now rise up, lady, or we drown
About Me
Click here.
About This Blog
This is a personal blog. It's one part personal stuff, one part media that I'm into, and one part sociopolitical issues I care about.
Things on my mind lately include Battlestar Galactica, the fate of River Song, the challenges of traveling solo as a woman, and how to transcend misogynistic narratives in traditional Appalachian music.
Stuff I typically blog:
→ politics (American and international)
→ international relations
→ social justice (especially intersectional feminism)
→ language & linguistics
→ the Balkans
→ Palestine
→ gymnastics → personal stuff
→ Alison Krauss
→ fandom
This blog doubles as an Alison Krauss' boobs appreciation blog because for some reason, when you do a Google search for Alison's boobs, my blog is generally the first relevant result. I don't know how this happened, but I will accept it. If people are gonna be googling her boobs, better they find the blog of a fangirl expressing solidarity than that of some skeezy dude objectifying her.
If I ever disappear or get hacked, find me at iellaantilles.tumblr.com.
your
grandmother.
mother.
a
bitch.
hoe.
slut.
dumb cunt. in that order.
to
her face.
watch her spirit leave her body.
watch her fall into herself.
take pride in your aim. your precision.
stay.
grab a plate.
eat what remains of her.
that is what you do
to
women
who are not yours everyday.
(via azaadi)
i have a new favourite twitter
How do you wanna break / this perfectly solid glass ceiling? / How are we gonna take / this oppressive social construct apart?
OMG.
(via deucalioness)
An Iranian channel ran a story about how a certain kind of martial arts is enjoying increasing popularity among Iranian women. This means that a) Iranian women have rights, b) Iranian women can access the public sphere, c) Iranian women participate in organized, public sports, and d) an Iranian government news channel has no problem with any of this.
Faced with these facts, the Western media panicked: some news agencies resorted to the stereotype of Iranian women as veiled, militant fanatics; others opted for infantilizing portrayals of suffering women using martial arts as their only escape. Can you imagine any self-respecting Western reporter writing a story that explained, unprovoked, the popularity of karate among girls in suburban Los Angeles by citing America’s high rates of sexual assault? Additionally, few bothered to mention that recently it has been Western sports organizations that have prevented Iranian women from playing, for example in 2011 forcing the Iranian women’s soccer team to forfeit hope of reaching the Olympics because they wore sports hijabs on the field.
Narratives of weak or militant Iranian women are not just dishonest; they also fuel a political narrative whereby Islamism is equated with backwardness and the ability of women to reconcile Islamic ideals with feminist goals is entirely obfuscated. Both Western conservatives and many secular feminists often participate in this obfuscation, effectively trying to either hide Iranian women’s successes in order to demonize Iran or by ignoring the ideologies of liberation they have formulated in order to preserve the status of secular feminism as the only path to women’s liberation.
Read the entire article. You can follow ajammc on tumblr here.
(via palestinianliberator)
(via heyyouwiththeboobs)
Tumbling over the past year and a half has made me see the problems of gender roles that exist in media, but sometimes it gets to the point where I over analyze every single piece of television or film that I come across. (However this in no way means that I think feminist media criticism is wrong, or should be avoided!) Mostly I just over think everything.
This is awesome!
See: every debate about the female characters on Doctor Who.
(via nabokovsshadows)
~ Elise Nagy, “Exploding The Limitations: What Being a Femme Means to Me,” inourwordsblog.com (via queerintersectional)
I wish I could be loud and confident in my anti-racism, my feminism and my femme-ism. All too often - in real life, not online - I find myself not piping up and saying what needs to be said.
Beneath the massive denial of men’s power and responsibility and its projection onto women is an enormous pool of rage, resentment, and fear. Rather than look at patriarchy and their place within it, many men will beat, rape, torture, murder, and oppress women, children, and one another. They will wage mindless war and offer themselves up for the slaughter, chain themselves to jobs and work themselves to numbed exhaustion as if their lives had no value or meaning beyond controlling or being controlled or defending against control, and content themselves with half-lives of confused, lost deprivation. What men lack, women didn’t take from them, and it isn’t up to women to give it back.
