arbofo

Yesterday was Earth Day, and wow, I’m still sorting through all the related blog entries saved in my Google RSS feed reader. It’s tricky to think about the overlap (or lack thereof) between our spheres of thought - like environmentalism and feminism.  Rana did a great job of addressing her thoughts on this junction in a guest post over at Shakespeare’s Sister.  I recommend checking out the whole thing, but here’s something to get you started:

In other words, masculine environmentalism is, when reduced to its most basic, about defending a vulnerable earth from “rapists” in order to ensure that (male) human beings continue to have access to it. Feminine environmentalism, on the other hand, is about protecting one’s body, family, and home from outside attacks by (male) corporations.

This gendering of the movement shapes the way that we think about environmental issues, and the way that we address environmental problems, in ways that are subtle, but significant.

This is an interesting post that merges two knotty topics. Here’s the first paragraph, from Samhita:

A Republican California assemblyman proposed a bill that would deem pregnant women “temporarily disabled” in the third trimester of their pregnancy and allow them access to handicapped parking. The bill failed, but I think this is really interesting.

She then goes on to express concern that classifying pregnant women as disabled would attach the same kind of stigma we see attached to people who have physical disabilities that aren’t temporary. Namely, the stigma of being helpless, and needing the law to help us out.

There’s one practical reason why this bill failed. Not all women encounter mobility issues in their final months of pregnancy. Those that do can be given handicap parking stickers by their doctors. My roommate observed that where she’s from, they further solved the problem simply by providing maternity parking spaces. There are ways to address access to better parking for pregnant women without creating a redundant law.

Given that the law’s redundancy is really the issue here, it’s disorienting that there was so much discussion of disabilities and abilities over at Feministing. NicoleGW said it best:

A lot of the comments (and the original post itself) rub me the wrong way. As others have already mentioned, there seems to be a big problem here with people attaching stigma to the terms “disabled,” “handicapped,” etc., and being wary of attaching that same stigma to pregnant women.

Frankly, the issue with this approach isn’t whether or not pregnant women are disabled. The issue is that there is a sh-t ton of prejudice against people with disabilities.

Samhita concluded her post with a brief dicussion of the “disability” label itself and her resistance to using it. Personally, I’d appreciate her good-intentions more if she’d just call it for what it is. Whatever word we use to describe a group of people who exist outside societal norms is inevitably going to have a stigma attached to it. Why bother with a confusing and condescending substitute like “differently-abled?”

I love this quote, attributed to a commenter’s wheelchair-using friend:

I don’t care if you call me f-cking disabled, just put a f-cking ramp in front of your store so I can get in!”

I wish I had that kind of chutzpah!

Digression:

The news story reminded me of Brigitte Jordan’s Birth in Four Cultures. This was my favorite piece of required reading for an anthropology class in college (and this was another). In it, we see very plainly how birth in the US is treated as a medical (vs. natural) event. In other words: a mother is a “patient” whose pregnancy is a medical condition.

*Apologies if you found the title kind of misleading.

Wow.

A couple weeks ago, I started reading Tibet and China in the Twenty-First Century. It’s a good book, but it’s definitely going to take me a few more weeks (months?) to read. I picked it up after seeing Seven Years In Tibet for the first time, wanting to know more about what exactly had happened over there.

The book’s introduction highlights a lot of the human rights violations, the tangible reasons why anyone would object to China’s possession of the region. As I read about the horrible lack of access to health care, education, food, and jobs, I wondered whether anyone was still talking about Tibet. Was it too ’90s to talk about it? Had Darfur (also a horrible tragedy- don’t get me wrong) supplanted Tibet as the hot human rights topic to talk about?

Within days, Bjork shouted “Tibet, Tibet!” at a concert in Shanghai. And now it seems as if there could be no end to the news coverage about protests in Tibet. Someone from work sent a mass email that included two opposing accounts of the protests. The first is an account from a sympathetic eyewitness via the BBC, the second is a completely different account from People’s Daily (a newspaper backed by the Communist Party of China). The Guardian also has Students for a free Tibet as #21 in their list of the world’s 50 most powerful blogs.

It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the protests. You would think China has its hands full with things like censorship and pollution- why spend all this energy on Tibet? (Heh- remember when they ordered living Buddhas to get permission before reincarnating?) But what would happen if the protests actually worked? Today’s Tibet is not what it was before 1959- would it be impossible to put the pieces back together?

But to answer my original question: YES, people are obviously still thinking about Tibet.

A couple years ago, I went to see Born into Brothels at the movie theater with my Dad. Like a lot of movies, I missed much of the dialog, but figured I’d just catch it with captions/subtitles on dvd later on. My plan was foiled when the film’s dvd was released without captions. So much for that.

I love movies- especially the smaller, independent films, because they usually have something to say that you don’t usually find in the mainstream. For example, a number of feminist blogs raved awhile back about a small film called The Education of Shelby Knox, a docudrama about a girl from Texas who fought for comprehensive sex ed in her town. I was excited to see this girl’s transformation from apathy to activism for myself, but when I received a copy from Netflix, I found that it wasn’t captioned. Great.

