Gender Across Borders

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The Chinese Government has called for an end to the public shaming of prostitutes in China by police, the New York Times reports this week.  Those suspected or accused of prostitution are regularly shackled and paraded in public by law enforcement, exacting the ultimate price for their crime – public humiliation and identification.

Just because the government calls for an end doesn’t mean it will come – law enforcement officials all over the world regularly exploit and abuse sex workers whether they are authorized to do so or not.  But the move is a commendable one, since the institutionalized practice of prostitution parading, like a nationalized form of slut shaming, is gross, abusive, and absolutely no doubt hypocritical.

On the other hand… righteous groups of sex workers continue to organize and demonstrate worldwide in an empowered twist on the slut-shaming parade convention.  Sex workers demonstrate to call attention to themselves, that they exist as humans with rights and dreams, and to advocate for better services and policies globally.

Just last week, as Emily wrote about, sex workers from all over the world descended on Vienna for the International AIDS Conference to demonstrate, including against the anti-prostitution pledge in PEPFAR, which withheld services and information from sex workers if countries received funds through the program.

I think the demonstration of sex workers is one of the most powerful acts of social justice since one of reasons sex work remains so taboo and sex workers so often marginalized is the secrecy of it all.  Demonstrating sex workers are parading themselves, showing their identities and publicizing their professions as a way to call attention to the lower than low treatment most regularly receive. Read the rest of this entry →

Image via Duke University Press

The study of female homoeroticism in Chinese media is a small yet evolving academic discipline. It is, therefore, of great importance that Backward Glances was written. Exploring popular media produced during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, author Fran Martin addresses the ways in which same-sex love between women is commonly depicted, and the ways in which those depictions simultaneously reinforce and challenge the conventional discourse on homosexuality in China.

On the surface, many of the novels, television dramas, and films Martin analyzes do not appear to be particularly transgressive. A common theme among the media she explores is memory; stories of same-sex desire between women are often presented as a fleeting childhood fantasy, something that perpetually exists in the past and can never be fully realized by adults in the present. This memorial mode is also tied to what Martin calls the “going-in” story. Unlike “coming-out” narratives, which depict homosexual identity as the final stage of an individual’s struggle with sexual identity, “going-in” stories start with same-sex desire and end with heterosexual marriage. None of these tropes disturb the status quo of Chinese society, where homosexuality remains incredibly stigmatized.

Read the rest of this entry →

Olympic Rings, Image via Wikipedia

Every other year, the Olympics bring inspirational stories and a good deal of spectacle to the living rooms of just about everyone who has a TV or Internet access. Even though the coverage often reinforces gender roles, it at least gives women athletes an opportunity to have the cameras focus on their abilities and thus provides role models for girls and young women. Behind the pageantry, however, lies quite another kind of story.

The latest example of this is that the UN Environment Program is criticising construction in Sochi for its impact on local wildlife and other aspects of the ecosystem. Remember, it isn’t just wild animals who will face the consequences of heavy metal pollution; the local people will have to deal with it too.

Of course, the Olympics are rarely good for the places they are held; they bring a certain amount of pride for the privileged, and income for certain kinds of businesses but too often they end up perpetuating oppression. Read the rest of this entry →

Cover of Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain was born in Singapore and grew up with a multitude of cultural influences which appear in the poems of Water the Moon. The title of this collection brings together two potent feminine symbols but, just as the moon leaves shadows, it leaves the reader with questions. Who is to bring water the moon and to what end? Can anything grow on that lunar surface? Is the title a command? A dream?

At least some of these questions appear to be answered early in the first section in the poem “My Grandmother Waters the Moon”, a poem which elevates the art of making mooncakes to the same importance as rebellions and battles. This ennobling challenges the devaluation of traditional women’s work yet coming as it does in a chapter entitled “Biography of Hunger” it seems only reasonable. The hungry think mostly of food, after all. In “Shoebox Filled with Mao Buttons” Sze-Lorrain mentions that “[s]tudents bartered [these pins] for pork buns, / a professor swallowed two to commit suicide.” The students use the buttons to fulfill a hunger, the professor to end hungers that could not be fulfilled. We never learn what drove the professor to that extreme. The poem is more impressionistic, more about responses than the atrocities to which the subjects respond. Similarly, in “Tibet” we read of a horrific escape, of people dying in migration: why they must flee we are not told. Sze-Lorrain expects readers to do their own research into the history and with her agonizing descriptions in powerful, sometimes contrastingly beautiful, language she gives us every reason to do so. Read the rest of this entry →

We are very excited to announce a monthly book club on Gender Across Borders! All of us are avid readers as well as writers, and would love to engage more with our readers (that means you!) through a monthly book club. Each month we will announce our text of choice, giving readers a month to read and prepare for discussion on the first day of the following month. We hope to promote dialogue, inspiration and also have some fun. Since we welcome a global audience who could not all gather in the same physical space, we will share our ideas together on the blog.

