some monday links

'Cause it's apparently one of those periods when blog posts aren't so easy in the writing.

Hanna has some photos up from the past couple of weekends over at ...fly over me, evil angel ..., for those of you who follow this blog at least in part because you know us in not-net-life and would like to see what we're up to when not blogging.



Me reading, by Hanna E. Clutterbuck, 2010-10

She also wrote a wonderful two-part post (part one, part two) on Dr. Who for a friend of mine who recently requested some good introductory episodes from the earlier incarnations of the Doctor.

If you're on tumblr (or even if you're not), there are some awesome blogs to follow. Namely beautiful portals if you (like me) are in to liminal spaces; fuck yeah tattoos if (like me) you are in the process of considering how to design the tattoo of your dreams -- or you just like beautiful ink; and lesbian outlaw because her tagline is "separate from the government, beyond the police." And also 'cause she posts lots of great stuff.

Via our friend Rebecca came this great illustrated explanation of the four levels of social entrapment ("This person is seemingly immune to awkwardness and once they latch onto you, you are not allowed to leave until they are done with you.") at the blog Hyperbole and a Half.

For those of you who are at all familiar with the site Feministing and know that Jessica Valenti and her husband Andrew recently became parents through a pretty traumatic pregnancy and birth experience, I hope you've seen that their daughter Layla finally came home from the neonatal intensive care unit (warning: pictures of incredibly tiny baby human after the jump). I really hope they're getting some quiet time to be together as a family.

There's been a flurry of posts up this past week or so in the feminist blogosphere on "fucking while feminist": what that means, exactly, and how people live out their own particular iterations. I may or may not have an actual post in my about this (I actually think being feminist in my political identity and using feminism as an analytical tool has a pretty profound effect on my sexuality and sexual related-ness ... but I'm not sure how to talk about it yet). In the meantime, one of my favorite responses has been by Garland Gray guest-blogging over at Tiger Beatdown on how his feminism informs his experience of fucking other men:

Over time, I realized that if I was committed to working toward a world where gender variance was celebrated, where getting fucked wasn’t viewed as something shameful or disempowering, I was going to have to start voting with my dick.

This isn’t simply high-minded “the personal is political” sexual activism. If a dude thinks that he is powerful because he doesn’t get fucked, and you are weak and shameful for getting fucked, you really and truly don’t want to let him fuck you. Sex is about respect, and letting someone inside you without respect is a bad idea. No matter what position I am in, I follow this cardinal rule: If someone needs to be in control, it should be the person getting fucked. I fuck while feminist by insisting that there is nothing submissive about getting fucked. Accepting the standard bullshit narrative of “penetration as dominance” or “penetration as corruption” is ridiculous and arbitrary. It is just as easy to see penetration as submission. A part of your body is inside of me. If you don’t play by my rules, I MIGHT NOT GIVE IT BACK.

 And finally, Tenured Radical and Historiann had a series of thoughtful posts + comment threads up recently at their respective blogs about single-sex (women's) colleges. I haven't had the time nor been in the mental space recently to really sit down and digest them, but here are the links.

• Tenured Radical: Not Equal Opportunity, But Every Opportunity: An Argument for Single-Sex Education
• Historiann: From the Department of WTF?
• Tenured Radical: Feminism's Unfinished Agenda: If Women Have Equal Opportunity, Why Are the Outcomes So Very Unequal?
• Historiann: Women's Education, Part II
• Tenured Radical: What Is Our Work? Towards a Feminist Future in Education
• Historiann: Women's Education, Part III
• Historiann: Why Must Women's Colleges Exist? A Personal Reflection

Thirty-second commentary: As someone who 1) worked at a men's college for a semester, 2) attends a graduate school attached to a women-only undergraduate college, and 3) is a feminist and historian of feminist activism and education, I find the question of single-sex education incredibly complicated. There are compelling (mostly, to my mind, historical and individual) arguments for the worth of women-only space, but I can't get away from the question of sex and gender varience, and the problem that once you start policing the boundaries of space by saying "women only" or "men only" you're reinforcing a world in which the gender binary is a fundamental organizing principle ... a principle that I believe is antithetical to the values of feminist theory and practice.

And because it's out there and thus needs to be shared: Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson has contributed to the It Gets Better project. I've linked before to a lot of really good commentary on the problems with the project, but none of those problems erase the fact that people are telling their own personal stories of Growing Up While Queer, and that each individual story is a powerful testament to the infinite possibilities that exist for each of us as we grow and change.

Enjoy the week ahead!