Born into Brothels… The Education of Shelby Knox… Sherrybaby… 2 Days in Paris… Word Wars… This Film is Not Yet Rated… Iraq in Fragments…

What these films all have in common is that they received wide critical acclaim, press, and advertising dollars. They were all produced by Red Envelope Entertainment, Netflix’s production company. And not a single one of them has English captions/subtitles.*

I’ve written to Netflix asking that they include captioning information with the “Movie Info” pop-up. It’s amazing to me that they’ll include information in this space about a movie’s length, but not whether it’s accessible. I also asked that they correct a listing they had for Daria: The Movie: Is It Fall Yet, since the copy I received did not appear to have captions. The result was a terse letter from one of their customer service reps telling me what I already knew: I could look at the complete record of a movie to find out whether it had captions/subtitles. They didn’t explain the situation with the Daria dvd, and the record still states that it has captioning.

I’m not a lawyer, so I do lack a complete understanding of the American with Disabilities Act and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but I would imagine that Netflix is able to get away with this because Red Envelope Films is a relatively new production company, which probably makes it exempt from captioning laws for four years. Still, one glance at the sheer number of high-profile films they’ve helped produced in the last couple of years makes me doubt that captioning their films would be an undue economic burden.

Netflix has also come under fire for their past lack of TTY customer service line and the poor development of their “Instant Viewing” feature, which you can read about here, here, and here. The captioning of a/v material on the Internet is definitely a move I want to see happen. I am increasingly frustrated as high-profile blogs and news outlets increasingly substitute text-based stories with videos that generally lack any kind of transcript. Meanwhile, Project ReadOn is an amazing endeavor, and I’m blown away by Bill Creswell’s effort to caption movie trailers and other videos of interest to deaf individuals. But I’d like to see the ADA and Telecommunications Act updated in order to successfully adapt to technology’s constant changes.

By comparison, it seems like such a small request from some of us that companies such as Netflix start with the basics: caption their own films, ensure that their records are consistent and free of errors, and respond appropriately when customers point out such errors. Is that really so much to ask?

*UPDATE: A couple commenters have pointed out that some of these dvds *are* captioned. Here are the films that have been established as having captions/subtitles: 2 Days in Paris and Iraq in Fragments. I’d be interested to know if anyone has a trustworthy source for this data? For my work, I use WorldCat a lot, but am finding that the staff module is easier to use than the basic version I’ve just linked to — but the information on it is pretty sound, as far as language details go.

Update #2: I double-checked Born into Brothels and Sherrybaby - the versions available from Netflix are *not* captioned, nor do they have subtitles (more about this here).

These students are my heroes.  Civil disobedience at its best.

Even though I’ve already put in a vote for Obama, can I just say… how awesome it’d be to see Chelsea Clinton as First Daughter again? Or, maybe, if Bill’s too much of a liability for Hillary, couldn’t we just ask Chelsea fulfill the duties of First Lady? I mean, who says the First Lady has to be married to the President? C’mon, shake things up a little!

They should totally make this into a campaign photo.

Broadsheet is rightfully critiquing its generalizations, but when I read this fluffy NY Times article today, I immediately recalled the dark look on my mother’s face when I told her over Christmas that I, um, sorta prefer Obama to Clinton, despite the potential awesome-ness of a President with ovaries.

Like a lot of women in my generation, I tend to err on the side of being complacent when it comes to feminist politics. It’s easy enough to take for granted that I’ve got the vote, a career, access to birth control, and so on. It’s as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards write in Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future: “The presence of feminism in our lives is taken for granted. For our generation, feminism is like fluoride. We scarcely notice we have it—it’s simply in the water.”

And yet, as Hillary Clinton runs for president, it’s impossible to ignore the appalling degree of misogyny from t-shirts that say I love [cunt]ry music or The good, the bad, the ugly, to Chris Matthew’s pinching Clinton’s cheek (after her alleged sob-fest in New Hampshire, which inspired political cartoons like this one), to the formation of a 527 group that basically exists only to call Clinton a cunt (be sure to check out their logo). I’ve watched as anti-Clinton Facebook groups were formed, in which members refer to Clinton as “that BITCH.” In this climate, it’s no wonder that Clinton’s wrinkles and cleavage are considered viable topics for discussion for some news outlets.

Thankfully, people like Bob Herbert, with his commentary, Politics and Misogyny, and blogs like Feministing (they have a “Hillary Sexism Watch”) and Jezebel (see their retort to some of Clinton’s wrinkle-gate), I’m more aware of the challenges women still face in this world.

When I was young, I learned in school that (almost) anyone can be President- this is something children are still being taught. But considering the amount of backlash Clinton has received, when the only fundamental difference between herself and her (dominant) white/upper-class/Christian/able-bodied/heterosexual colleagues is her sex, it depresses me to think of how much farther we have to go before what we teach kids is really true.