Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/gender-and-sexuality/page/26/)
About struggles to be who we are, and to love each other across the categories.
Marcus Buckingham has caused a stir in the blogosphere by reporting on the United States General Social Survey about American women’s happiness. The long and short of it is that women are unhappier than they were 40 years ago (and men are happier). Nobody can figure this out. People have their own pet theories (See several of them at Huffington Post and elsewhere). But really it’s all sheer speculation.
Louise Cankar, an assistant professor of sociology at Marquette University, recently published a book in which she argues that, while anti-Muslim suspicion existed prior to 9/11, 9/11 created an environment in which hostility toward Muslims could thrive and their political and social exclusion could be legitimated by both the government and nativist Americans. While Cankar’s discussion in her book, Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11, is, as a whole, thoroughly fascinating, if not depressing, her research regarding gendered dehumanization stands out as especially troubling – though also suggestive of where we may find solutions. Cankar’s dissection of the gendered patterns of dehumanization identify gender as a critical area for cross-cultural dialogue. She lays out three patterns in particular of gender dehumanization. Women In Hijab As Symbols of Anti-Americanism
As is perhaps inevitable, after 9/11 Muslim women who don hijab (the headscarf worn by some Muslim women) became central to the construction of Arabs and Muslims as the ominous “Other” – that is, as belonging to a culture in which women are oppressed and incapable of exercising choice, and men are violent and misogynist.
This post was written by Zehra Rizavi and Yusif Akhund for altmuslimah.com. I think it helps non-Muslims understand the Ramadan experience from an insider’s perspective, while also raising questions of how different interpretations of gender roles may change each couple’s experience of Ramadan. When my husband finally makes his way down the stairs, my frustration abates and he and I sit across from each other and share our early morning meal. We speak intermittently and keep one eye trained on the clock to ensure we finish our food by the time dawn prayers begin. Despite the sparse conversation and the hurried meal, I enjoy the feeling that we are both beginning our obligatory fasts together, as a unit.
A memorable moment in my education as a straight man and a writer happened for me back in the 1970s at a Gay Sweatshop production of Noel Greig’s Dear Love of Comrades, a play about the upper class British socialist Edward Carpenter and his working class lover(s) in the 1890s. After the play others remarked on how the challenges of gay relationships were so similar then and now. But what had struck me was not how different but how similar Carpenter’s issues were to my own in my relationships with feminist women: the power dynamics between two lovers, the issues of class, of relating our own lives to the political struggles of the day. By washing Carpenter’s dirty laundry in public, as it were, instead of trying to portray gay relationships in some more idealized way, the playwright had brought out the universality of the human problems involved: love, power, desire, neediness. If the play hadn’t convincingly portrayed the particulars of the people involved–British, gay, upper and working class, and so on–it wouldn’t have worked half as well to tell a universal story.
On my desk at Tikkun I have a photo of three girls, two boys and me, and the van I used to drive them and my son to school in every day in the Hudson Valley, an hour’s trip. I miss those kids and the wonderful thing that happens to a parent on the school run when you become invisible and they just talk their usual talk with each other. These were such decent and enjoyable young people, it was the thing that kept me going to my not so perfect job near their school. One of them, Eliza Reynolds, just graduated and her mother, Sil, sent me a link to an article they wrote together in Feministing. Here’s Sil’s take, and to get Eliza’s, go visit Feministing, which is well worth checking out:
1.
This fall I’ll be teaching “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” again. Shirley Ranck wrote this groundbreaking curriculum about women in Western religion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was first published in 1986. The fact that it took the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) at least five years to put it out says a lot about this pioneering course. The UUA is notoriously liberal, even progressive. But this class pushed the buttons of Unitarian Universalist’s still largely male hierarchy, and they delayed publication.
Perhaps disappointed that death panels failed to frighten the tar and feathers out of the average American, the right wing appears to have settled on a new meme to undercut healthcare reform: the CDC will force males to undergo circumcision. Loosely based on a CDC report to be presented at an AIDS prevention gathering in Atlanta, Fox News, Reason Online, and The Drudge Report report that the CDC is considering forced circumcision of all males to prevent the spread of HIV. David Harsanyi, a Denver Post columnist and author of Nanny State wrote:
Here’s the problem: Why is the CDC launching campaigns to “universally” promote a medical procedure? If you’re an adult (and nuts) or a parent, no one stands in your way of having a bris. Today 79 percent of men are circumcised already, and even if 100 percent were, the effect on the collective health of the nation would be negligible.
Today after returning from a delightful vacation in the Adirondacks, I’ve been immersing myself in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. This week to my utter astonishment, the entire magazine section of the Sunday Times has been devoted to the international issues surrounding women’s rights. It’s entitled “Saving the World’s Women.” The cover story, “The Women’s Crusade” by husband-and-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, begins by enumerating several of the causes for women’s oppression in China, South Asia, and Africa — sexual slavery, lack of employment opportunities, lack of education, even lack of food and medicine for girls (but not for boys) — and how some of the women affected by these issues have turned their lives around through microfinance. These are wonderful stories, inspiring and perceptive about women’s situation in the developing world.
An open letter to the Indian diaspora and their organizations to think about the regressive nature of their decision to not allow the preeminent South Asian LGBT association to march on the Indian Independence Day celebrations due to take place on Sunday August 16, 2009 in New York city.
Before I started blogging for Tikkun Daily, my web publishing consisted of my own website, www.mamasminstrel.net, and articles in Matrifocus, the web magazine by and for Goddess women published four times a year. What I love about Tikkun Daily — the lively interaction that’s beginning to occur — is something I found in embryo in Matrifocus. Matrifocus always has a wide variety of articles that inform me, entice me, lead me to think a little differently, and most importantly, feed my soul. Often it includes essays by some of he most interesting thinkers in feminist spirituality: Patricia Monaghan, Vicki Noble, Susun Weed, Max Dashu, Johanna Stuckey, and even occasionally Starhawk. It always includes poetry and beautiful art, as well reader-submitted reviews of Goddess books, DVDs, theater, and films.
This quarter the articles range from my description of “Tree Divinations” to two articles on permaculture by Mary Swander and Madelon Wise plus a lovely introduction to fairies and devas by Susun Weed.