Art

First a small gallery of Carrie’s art.. 

to listen to her INTERVIEW click The Circled A

Mayday demonstration at Bank. People protest against police violence and dress as convicts, prisoners or police. Organised by Space Hijackers. London.

to listen to her INTERVIEW click The Circled A

 

The Circled A

Carrie Reichardt is a contemporary artist, who works from a mosaic-covered studio in London. A member of the Craftivism movement, she uses murals, ceramics, screen-printing and graphic design in her work. She is a dedicated advocate of the movement and curated one of the few exclusively Craftivist exhibitions in the UK. She talks about the ‘Disobedient Objects’ exhibition at the V&A, Angola 3 and much more!

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Lee Lakeman: Lifelong Feminist Activist

‘We are in the midst of an uprising’: An interview with Lee Lakeman

by JESS MARTIN

Lee Lakeman is a feminist activist, speaker, and was a front line anti-violence worker for over 30 years. She continues to consult and do anti-violence work in her retirement. In May of 2013 Lee received an honorary PhD from the University of British Columbia. Upon her retirement she also won SFU’s Thakore Visiting Scholar award, given in the name of Mahatma Gandhi.

Jess: Thanks for agreeing to meet with me today. As a young feminist I’m wondering how you became involved in the feminist movement and how you decided to make it your life’s work.

Lee: In a way, I had absolutely no excuse. I was roughly twenty, living in Toronto and studying at Ryerson, so lots of things were going on all around me, including meetings about women’s liberation and meetings about the civil rights movement. It was right there. You had to work atnot being involved when I was young.

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reblogged with thanks from: http://www.feministcurrent.com/…-interview-with-lee-lakeman/

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To top it all off, I became pregnant by a foreign student so I was, all of a sudden, right in the middle of the race questions, poverty questions, and women’s rights questions. That made them all profoundly important to me. I didn’t think about it as my life’s work until later.

I owned a house with some friends, and we made it available to women who had no place to go. It became the Woodstock Women’s Emergency shelter. So, there I was in the middle of learning about violence against women, and I haven’t looked back. The work is rewarding, and the more I did it, the more I understood how important it was. It was a place to stand.