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Monthly Archives: September 2008

The Art of Female Bloggers

30 Tuesday Sep 2008

Posted by Kaitlin Blanchard in Dreams for women, women's issues

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dreams for women, fan-fiction, female blogosphere, female fan communities

I have of late been spending inordinate amounts of time thinking about the meaning of a blog and the rhetorical mechanisms which operate within the blogosphere. Conducting research for my undergraduate thesis on blogging communities has been something of a revelation for me. I have been pursuing perhaps the less ‘serious’ side of the spheres by traveling through fan communities.

Fanaticism aside, these communities present some very peculiar and remarkable characteristics. Given that we here at Antigone solicit artwork, and in view of the community which this has created for us, I find it interesting that many of these blogging communities engage in the same practices. Indeed, I have come across and continue to encounter numerous calls for submissions of icons and banners which re-signify and re-present the aesthetic of their shows. Linked to each other in a complex web of dialogue, videos and collages speak for these fans in a way which reverberates across the net. A reverberation which carries greater currency than their words alone.

The graphics of fan-communities and journals are much less ephemeral than the dialogues themselves, which are edited, deleted, and archived. Indeed, graphics travel among sites with surprising fluidity. Graphics are in a sense palimpsests denoting the fluctuating cultural currency of their signifiers. If, for example, a fan takes a relationship between two characters and ‘transposes’ its structure onto another plane–a friendship to an affair, a friend to an enemy–sameness and difference are re-negotiated through the liberating fluidity of digital space.

Quite often, fan blogs are run by and catered to women. Consisting of fan-fiction, digital art, and commentary these blogs stage a complex re-writing of the canons of their respective shows. The writing back which occurs between fansites and television is a fecund site of creativity, spawning a lineage of material from one story (or show) based on previously unrecognized demand. Indeed, blogs provide a formum for recognition, allowing for the rapid creation and modification of group identity. It is not uncommon for shows to sollicit their fans’ approval or suggestions and to use outspoken fans to gauge audience approval. Narrative and character are adjusted accordingly. Unfortunately, however, what I have noticed, apart from the appallingly bad fiction they create, is that these communities often reinforce entrenched notions of femininity, which the shows they mimic do not.

I refer here in particular to the phenomenon of the shipper. A shortened moniker denoting a person who endorses a relationship (in any form) between any two characters, shipper communities commit some of the greatest sins and equally achieve great triumphs in representing women. The harlequinesque re-writing of canonical characters, as for example, when “Scully” the chaste becomes sexually ‘liberated’ within a fan’s narrative, is a paradox of agency. On the one hand, the fan is asserting a preference independent of the show’s trajectory; but, on the other, she uses the paradigm of repression in order to do so. Emerging from the narrative prison in which she is enchained, the character liberates her desire, and conquers the man. While the initiative here is admirable, I question the terms of its achievement. These stories commonly re-write female characters within thinly veiled pornography scripts. Instead of celebrating their international distribution as paragons of independence and intelligence to a wider audience, these blogs take female characters into an even more constraining discourse. And then the blogs’ authors engage in a self-narrative and reflect on their lives around these narratives, modeling their subjectivities, their ‘selves’ upon a false version of agency. The question is, I suppose, whether we can write or film the ’emancipated’ woman’s sexuality outside of these terms. How do we transpose the leader into a erotic landscape without placing limits on agency? It’s a difficult question, one I’m hoping some of our dreams for women submissions might address…

However, in the annals of fan-fiction archives a curious cross-breeding between shows often occurs as characters cross narrative lines and populate the discourse of a show for which they are not a persona. This to me signals the liberating potential of blogs as sites which defy the limits of discourses. These blog sites proliferate in and populate the in-between spaces: the silences between episodes, between shows, between networks. These blogs are also often collectively funded and exist in freeware or shared spaces, reclaiming ‘leisure’ for their own purposes sometimes outside of class difference.

What does this mean you might ask? Well, it means that art-projects, like Antigone’s Dreams for Women, are part of a visual turn that shirks the pitfalls which appear to plague fan-fiction. The stories encoded in our postcards are freed from precedent since they take and re-work previously existing images without the hindrance of discourse. Just like “icons” borrow images and re-locate them, our postcards carry our messages of hope across continents.

All this in the name of art. Call me an idealist, but it’s a nice thought, no?

Come check out our exhibit in the AMS Art Gallery from Oct 6-10th!

Dreams for Women!

27 Saturday Sep 2008

Posted by Amanda in Dreams for women, women's issues

≈ 1 Comment



I would like to thank Anita for sending in some of the postcards this week, as well as, the lovely women from the University of Toronto at Scarborough! I would also like to remind everyone to pick up their Dreams for Women 2009 calendar! The information is in the post below! Buy one for yourself, buy a bunch for your friends as gifts or buy copies to sell as a fundraiser for your non-profit organization!