To get ready for next month’s discussion on Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, all of the editors have contributed a book they find important to the global feminist discourse. (Check back tomorrow for a post from Elizabeth who will lead the discussion this month.) Read below for our Editor’s Picks.

Read the rest of this entry →

Celebrations in Beijing, Photograph by erinohara73 on Flickr

May the Year of the Tiger bring you joy and prosperity.

Image via Wikipedia

I have witnessed many an online conversation about the politics of food devolve into a debate over whether or not being vegan or vegetarian (veg*n) is a privilege (though this did not happen with Colleen’s excellent post last month about Feminism & Food). These arguments result from an error in categorization: being veg*n is not in and of itself a privilege. For most citizens of western countries who are veg*ns, however, it is a choice enabled by privilege. (An exception to this would be the children of Seventh-day Adventists.) By privilege, I don’t mean having an income that allows you to eat fancy hand-molded lumps of vegisoy goo every day: I mean the simple ability to choose what you eat. That ability depends on your not being confined to an institution that tells you what to eat. It depends on your being able to afford food instead of relying on soup kitchens or food banks. It depends on your being able to access a grocery store that has a variety of foods. It depends on your not having food allergies, sensitivities, or other conditions that make a veg*n diet untenable. But if you have all those privileges, eating meat does not make you any less privileged than someone who chooses veg*nism.

This distinction becomes particularly apparent when you consider the status of veg*nism in China. Read the rest of this entry →

Today global leaders reached a tentative deal on climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (Cop15), after two weeks of negotiations and much anticipation around the world.

According to Grist, President Obama warned that the agreement, which was limited and not legally binding, was “not enough” to curb global warming:

The deal came at the end of a day in which several drafts agreements were knocked back… Obama, whose presence was intended to provide the momentum to propel the deal over the finishing line, had earlier pleaded for unity while acknowledging any agreement would be less than perfect. The haggling capped two years of deadlock over crafting a new UN treaty from 2013 that would reduce global warming from mortal threat to manageable peril.

Scientists say failure to curb the rise in Earth’s temperature will lead to worsening drought, floods, storms and rising sea levels. The commitment to limit the rise in Earth’s temperature to no more than 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) falls way short of the demands of threatened island nations who, with their very existence threatened by rising seas, have called for a cap of 1.5 C (2.7 Fahrenheit).

‘Whatever the outcome, it looks bad for us,’ said a member of the Maldives delegation, an archipelago which fears being swallowed up by the Indian Ocean in a matter of decades.

But one major question that our leaders neglected to ask: How does this affect women? Studies show that women are 14 times more likely to die in natural disasters, as Riane Eisler writes for American Forum: Read the rest of this entry →

This New York Times story about a Han Chinese couple who lost their son during the clashes in Urumqi has at least one effect beyond making me wonder when The Gray Lady plans to come out with a similarly sympathetic story about a family of Uighurs whose child was killed (or just disappeared) by the police. It also reveals one way in which the so-called People’s Republic of China continues to resemble so many other empires.

In the PRC, the poorest among the Han Chinese are the likeliest to heed calls (and accept help) from the government to move into what are otherwise minority-dominated areas including Tibet and Xinjiang. The government talks about development but really wants two things: Read the rest of this entry →

In 2008, international investment in renewable energy surpassed spending on fossil fuel resources, according to The Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009, a report prepared for the UN Environment Programme’s  Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative. This is good news for global warming, but global warming isn’t the whole story when it comes to environmental protection and justice.

The New York Times notes that the figures for renewable energy spending include “[l]arge hydropower projects”. In my home bioregion, Cascadia, such projects have devastated wild salmon runs and have thus had a tremendous negative impact on Native American communities living near the rivers. The construction of China’s Three Gorges Dam has uprooted communities and altered the habitats of already endangered species. Worse environmental damage may be yet to come. Read the rest of this entry →