I’ve chosen to reply to this blog entry on F-Bomb: http://thefbomb.org/2012/06/saturday-vids-the-invisible-war/
I feel like my chosen image describes in a way what happens inside a person after being a victim to rape.
Please let both the image and the video act upon yourself and think about this shameful tendency.
D.
Hello dear bloggers!
The course is going into the “hot-phase” and we are going to make art responses and remixes of past issues regarding feminism and social justice in general.
At first I was some sort of clueless, but suddenly it struck me. I remembered one course where we talked about drawing attention to certain topics.
GI Joe and Barbie. The toys with swapped sound modules, where Barbie would shout a warcry and GI Joe admitted that he likes flowers the most!
So why not pick up this topic and develop it to point out a different and urgent issue?
Picture sources from left to right:
!!!Before continuing reading, try to figure out the meaning of the pictures above. They develop their projected weight jointly.!!!
Reflecting on GI Joe and Barbie switching their roles (or being precise: How I saw the sound-swapping) made me think of our troops or police officers and the recent (political) acceptance of women within these forces.
Beforehand continuing this blog, I would like to state that the following lines do not generalize or directly state that every woman has a hard life within our civil service, nor do I aim to generalize and demonize the men mistrusting women doing their jobs. Not everyone mistrusts women in these jobs, but still:
There are issues accepting women in these jobs and all I aim for is to raise attention to this sensible topic. Again, I do not say that women are not welcome within these forms of civil service!
But in the cases when they aren’t, they encounter several problems along their way. They may get into civil service, but from then on their lifes are hell.
Not gaining credit for their work, being titled “The weak link in the chain” or simply by receiving the disliked work nobody likes to do.
While my first chosen picture may show equality, the second picture refers to being misused or abused. With this I want to refer to using women as a tool, to get disliked work done or to simply get them out of the way, so the important work can be done by men.
The third picture illustrates the whole situation they find themselves in: Being hogtied in their uniforms (a pity I could not find one where Barbie is wearing an uniform while being tied up), unable to move, to work and to enjoy their valuable duty for their countries. The scissors are there, waiting on being used by the society to finally free her from her misery.
Opening recruitment and yelling “EQUALITY IS REAL!” isn’t enough to kick back and relax on this brilliant idea. Furthermore the process of equality needs to continue within these “Bands of Brothers” and change it to “Bands of Brethren and Sistren”.
Dennis D.
Hello fellow bloggers,
This time we had to review one of our older blog entries : “Blog Consciousness-raising response”
I seemed to be sleepy the last time when browsing this assignment and misunderstood the purpose and the goal of this errand.
My response was an edit in my previous blog called Identity and Politics Visual Map (The one where I visualized the world wide weapon dealing countries)
Since I misunderstood the previous assignment, I am simply going to do this over again:
“Name the systemic issue and search this
issue with all of the text or part of the text from the title of the course “Social Justice Activism through Feminist Arts-based
Research: Agency and Transformative Identity Politics” to identify at least one feminist arts-based research example that relates
to the systemic issue.”
Since my blog “Consciousness-raising response” reflected on immigration and mistrust, I had a hard time to come up with some arts based responses that would fit my chosen topic well enough.
Instead of an artwork I found an interesting article which connects feminism, immigration and some sort of mistrust in the US:
Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justicehttp://phg.sagepub.com/content/34/6/818.full.pdf
Wright, Melissa (2010): Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justice. In: Progress in Human Geography, http://phg.sagepub.com/
Pennsylvania State University, USA
I hope my finding is suffice enough to complete the assignment.
Dennis D.
Hello dear bloggers,
This time we had to think about a product or a label in our daily life – or any products that affect our life or the life of others. Since we live in a country with a famous arms producer settled,
I decided to visualize the global market of weapon dealing. At first I was about to visualize the connections between the different countries, but soon I realized that the research for the needed background
information would take a seminar papers work time. Also I wanted to list the legal and illegal weapon exchanges. Instead I simply chose to research a top 10 list of weapon exports around the world.
With this map I want to raise the awareness of a big industry branch which is keeping a low profile in our society. It is a topic nobody talks about, because it is mainly acting behind the scenes.
The products this industry produces may (currently) not be influencing our daily life, but in a lot of other countries they are not only influencing life but ending it.
Sources:
The sources used to create this map were mainly Wikipedia articles and the “SIPRI Arms Transfers Database”
Dennis de la Gala
EDIT:
I was googling (Wow. Is that even a word? I bet it is!) ” Social Justice & Weapon Dealing” and it threw up the following interesting article:
http://socialjusticefirst.com/2012/04/11/david-cameron-the-travelling-weapons-salesman/
Not surprisingly I was able to find the lines “Lord of War” too. My article was inspired by remembering this brilliant piece of movie-art.
When thinking about habits I have to inevitably think about trust and mistrust in our society.
