A few reflections on my first WAM! conference

I'm taking a (probably undeserved) break from writing my paper on White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States to describe a few impressions and reactions from my very first WAM! conference. I don't have very coherent thoughts at the moment, since my brain power is being sucked away by catching up on academic responsibilities, but a few highlights and a couple of links for those folks who are interested:

• It was awesome to spend a weekend surrounded by feminist activists from a wide variety of backgrounds, from bloggers to organizers, undergraduates to radical grannies. I had the opportunity to do a lot of feminist star-spotting, since there was a healthy representation of bloggers and writers present at the conference whose blogs I read and books I own.
  
• In addition to volunteering at registration, I attended two panels and a screening of the Silent Choices film about African-American women and abortion. Incidentally, the two panels I attended were live-blogged about at feministing.com, one on reproductive justice and one on battling anti-feminist backlash, if you're interested in a quick synopsis of the discussions.
  
• Amanda Marcotte, over at the blog Pandagon, who was one of the speakers at the panel I attended on reproductive justice, wrote about her perspective on the session, and includes a great picture of the Stata Center (designed by Frank Gehry) where the conference was held.
• In addition to being a blogger, Amanda has just written her first book, It's a Jungle Out There, which is a hilarious, light-hearted blend of "feminism 101" and humor for those of us who can feel burnt-out by anti-feminist crap. "Why are people so mean to feminists?" she asks in the introduction, "Because so much of feminism is the fine art of calling bullshit, and calling bullshit makes people uncomfortable. The first rule about understanding bullshit is that people really love their bullshit . . . Many people love their bullshit more than they love their spouses, or at least they'll defend their bullshit more fiercely." I picked up a copy at the conference bookstore before they were sold out, and read it all the way home on the T, giggling to myself.

All in all, the conference was an energizing break from my regular routine, and gave me an opportunity to reflect, once again, on how I envision bringing together the sort of research, writing, and practical skills I am developing as a librarian-in-training and student of history with the politically relevant, people-oriented activist work that I find incredibly nourishing to be involved in, even though I have never been comfortable out on the front lines. I realized, sitting in the conference rooms listening to all these articulate, politically engaged women (and yes, a handful of men), that even though I get burnt out sometimes by the amount of work that needs to be done, I virtually never get tired of engaging with feminist ideas and the people who care about discussing them. Now if only I can figure out a way to get paid for doing it!

UPDATE: You can also check out conference coverage at Feministe, where Jill talks about both of the panels I attended, and other stuff as well, and Racialicious, whose regular blogger Carmen was at the (seemingly universally attended) backlash panel.

"I can't really say I liked it"

Stephen D. Levitt, author of the wildly popular book on weird statistics, Freakonomics, has just reviewed Philip Pullman's fantasy novel The Golden Compass on his blog over at the New York Times. Did he like it? Not so much. As Hanna wrote when she sent me the link, "okay, this has to be the fastest and most complete pan of a book I have read in a long time." Check it out and have yourself a giggle.

Home Education in CA

In the midst of the midterm crunch, I don't have a chance to reflect on this at great length, but I saw via the NPR website this week that a California appellate court recently ruled that home education in the state may be vulnerable to legal challenges:

The court ruling that declared some home schooling unconstitutional, Huerta says, seemed to indicate that California regulators' occasional monitoring of the family's home efforts was deemed insufficient to qualify children as being enrolled in a school.

Huerta says the ruling is an unprecedented decision, and one that has prompted an uprising not just among home schoolers but also among privacy advocates. "This is an issue that's going to be taken all the way to the Supreme Court," he says. "It's going to open a Pandora's box of issues the court may not want to address."

Diane Rehm also did an hour on the subject this week, a show that I plan to listen to and report back on when I have a chance.

I'll be interested to see both how this actual legal case develops and how the media covers it.

WAM! 2008 @ MIT

I just got in from my volunteer orientation for WAM!2008--the Center for New Words' Women, Action & the Media conference, which is held annually here in the Boston area. I'm volunteering at the registration table Friday night, and plan to spend all day Saturday with the over 500 feminist activists who are converging on the Strata Center to talk about political activism and the media. It was great just to meet the handful of local volunteers who showed up at the orientation session tonight, and remember what a wide range of women are interested and involved in feminist activity.

The conference plans to record and post all the sessions on YouTube and various web-based media outlets, so I'll be back later in the weekend to share some highlights with y'all. For now, let me say that I'm particularly looking forward to meeting many of the wonderful ladies over at feministing who will be on hand to participate in various breakout sessions, as well as getting to see Silent Choices, a documentary film about African-American women and abortion politics.

Check back for more after the weekend . . .

Weekly Update: Brain dead edition

It's that point in the semester (I'm sure all students and former-students will identify) at which the end of term seems both impossibly far away and alarmingly at hand. Projects develop glitches. The panic-o-meters on everyone around you start to rise and your own barometer cranks it up in response. "Many college students stressed out, study finds", the Boston Globe reported this week, in a classic "No duh! Don't we know this already?" headline. What is always amazing to me is how normalized and individualized the state of being stressed out--physically and emotionally--is. We expect to spend our educational careers overworked and frazzled, and inability to get things done is always seen as a personal failure, not as a systemic problem of a social system that requires students to work part- and full-time as well as attending school in order to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, we haven't entirely lost our sense of humor. Here's a little something that's been circulating on the internet for all my political-junkie friends out there. My friend and colleague Laura Cutter forwarded it to a bunch of us after our history class last night:

The George W Bush Presidential Library is now in the planning stages.

The Library will include:

• The Hurricane Katrina Room , which is still under construction.
• The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you can't remember anything.
• The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don't have to even show up.
• The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don't let you in.
• The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don't let you out.
• The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room (Which no one has been able to find).
• The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you to go back for second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tours.
• The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location, complete with shooting gallery.
• Plans also include: The K-Street Project Gift Shop - Where you can buy (or just steal) an election.
• The Airport Men's Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
• Last, but not least, there will be an entire floor devoted to a 7/8-scale model of the President's ego.

To highlight the President's accomplishments, the museum will have an electron microscope to help you locate them. When asked, President Bush said that he didn't care so much about the individual exhibits as long as his museum was better than his father's

Happy Spring Equinox to you all and hope this finds you all well. I always enjoy your emails and calls and correspondence (I actually still receive letters by post from a number of you!) and will be in touch when I can.

Yup

Thanks to Jesus Camp, I was expecting this one, but it's still depressing and kinda creepy: Sarah Seltzer over at RH RealityCheck illuminates the connection between Horton Hears a Who! and anti-choice activists.

Whither the Witches?

This being Spring Break, as previously mentioned, Hanna and I took one entire day off to frivol. We took the commuter train up to Salem and wandered around town, visiting the Peabody Essex Museum, admiring gravestones in the Old Burying Point Cemetery, and tarrying a while at a coffee shop with the most comfortable chairs ever invented (or at least they felt that way). We did not feel much of a need to visit the Witch Dungeon, the Witch History Museum, the Witches Cottage, although we did pass by the Witch Trials Memorial on our way down to the shore :).

Here are some pictures.