Antigone Magazine is launching a Feminist Postcard art project! We want to know what your Dreams for Women are.What are your own dreams for yourself, your friends, your sisters, your daughters? Paint, draw, write, sketch or decoupage your dreams on a postcard and send it to the address below:
Antigone Magazine
C/O WILLA UBc
Box 61-6138 SUB Boulevard
Vancouver, BC, Canada
V6T 1Z1
OR
antigonemagazine(at)hotmail.com
With your postcard submission, we ask that you make a donation (if you can!) to Antigone Magazine for anywhere from $1 to $10. You can send your money along with your postcard or donate on our blog: http://www.antigonemagazine.wordpress.com/ .
But don’t worry… if you don’t have the money, just send along the postcard and tell people about this program.
What is Antigone Magazine? We’re a grassroots national magazine that works to encourage young women to get involved in politics in Canada. We work to empower young women to engage politically and civically and to actively take part in leadership roles.We are raising the money in order to help launch the Antigone Foundation, a national foundation that will encourage young women aged 10-30 to get politically and civically engaged. Help support Antigone as we help to make the dreams of young women come true!

POSTCARD ART EXHIBIT/CALENDAR LAUNCH PARTY!

24 Wednesday Sep 2008

Posted by kelizabethlau in women's issues

≈ Leave a comment

The Numbers are in! And the Liberals win!

23 Tuesday Sep 2008

Posted by Amanda in women's issues

≈ Leave a comment

I just returned tonight from a Liberal Townhall with Dion at the University of British Columbia to find an article by CanWest about the Liberal party’s record number of female candidates in the upcoming election.  As you can see from the above photo, women are given front and center placement in the Liberal party.  And it is in the Liberal party that they are the most plentiful!

Turns out the Liberals have surpassed the NDP for the first time in running the most female candidates.  Says the article:

With the passing of Monday’s deadline for official nominations in the Oct. 14 federal vote, Canada’s official opposition is fielding 113 women in 307 federal ridings, which means 36.9 per cent of Liberal candidates are female.

That also means Liberal Leader Stephane Dion has made good on one previous promise: that at least one-third of his candidates would be women.

The NDP is a second with 104 women vying for seats in all 308 ridings, or 33.8 per cent.

In terms of sheer percentage, the ruling Conservatives rank fifth among the five major federal parties with 63 women running in 307 ridings, or 20.5 per cent.

The Green party has 87 women running in 305 ridings, or 28.5 per cent.

The strong showing by the Liberals dethrones the NDP as the traditional front-runner for fielding female candidates, according to Elections Canada data compiled by Punditsguide.ca for the Canwest News Service.

In the five federal elections since 1997, the NDP has led all parties with a female representation of between 29.5 and 35.5 per cent.

This shows that Dion’s attempt to encourage more women in politics worked! I have to say the fact that Dion even thought that this was an issue that was of importance was a catalyst in encouraging more women to run for nomination in Liberal ridings.  The women knew that they would be welcomed and encouraged within the party. What I think is most encouraging is that Dion surpassed the number of women he pledged to run.

In order to get more women involved in politics we need to set ambitious goals and continue to meet and surpass them. We need to continue to break records in the number and percentage of women running and elected. While there is still more work to do, and while the Liberals still have yet to elect a female party leader, this IS progress and we should celebrate it.

Dionne Brand at UBC

23 Tuesday Sep 2008

Posted by jilliangordon in vancouver events, women's issues, Young women

≈ 1 Comment

Women’s and Gender Studies, UBC is presenting a free public lecture by

award winning Canadian writer Dionne Brand.

 

Dionne Brand

Inventory

Friday October 3, 2008

AERL Theater (Rm 120), 2202 Main Mall, UBC

7:00pm- 9:00pm

Lecture followed by a wine and cheese reception.

 

 

Rwanda and the Mirror of Politics

23 Tuesday Sep 2008

Posted by Kaitlin Blanchard in women in politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

glass ceiling, politics, power, Rwanda, sarah palin, women

The End to a Glass Ceiling?

I just wanted to report a serious fracture in the glass ceiling of women’s participation in political life. Rwanda has recently achieved a parliament which is over 50% female. Earning 44 of 80 seats in the recent national election, women now dominate political life.

In a country which is post-genocide, I find it not a little interesting that the domestic sphere figures large in their elections. While the country’s demographics are skewed towards women (55% of the population is female) because of the ravages of war, I find their endorsement of affirmative action refreshing. However, I wonder if the election is perhaps reinforcing rather than destabilizing the difference of women: 24 seats are reserved for women in parliament, regardless of their political affiliation. In fact, these seats are undeclared until after they gain the legislature. Thus, here gender trumps ideology.

In a country where women leaders must both cater to the needs of a democratic system and nurture grassroots movements, I should think that transparency would be more of a concern. Nonetheless, I am enthused by the thought that a top-down solution should bring such a huge triumph for women. It does, however, beg the question of the value of affirmative action in the political arena. Long criticized in the West for its politically volatile consequences, affirmative action would see female candidates parachuted into positions of power. The problem is, as here, affirmative action would not discriminate between Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. Both women would be regarded as equal on the basis of widespread gender discrimination (whether they themselves understood it as such or not). I think perhaps in a society forced to rebuild not only its political sphere but also its domestic realm such policies are effective methods of reaching consensus–since, of course, neither realm is mutually exclusive and in fact one models the other. However, I don’t think they should be long-term solutions…

The Mirror of the West?

