Posts Tagged "feminism"
Happy women’s day! –but what is this for?
Our big boss who’s in a Mekong Delta trip right now told us that flowers are filling the streets of Vietnam as men get these for women since it’s women’s day today.
What’s this international women’s day for?
Different organizations have different themes, just as how different schools and discourses of feminism define a woman or how to empower women. Early French theorists bank on the idea of sensuality as the source of women’s power, that is, having the women’s body as the corporeal ground of women’s intelligence, like in literary metaphors of maternity such as gestation, labor, and delivery. In other words, the woman’s body could actually be a source of imagery and inspiration in a woman’s narrative.
Whenever I discuss the varied feminist thoughts with passion and elaborate feminist notions before, students would ask me if I’m a feminist. I always tell them that I only know the theories because I studied them, but I don’t call myself a feminist precisely because of political associations and the competing schools of feminism–some of which I agree with, some I don’t, even if I’m a woman myself. Gender studies, I believe, have overtaken women’s studies in breadth and depth, in terms of theories and discourses as some feminist studies tend to be essentialists, which means, theorists define women essentially as this and that–when in fact, one can hardly tell the essence of being a woman.
What makes one woman a woman may not apply to all women, or what can empower one woman of a certain generation in a certain country may not empower another woman from a different place.
This is where culture and history specific gender studies come in. But that’s another theory. It’s women’s day.
For this year, here’s a list of themes for the international women’s day:
- Global, United Nations: Women and men united to end violence against women and girls
- Canada, Status of Women (Federal Gov): Strong Leadership. Strong Women. Strong World: Equality
- Australia, UNIFEM: Unite to End Violence Against Women
- Australia, Queensland Government Office for Women: Our Women, Our State
- Australia, WA Department for Communities: Sharing the Caring for the Future
- UK, Doncaster Council: Women’s Voices and Influence
- UK, Welsh Assembly Government: Bridging the Generational Gap
- UK, Accenture: Stretch Yourself: Achieving 50:50 in the boardroom by 2020
- USA, IBM: Women@IBM: Success in the Globally Integrated Enterprise
Sometimes, I don’t quite like the idea of romanticizing women’s day or women’s power or women whatever,
Read Morenarcissistic feminist notes
I have always believed that the personal is political.
To tackle a literary text is not only to read into it with theoretical know-how, but to relate it to the reader. Sometimes I am apprehensive of what silences me in the active making sense of a text. Then it hit me.
looking for paternal pat
What silences me is the oppression ubiquitous in today’s society. Oppression is indeed a fact of everyday life.
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some commotion after a machoshithead threw rock at our bus, on our way to cubao, but manong driver was so alert he managed to chase the bums back to commonwealth (we went complete circle around qc ellptical road!) and call police
some commotion after a machoshithead threw rock at our bus, on our way to cubao, but manong driver was so alert he managed to chase the bums back to commonwealth (we went complete circle around qc ellptical road!) and call police
Whenever I ride the bus, for instance, there is the fear of being harassed
Read MoreWho, Me?
Hello there! My name is Ai, Japanese for "love." I couldn't stay in one place for too long, so I'm always walking, traveling or changing address. I write for Australia's Campus Review, Education Review, Insite health care, and other magazines under APN. Before this, I was an editor of a quarterly rice science magazine and a weekly publication on international commodity trade in Singapore. But before everything else, I was an educator for five years.
