Is This Feminist? http://isthisfeminist.tumblr.com/

 

Margaret Atwood on Progress Traps in two new Films

http://womensenews.org/story/arts/120403/margaret-atwood-the-talk-two-april-films

Exerpted from Women’s eNEWS:

MARGARET ATWOOD IS THE TALK OF TWO APRIL FILMS

By Jennifer Merin, WeNews film critic, April 4, 2012

Two movies this month–”Payback” and “Surviving Progress”–offer great food for talk, thought and encounters with Canadian writer Margaret Atwood.

“Surviving Progress,” opening April 6, is Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks’ provocative documentary based on Ronald Wright’s “A Short History Of Progress.” Here Atwood appears along with Wright, Stephen Hawking, Jane Goodall, David Suzuki and others to discuss how the human species falls prey to “progress traps.” These are technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs but put the future at risk. Replete with dramatic reenactments (herding wooly mammoths, for example) and clever graphics, the documentary entertains while making you think deeply about human nature.

It would make an intense and perfect double bill with Jennifer Baichwal’s “Payback,” opening April 25. This is a masterful documentary based on Atwood’s provocative eponymous treatise plumbing the effects of debt on human behavior. Beautifully shot and brilliantly edited, the film interweaves clips of Atwood reading from her book and commentaries from the likes of British author Karen Armstrong, International Crisis Group’s Louise Arbour and social justice author Raj Patel. Stories include a reformed thief and drug addict who’s guilt-ridden about victimizing an elderly woman, a farmer who takes a stand against the cruel exploitation of workers in Florida’s tomato fields and Canadian media mogul Conrad Black’s fraud conviction. Moviegoers owe Baichwal a debt of thanks for “Payback.”

Camilla Vallejo, Chile’s Rebel Student Leader

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/24/chile-student-leader-camila-vallejo

After hearing Carmen Rodriquez’ interview on CBC radio (March 29, 2012) and her description of the “joyful, beautiful kinds of protest,”  I was guessing these must involve art and popular education. Protest art is implicated in The Guardian article of August 24, 2011 on Commander Camilla (Vallejo).  23-year old Vallejo has organised several cacerolazos – peaceful protests in which participants bang pots and pans. Vallejo has become a cult figure – with odes on YouTube and predictions that her charisma may well catapult her into Chilean politics. See also the photo of her beside the peace sign made of hundreds of empty teargas canisters, which had been used against students. Her observation on her looks and the strategic use of beauty is instructive for social movements:

can

She says: “You have to recognise that beauty be a hook. It can be a compliment, they come to listen to me because of my appearance, but then I explain the ideas. A movement as historical as this cannot be summarised in such superficial terms.”

Carmen Rodriquez: Interview on Student Protests in Chile on CBC’s The Current

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2012/03/29/thursdays-checking—in-3/

Listen to Carmen Rodriquez interview with Jim Brown on CBC Radio’s The Current, March 29, 2012. A Chilean exile from the Pinochet era, now living in Vancouver, Rodriquez compares the protests of the 1960s to the current student protests. “The students have taken the role of leaders of the whole country’s social movement.”  Unlike the protests against the repression under Pinochet led by peasants and workers, she points to the political savvy and maturity of the students “well beyond their years.”   She dedicates her 2011 novel Retribution, set in 1960s Chile to the leader of today’s student protests, Camilla Vallejo.

Gwen Barzey: Musician and Computer Programmer

http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story

Gwen Barzey, now retired, sums up her experience as one of Canada’s first women computer programmers: “I had it easy. The computer didn’t care that I was a woman or that I was black. Most women had it much harder.”

This story of Gwen Barzey Braithwaite emphasizes her struggles with getting accepted in the academic stream of secondary school education in Toronto, and getting hired for a man’s job, and renting an apartment with her white husband. The mention of her lifelong passion for music and dance as well as her self-advocacy performance, in which she draws in her male relatives as allies to support her schooling and career choices, moves me to name her as an artist and popular educator in the Canadian women’s movement. 

What is most intriguing about this story is that it offers no clues to Gwen’s married name, or that Raganwald is her son Reginald’s home page, and that he is writing about his mother.  Had I not clicked on the highlighted link “son” towards the end of the story, I would not have known. Her son is also an accomplished software programmer.

 For email, most people call me reg, and you know that this page is hosted at braythwayt.com.

the answer to an infrequently asked question

Raganwald is my own made-up variation on the Norse name Ragnvald, which is the origin of the Norman name Reginald (if you go back to back to Sanskrit, you find that Ragnvald is loosely related to the Indian name Raj). Braythwayt is a very rare spelling for my surname. I first encountered “Braythwayt” in a P.G. Wodehouse short story when the hapless Bingo Little abandons Honoria Glossop to chivvy Daphne Braythwayt about, and Honoria assumes Bertie loves her and accepts what she thinks is his implied proposal… But perhaps you should read that story for yourself.

The Famous Five removed from our $50 Bill

Shameful!  We need more signs and symbols of “Women’s Rights are Human Rights,” not fewer.

With the announcement today of the new plastic $50 bill, the pictures of the Famous Five and of Therese Casgrain as well as the quote from the UN International Declaration of Human Rights will no longer appear on the back of the bill. The front of the new note features a portrait of Sir William Lyon Mackenzie King, while the back depicts the Arctic research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen.
 
http://www.bankofcanada.ca/2012/03/press-releases/bank-of-canada-issues-50-polymer-bank-note/

Feminist poet Adrienne Rich dies March 27, 2012 aged 82

This link to a biography of Adrienne Rich.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html?_r=1

The purpose of the poem, a real poem, in Adrienne Rich’s view. as the breaking of an existing silence will stay with me.  I ask with her:

 “What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?” (p. 150).

Rich, A. (2001). Arts of the possible: Essays and conversations. New York: Norton &

Company.

 

I too have always wondered about the “left-over energy” of our beloved dead. Here is Adrienne Rich’s poem on this subject.

For the Dead

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

Adrienne Rich