In a provactive but brief editorial on the PBS Program “Women, Power, and Politics”

a new york times reporter comments on the curious phenomenon of profiling women in power. He makes the important point that throughout the PBS program the reporter’s subjectivity, her voice, saturates the narrative of women’s international political triumphs.

This is something which greatly disturbs me: the individualism of a western media outlet has completely trumped the communal politics of equal representation. Ms. Hinojosa could very well represent any male or female reporter asked to complete a similar task. In a western society which is so obsessed with the production and consumption of self-narratives, that we cannot consume the ‘facts’ of success without first affecting their concomitant narratives is extremely depressing. Must the narrative of success be representative, or as here, related to a western ethos before it resonates? Do we have to wait for Oprah to christen a movement with her queenly ‘we’ before we recognize the accomplishments of women’s movements around the world?

UBC Womyn’s Center Meeting

20 Saturday Sep 2008

Posted by jilliangordon in women's issues, Young women

≈ Leave a comment

The UBC Womyn’s Center is hosting its first meeting of the year. The purpose of the meeting is to connect with members, interested students, and make plans for the upcoming year. There will be food and lots of fun. This gathering is open to people who are respectful of womyn, transgender and intersex people. People who identify as male are welcome/encouraged to attend, so are friends and children. 

When: Wednesday, September 24th, at 6:30pm – 8:00pm
Where: SUB room 245 (not in the womyn’s centre itself but in the bigger room)
Note: If you have any dietary restrictions, please email  womyncentre@gmail.com.

Save Bitch Magazine!

18 Thursday Sep 2008

Posted by Amanda in women's issues

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bitch magazine

The world’s coolest feminist publication is in dire straits and need to raise $40,000 by October 15th (okay, well the second coolest… I must give Antigone her due!). This magazine has meant a lot of thinks to me over the last few years and it has been a great accompaniment to my education. I donated $10 to them this morning and encourage you all to donate to them as well.  It doesn’t have to be big –  5 or 10 bucks will make a difference…Here’s what the post on their website (www.bitchmagazine.org) reads:

First the bad news: The print publishing industry as a whole is staring into a void. Across the board, newsstand magazine sales are in a slump, subscriber numbers are down, and paper and postal costs continue to rise. But it’s not magazines like US Weekly or Vogue that you’ll see disappearing from the newsstands—they have the parent companies and the resources to weather industry ill winds. It’s the small, independent magazines like Bitch that will disappear, because the odds are already stacked high against us. And simply put: We need to raise $40,000 by October 15th in order to print the next issue of Bitch.

Now the good news
: While it’s true that $40,000 is a lot of money, we know the number of you Bitch supporters is in the hundreds of thousands. And we’re asking each of you who values independent, nonprofit media and intelligent feminist cultural analysis to contribute what you can to ensure that Bitch thrives. And while we can’t say what form Bitch will take in the future (our direction will depend, in part, on your feedback), we can say that we’ve been hard at work to find an innovative publishing model that will allow us to maintain the spirit and integrity of Bitch while also reflecting the changing world around us.

As a nonprofit, reader-funded media organization, our fate really is—and always will be—in your hands. We don’t need a parent company. We just need you!

DREAMS FOR WOMEN VIDEO PARTICIPANTS NEEDED!

17 Wednesday Sep 2008

Posted by kelizabethlau in women's issues

≈ Leave a comment

We are trying to get women AND men to write down what they dream for women on a blank sheet of paper and film themselves standing/moving for at least 5 – 10 seconds in a setting of their choice (at home, outside, on the street, on campus, daytime, nighttime etc.).

The more variety the better, as long as we can see your writing/paper clearly. You don’t need to write “I dream of a day…” or “I dream that…”: For the best effect, your dream(s) for women should be succinct and be easily read within the 5 – 10 second limit e.g “The Right to Choose”, “Affordable Childcare”, “To Be Seen and Heard”

Once you’ve got a clip, you’re welcome to upload it on a filesharing site and/or send the link/file to Kelly at kelizabeth.lau(at)gmail.com. Megaupload and 2shared are some sites that enable free uploads/sharing. The clips will be compiled in a music video with emphasis on shots of people holding up the different postcards from the calendar.

Video files should be in the following format: .asf, .avi, .m1v, .mp2, .mp2v, .mpe, .mpeg, .mpg, .mpv2, .wm, and .wmv

The deadline is October 6th. Feel free to get your friends to do this, too. Be sure to let them know that the video will be posted online!

Thank you for your cooperation and for helping us out! We look forward to creating another inspiring music video :)

Anyone can become president…including Sarah Palin.

16 Tuesday Sep 2008

Posted by Kaitlin Blanchard in female politicians

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Hillary Clinton, Republican Convention, sarah palin, Saturday Night Live, US Presidential Election


Here is a link to a well done spoof on Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton aired during Saturday Night Live:

Though, I have to say watching extracts from Palin’s speech itself was even more disturbing.

As the mother of one of those troops?” That’s a scary thought.
I’m not sure what’s worse rhetorical eloquence, or linguistic incompetence…

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