Nowadays it is a common habit to mistrust most of the people and especially when they are not local people. Why do I come to this conclusion?
During the weekend I was visiting the parents of a friend of mine, since they wanted to sell me a bicycle. At the same time my friend dropped by with his girlfriend and we all got invited to a cup of coffee. We started to talk about several topics and suddenly the conversation leaned towards living in places with lots of immigrants around you. It did not take very long until the word “thief” was connected with the immigrants living there. “You can’t trust them. You can’t leave things unattended for a single second there. Or it is gone! For sure!”
I am by far not naive and I am also always watching over my belongings. Regardless if there are locals around me, or people from foreign countries. But still this kind of thinking made me ill. Reflecting on the conversation we had, I need to rise a question now.
Why is it that we have this habit of mistrust? Why has the thief always to be the “foreigner”?
Is it experience? Did they witness “them” being sneaky and stealing everything not being bolted down? How do they know that their missing mobile was snatched by a Croatian, Russian or a Chinese person?
The answer is quite simple. It is the stereotypical thinking most people build up throughout their lives. Not being built by experience (mostly), but by interaction and storytelling with other people. Just because they act, look, behave or “insert random reason here” differently, they are not bad people by default. Of course there are bad ones too! Nobody questions this fact. But there are also bad locals as well. Maybe your Austrian neighbor is happy about his new mobile phone (your missing one!) now and the Croatian guy who lives downstairs was the whole time working for charity reasons.
I’ve earned some harsh comments for standing up and defending foreign people. And all that just because they heard about the fact, that foreign people may be the reason for things disappearing. Criminal statistics going up? Must be because of immigration.
If you watch little children who play with foreign kids, you can witness their behavior without external influence on their habits. Try to notice some difference in their behavior towards foreign kids. What do they do differently when playing with local children?
I bet you won’t find any. There are no prejudices at all.
This unspoilt state is something I miss. Even for myself:
(Picture Source: http://explodingdog.com/title/imisstheoldyou.html)
Hello there!
This time I am going to response to the Blog site “The F-Bomb” in a more critical way.
So what’s up with all this feminism stuff you ask?
Ok that one was cheap. Although if you take feminism serious you’d need to be able to laugh about it too.
Still this humorous demotivational picture points out a valid perspective on the “being strong and independent” part of feminism. We are all just humans. Nobody expects someone to be the invulnerable strong superhero.
Well now off to the Blog!
I’ve been browsing through a few entries and would like to comment on a few of them.
The first one is “You Don’t Have To Walk In High Heels To Protect Me From Sexual Violence“.
Kate S, the Autor of the text, refers to an activism-based event in Western Kentucky, where 50 members of a fraternity walked with red high-heels around their campus. This aimed to raise awareness about violence against women and Kate seems to be unhappy with the way they decided to get attention to violence against women.
While I can understand her points she tries to make quite well, I still feel she does not honor them enough for their activism. It were men organizing the event and taking part in it. Men who decided to stand up for the cause and I feel that this shouldn’t be downgraded in a way like:
“Yeah nice try gents. Red shoes? C’mon! Thats so useless and won’t change anything. But thanks anyways.”
I’ve exaggerated here a bit, although this is the impression I have been left behind with. Yes it may be a simple campaign but just because it is not a fricking Hurricane sweeping over the country, it shouldn’t be ignored by feminists. This may sound like a harsh critique and blunt put. But shouldn’t be the High-Heels event a place where you stop and witness? A moment where you reflect on the topic for yourself. So in my eyes the goal is still achieved.
Another Topic I would like to refer to is “Growing Up A Tomboy“.
Aimee B wrote about being a “Tomboy” and growing up as one. This reminds me of a friend growing up with me and my other friends when we were children as well. She always played with us boys, since she did that from kindergarden on. The real difference to Aimee was that she didn’t style (or was styled by her parents) like a boy at all and that she mixed her activities. She played with dolls and stereotypical “female toys”, but on the other hand she played with toy-guns, took the role of a firefighter and gazed at large trucks passing by like we did. Since I moved away with about 10 years for myself, I wonder now how she does now and how she grew up through her juvenile years in school.
Thinking about how Aimee adapted to the situation in school, I’d rather want to stay away from judging this situation. Sure it is more easy to stay with the flow and behave (and look like too) like the social environment expects us to do. But I can’t tell if she did wrong by becoming more feminine or not.
We all are playing different roles in our life to get along with people, to advance in our jobs and to “keep a low profile”. It may just be a little play-acting every here and then, but truth is, if we would act like we really think then we’d be living in an asylum sooner or later. On the other hand there should never be a community driven force which sticks us to social accepted appearances or behaviors. We can not (and should not) say if Aimee did right or wrong in behaving like the people expected her to be. This is something that only Aimee herself can reflect in retrospect.
So thats it for now.
I hope you enjoyed reading!
D.
socialjusticedelagala 