Allan G. Johnson (via wretchedoftheearth)
What men lack, women didn’t take from them, and it isn’t up to women to give it back.
What men lack, women didn’t take from them, and it isn’t up to women to give it back.
What men lack, women didn’t take from them, and it isn’t up to women to give it back.
(via wretchedoftheearth)
A lot of times men get angry at me when I don’t address the problems men face. [….] For some reason, men want women to fix their lives too. (sexist tropes make women into plot points, catalysts for male character development, homemakers, and manic pixie dream girl muses. We’re expected to change their lives for the better. It’s written into the definition of womanhood.)
There are genuine problems that men face, problems also created by patriarchy: Not being allowed to show any emotion other than rage. Being held to strict standards of masculinity that require them to disrespect women and one-up each other to maintain a sense of identity. The required neurotic aversion to anything even remotely feminine that forbids any kind of empathetic connection to other human beings. Getting attacked for showing any kind of vulnerability.
These are problems that men have approached me with and demanded I address them, as if I as a feminist have any influence over how men define their manhood. Instead of complaining that feminists should fix all the problems that men create and perpetuate, men need to organize themselves to change these things. And while you’re at it, tell the MRA’s to give it a rest. They’re just making it worse for you.
(via amydentata)
THIS SO HARD. Fuck, I wish I had this quote like 5 days ago.
(via meretremfuit)
(via nabokovsshadows)
One thing I love about River/Eleven is the age difference in their actors
If you haven’t seen “The Name of the Doctor”
Three cheers for positive portrayals of age-gap relationships and sex-positive representation for older women in media!
And yet, there are still girls in the River Song tag complaining that they might be able to ship River/Eleven if only Alex Kingston was a bit younger. =/
“kill myself” was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl
Yeah, tell me again how misogyny “isn’t real” and men and boys actually “love”, “like” and “respect the female sex”? This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs in this world. Men and boys are so viscerally contemptuous of anything or anyone who/that is female or feminine, or perceived to be female or feminine, that they would rather commit suicide than to be associated with— or become a member of— the female sex. As Germaine Greer said, “women have no idea how much men hate them.”
Er… wow. Maybe I’m completely naive, but I took that not as “men would rather die than be associated with anything female or feminine because they hate women so much” but “boys realize how much more limited their lives would be as girls, and don’t want to face such a life”. I mean, the girls’ answers are all capitalizing on their newfound male privilege, right? Why wouldn’t the boys’ answers be related to the same thing — their newfound lack of male privilege? It’s still depressing as hell, but it’s not as sinister as MEN HATE WOMEN AND EVERYTHING ABOUT THEM.
IDK, I think at the very least it’s both. Do you not see how boys are taught to think that everything girly is gross?
In fact, I don’t think men even realize how truly women’s lives are limited. You always hear guys make arguments like “but women are equal now!” I think girls notice their lack of opportunities more than boys do. That’s how oppression tends to work; minorities know how much better life would be as a member of the majority, but the majority doesn’t even think about what life is like for minorities.
So yeah, I do think that in this instance, the girls were reacting to how many more opportunities they would have as boys - because coming from a place of oppression, that’s what girls would notice - and the boys were reacting to suddenly being a “gross” girl - because oppression works not by teaching the oppressor that they’re lucky not to be oppressed, but by teaching the oppressor that the oppressed is somehow lesser.
ETA: And, of course, when we say “Men hate women,” we don’t mean ALL MEN HATE ALL WOMEN AND EVERYTHING ABOUT THEM, but that men in general are socialized to subconsciously associate being female with negativity.
Saw this at the Elles exhibit at Seattle Art Museum, seems relevant. — by Guerrilla Girls (really interesting feminist activist artists, look them up)
fucking love Guerrilla Girls
Actually Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director a couple of years ago, so this is a little outdated.
(via itsrevolutiontime)
