Tag Archive for "intergenerational dialogue"

Posts Tagged intergenerational dialogue

Jack Halberstam’s Flying Circus: on postmodernism and the scapegoating of trans women

With mainstream discussion around trigger warnings circling the drain of bad faith and broken ethics, Jack Halberstam’s article on the matter was as inevitable as it is unhelpful.

It belongs to the peculiar species of toxicity that activists produce when we struggle manfully against the Jungian shadows created by our work: we stridently accuse others of what we ourselves are, in fact, doing.

This is not to say that Halberstam’s piece is entirely wrong. Trigger warnings are overused in a way that condescends to the traumatised, creating an activist tic that serves primarily to signify fealty to a norm rather than do real community work around the issue of trauma. It is also true that we have indeed built an ...

With mainstream discussion around trigger warnings circling the drain of bad faith and broken ethics, Jack Halberstam’s article on the matter was as inevitable as it is unhelpful.

It belongs to the peculiar species of toxicity ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Erica Jong thinks you’re not having enough sex

Erica Jong–originator of “the zipless fuck” and longtime feminist novelist and nonfiction writer–took the time out of her allegedly very busy sexual schedule yesterday to paint a picture of our prude, passionless generation. “Generalizing about cultural trends is tricky,” she writes, and then goes on to extrapolate that the majority of younger Americans are as uninterested in sex as her vast, self-selected sample of the five contributors to her recent anthology, including her very own daughter.

This strange amalgamation of arguments includes a weird riff about “internet sex,” by which, it appears she means Weiner-style tweets (though I suspect Jong isn’t sure what kind of sex folks are having on the interweb these days based on the super vague ...

By Miriam • 14 years ago

What We Missed

GLAAD asked folks to wear purple today, in honor of the recent LGBT teen suicides. Above is Johnny Weir’s participation (courtesy of Chloe).

Another report of a gay young person’s suicide–this time Corey Jackson, a student at Oakland University. So far there are no reports of bullying as a factor in his death. I feel so saddened by every new piece of news, every new life lost. I also think this is important to put in the broader context of the suicide epidemic, one that impacts LGBT people at much higher rates.

Gloria Steinem responds to Susan Faludi’s article about feminism in this interview, defending young women and pop culture.

A high school cheerleader was kicked off ...

GLAAD asked folks to wear purple today, in honor of the recent LGBT teen suicides. Above is Johnny Weir’s participation (courtesy of Chloe).

Another report of a gay young person’s suicide–this time Corey Jackson, ...

By Chloe Angyal • 14 years ago

Anna Quindlen on young women and feminism

Yesterday I went to the More Magazine Reinvention Convention, where one of the keynote addresses was given by Anna Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times columnist and bestselling novelist.

Quindlen was interviewed by author and Good Morning America contributor Lee Woodruff. At the start of the interview, Quindlen said that she would never have been able to do the work she did – at the Times, especially – had it not been for the women who came before her and laid the groundwork to make it possible (Quindlen joined the paper in 1977, shortly after a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit had been filed against it).

Toward the end of the interview, Woodruff asked Quindlen if she was concerned that ...

Quindlen was interviewed by author and ...

By Maya Dusenbery • 14 years ago

Responding to Susan Faludi: On mentoring and “being seen”

Susan Faludi’s recent piece in Harper’s on intergenerational conflict in the feminist movement has already provoked thoughtful rebuttals—both here on Feministing and across the feminist blogosphere. Like others, I found her stereotyping of young feminists as matricidal, materialistic, and frivolous to be insulting and unfair; choosing Courtney Martin, of all people, to represent this young feminist caricature was just plain weird.

As to her larger point, I agree with Amanda Marcotte and Katha Pollit that much intergenerational strife stems less from differences in substance and more from struggles over power—which is unsurprising, understandable, and in no way unique to the feminist movement. Furthermore, as Miriam points out, some of this tension is actually evidence of progress—the happy ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

Electras talk back: Jennifer Baumgardner

We’re appreciative to Jennifer Baumgardner for adding her two cents to end our week-long series in response to Susan Faludi’s recent Harper’s article.

In the late 1990s, Phyllis Chesler wrote a book called Letters to a Young Feminist. It really rankled me at the time, in part because I was part of very large cohort of strong feminists creating abortion funds, zines, films, bands, and organizations while the book was speaking to an imaginary young woman who appeared to have lived under a rock for the last 20 years. This ditzy feminist needed chapters headed “Principles, Not Popularity” and found advice such as “Sex is not something that you only share with members of the opposite sex” surprising and helpful. ...

We’re appreciative to Jennifer Baumgardner for adding her two cents to end our week-long series in response to Susan Faludi’s recent Harper’s article.

In the late 1990s, Phyllis Chesler wrote a book called Letters to a Young ...

By Samhita • 14 years ago

Let’s leave my momma out of this.

In response to Susan Faludi’s recent Harper’s article, we at Feministing are doing a go around of feedback from different folks. This is my reaction to the piece, you can read Courtney’s and Miriam’s as well.

When I hear people use phrases like “women’s movement,” I get all confused, because both through academic training and as a racial justice advocate, with the lived experience of being a “foreigner”, “woman,” to me is so obviously an unstable category, something that assumes whiteness, a certain class level and even educational status. Woman only describes me when it is modified, “immigrant woman,” “woman of color,” “working class woman,” “queer woman,” and the list goes on. I’m not telling you something you haven’t ...

By Miriam • 14 years ago

A movement has got to move.

I’m adding my thoughts in response to Susan Faludi’s recent Harper’s article. Courtney began our series yesterday, with this response.

I just got to the end of the piece, and it’s almost impossible to leave it feeling anything but sadness and maybe some anger. For someone who positions herself outside of the waves of feminism (at 51 she says she’s too old for second and third wave and doesn’t clearly align herself with another sector), it’s pretty clear where Faludi stands at the end of the piece. She doesn’t get contemporary feminism (at least, as Courtney points out, the contemporary feminism she analyzes–academic and institutional). She finds it confusing, trite, commercial. She finds it sad.

Her article is like ringing a ...

I’m adding my thoughts in response to Susan Faludi’s recent Harper’s article. Courtney began our series yesterday, with this response.

I just got to the end of the piece, and it’s almost impossible to leave it feeling ...