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Recently, Change.org‘s Michael A. Jones covered a “public relations” misstep by the highly-recognized corporation, Target. It was revealed that the chain had donated $150,000 to a known antigay political figure in Minnesota (home to Target HQ). The matter of whether or not Target officials will work on rebuilding the their image is up for debate. Let’s be honest, it doesn’t look like they are conducting a whole lot of self reflection.

Target has had a gay-friendly history, and many have cited egalitarian hiring practices when discussing the recent scandal. It is hard to imagine that such a playful and youthful corporation brand would be aligned with an “aggressively antigay” political figure, as described in a New York Times editorial. The editorial also offered a business-minded opinion on the matter, which noted that,

The Target experience should be a lesson in the value of disclosure. The company, which insisted it supported Mr. Emmer solely for his pro-business views, discovered that it is bad business to back a candidate so out of step with the rest of its values. Presumably, it will be more alert now, knowing that customers are watching.

This is good business advice. But that’s not what is striking about the professional wisdom–instead, it is the last sentence that caught my attention. It seemed so odd that such a public organization would have to remind itself that people are watching.

Target’s image owes much to the Pop Art sensibility–their famous logo even resembles a Jasper Johns (an artist credited with influencing the Pop Art movement) painting, Target, which was created in 1958 (four years prior to the original logo design). Pop artists tended to be playful and cheeky, mixing the suggestive wit of a dirty joke with the language of advertising.  By doing so, the interdependence between consumerism and voyeurism was illustrated. Read the rest of this entry →

Amid all of Lady Gaga’s gender-bending and hot topic love affairs (most recently, her Phoenix concert appearance in which she bore writing on her body in protest of AZ SB 1070), a work of art was made found. I mean, made. Found…well, here it is:

Lady Gaga. Armitage Shanks. 2010. Image courtesy of SHOWstudio.com.

In an act of art historical savviness, Lady Gaga has again aligned herself with a historical figure-Marcel Duchamp. For anyone that is not familiar with the Dadaist object, known as The Fountain (1917)-let me recap:

1. Duchamp denounces the regime of “high art” objects and proposes his own work of art-a urinal inscribed with a name, “R. Mutt,”

2. The gesture goes down in art history, and introduces the public (and many, many art students) to “readymades,” and

3. Art’s repertoire is substantially broadened thanks to the clever artist.

What has Gaga added to the almost century-old dialogue about art? How does it relate to our culture in 2010? In her latest work, now on display at the London art space SHOWstudio, she inscribed this note to the public:

“I’m not f***ing Duchamp, but I love pissing with you.”

Based on her inscription, she is not trying to outdo Duchamp but she gets the joke. Yet, the comparison remains. Perhaps a better question would be, “How has her appropriation disrupted our notion of her, Duchamp, or art?” To begin with, consider this quote on the SHOWstudio.com site, which explains her version of Duchamp’s statement:

Read the rest of this entry →

Last month, I wrote an article about the Video Data Bank, a non-profit video art rental, screening and preservation facility in downtown Chicago, for Chicago Art Magazine. Having utilized the center for research on a number of occasions over the last year and a half, I was surprised to learn from its director that the screening room receives relatively little access outside of those affiliated with the School of the Art Institute, within which it is housed, and I wanted to make its resources more apparent to Chicago’s art-loving public. I was familiar with their collection of video art and video-recorded performance pieces by feminist artists, such as Sadie Benning, Yvonne Rainer, Peggy Ahwesh, Carolee Schneemann, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Dara Birnbaum, Gregg Bordowitz, Abigail Child, Valie Export, Coco Fusco, Jenny Holzer, Joan Jonas and Shigeko Kubota, as I had spent most of my time at Video Data Bank watching pieces by these artists, but I had only recently came across other sorts of historical feminist material in their collection, the nature of which I found relevant for all feminists, rather than just those with a particular interest in art history or criticism. Due to the limited nature of my first article, I was unable to highlight these special videos, which I hope to ameliorate here. These materials can be categorized into two different sorts: documentary video footage of feminist events and happenings from the sixties, seventies and eighties and interviews with feminist artists, theorists, academics and critics from the seventies through the present. Read the rest of this entry →

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5w-IN3hhrM&feature=player_embedded]

Last month, I attended a 20^th Anniversary screening of Maria’s Story at The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco. Prior to the screening, I had a very abbreviated understanding of El Salvadorian politics, and the subject of the documentary, Maria Serrano.

Filmed in 1989 by two young American women, Maria’s Story reveals the daily struggles and heartbreaking memories that lay in the wake of the political unrest that ravaged her town in El Salvador.

The film chronicles the life of Maria Serrano, mother, wife and peasant organizer. It tells the story of how she came to be a guerrilla leader in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The filmmakers spent two months with Maria in the hills of El Salvador in the middle of the civil war.

Here are a few excerpts from the interview with the two longtime friends and directors of the film, Pamela Cohen (PC) and Monona Wali (MW).

Read the rest of this entry →

When it comes to Catholicism, women have had a simultaneously prominent and highly scrutinized presence throughout its history. Recently, the excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride has illustrated that it’s no less difficult for nuns.

When I heard about the scandal in Phoenix, I admired the hospital staff for defending the decision to save a woman’s life. It appeared that the patient had weighed her options, and had made a decision to be considered by the board of ethics at the Arizona hospital. Yet, as stated in the azcentral.com article, there are circumstances in which staff may perform this medical procedure:

According to the medical directives that the hospital follows, abortion is defined as the directly intended termination of pregnancy, and it is not permitted under any circumstances – even to save the life of the mother…On the other hand, a second directive says that “operations, treatments and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted . . . even if they will result in the death of the unborn child.

A recurring theme arises: the female body is public property, even when it comes to religious devotion. And, if one woman is identified as a threat to Catholic doctrines, the Church has no problem launching a large-scale investigation of all women that are members of the Catholic church. It’s clear that the anxiety about women is just below the surface, poised for action. In fact, the image that I have included above is a Baroque sculpture of a 16th century Carmelite nun who was investigated during the Spanish Inquisition! Her name is St. Teresa of Avila, and she was ordained a Doctor of the Catholic Church in 1970. Read the rest of this entry →

Wilma Mankiller- Activist, Cherokee Nation Chief, Mother, Feminist

Feminists lost a great fighter on April 6, 2010. Wilma Mankiller, former Cherokee Nation Chief, passed away after struggling with many health problems during her lifetime, at the age of 64. Born the sixth of eleven children in rural Oklahoma, Mankiller went on to, among other things, become the first female Cherokee Nation Chief, from 1985 to 1995, and be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton in 1998. President Obama, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Chad Smith, and Governor Brad Henry of Oklahoma all commented on her life and her legacy.

Throughout Her passing has been covered by several blogs, but it merits as much mention as possible. Mankiller was someone who labored, with little glory at times, to better her own community, and in doing so set an example for the whole world. She lived an “un-political” life for many years, marrying and raising a family before the 1968 American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island moved her to action.

Throughout her lifetime her name became synonymous with optimism as she continued to speak, write, and lead even after a severe car accident in 1979 and struggles muscular dystrophy, kidney failure, and lymphoma. Gloria Steinem once said, “In a just country, [Wilma] would have been president.”

Read the rest of this entry →

Katyn, by Wit on Flickr

This month marks the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre in which Polish prisoners of war were murdered by the Soviet secret police on the orders Joseph Stalin. Until the 1990s, the Soviet Union blamed these killings on the Nazis. This year, the prime ministers of Poland and Russia commemorate the massacre together, taking a first step in the direction of reconciliation.

“A word of truth can mobilise two peoples looking for the road to reconciliation,” [Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk] said.

“Are we capable of transforming a lie into reconciliation? We must believe we can.”

Last week, Alicia Simoni wrote a powerful post about how gender expectations affect forgiveness, and commenters discussed when and whether to forgive. While forgiveness may be personal and optional, however, reconciliation is public and necessary. Read the rest of this entry →

Welcome to GAB’s first monthly book club! Feel free to use this post as an open thread for discussion of the novel and to post any comments or questions you have about it here, but if you’re not sure where to start, here are some ideas to get the discussion going:

• What did you think of the characters?

Hiroko Tanaka is of course the most clearly drawn; I found her at once remarkable and remarkably average. Her greatest strength seemed to come from her ability simply to keep moving, while the extraordinary nature of her experiences is what makes that movement extraordinary. Then again, the seemingly extraordinary things she experiences happened to many people: that is what makes them historical events. This tension between the ordinary and the remarkable not only makes for a compelling protagonist but also suggests a more thematic issue related to the question of what happens when history becomes personal. Read the rest of this entry →

The next time you hear someone say “I’m not a feminist, but…” put this book in their hands, sit them down, and don’t let them get up until they’ve read it. (Bathroom breaks are allowed. It’s 300+ pages long.)

Sadly, I was already well aware of many of the disturbing phenomena Douglas describes in the book- namely the rise of eating disorders, the dissociation with the word “feminism” among younger women, and an increased focus on a hyper feminine, white, rich, hetero  appearance for all women at the expense of personal happiness. Through examining different radio and TV shows, commercials, print ads and other social media, however, Douglas argues quite persuasively that these trends are all connected to the grotesquely warped portrayal of women in the media. Reading this book is an even more concentrated version of the usual onslaught of images. So much so that I, emerging after hours without putting it down, went to catch up on the news and had to forcibly redirect my outraged energy from depictions of women in reality TV shows to, for example, the systematic rape of women in the DRC.

The crux of her argument is that enlightened sexism is a newer, smarter, more discreet but equally destructive form of sexism that acknowledges the gains of feminism over the years and folds them into its rhetoric to truly strip women of any outlet, solidarity, or empowerment. Take, for example, the TV show “The Swan”, which Douglas dissects (pun intended) in great detail. On the show, “ugly” women beg altruistic plastic surgeons to fix them. Emerging after several painful surgeries, including, for almost all of them, breast augmentation, the women commonly react by saying “That doesn’t even look like me” to their reflection. Success!

Read the rest of this entry →

Henrietta Lacks, photo: Lacks family

I just finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  The book has been highly praised and rightly so.  Rebecca Skloot is a poised and passionate storyteller who doesn’t absent herself from that which she weaves, nor does she impose upon it.  The story is so compelling that she is at once invoked and dwarfed by it.

The book is about a woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and the cells taken, without consent, from her metastasized tumor, which became probably the most famous cells in the world.  They live on and multiply almost effortlessly, the first cell line to do so, thus enabling a myriad of scientific research.

While the world has heard about, and benefited exponentially from the cells, dubbed HeLa, the story of this woman has remained untold.  She is Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American mother of four from Baltimore. Read the rest of this entry →