chanel dubofsky

April is Abortion Wellbeing Month

wordcloudby Chanel Dubofsky

It feels hard and strange to write about anything after what happened in Boston on Monday. In a piece for Colorlines, Riku Sen  wrote, “I’m so exhausted from the cycle of sorrow, panic, defense and more sorrow that every incident of mass violence evokes in our national consciousness.” That’s more or less how I feel. I lived in Boston for a year after I graduated college, my friends live there, I know the place by heart, but I had to turn off the Twitter feed an hour after finding out about the explosions. That’s how quickly it became too much.

I’m afraid that writing about abortion right now is callous, that paying attention to anything that’s not a CNN news loop of the explosion and the injuries is wrong.  The thing I know to be true is that, in spite of the fact that everyone is scared and shocked and desperate for information, most of us just went back to living our lives, because we had to. Abortion is part of people’s lives. The desire to pretend that it’s not, or that it’s not “appropriate” to talk about stems from abortion stigma- the negative things we’re told about abortion and foist upon those who provide and receive them. (It’s not just cis gendered women who can get pregnant.)

Some examples of abortion stigma include the idea that all folks who have abortions are immoral, that the decision to have an abortion is made capriciously, that it’s used as birth control.  This is my favorite, because abortion IS birth control (in that it literally stops you from giving birth), and also because 87% of counties in the United States have no abortion provider. (insert source) This means that if the town you live in in Kentucky has no provider, you have to travel to the town where the provider is located, or perhaps to Ohio, West Virginia, or another state where there is a provider. Of course, this all depends on how much money you have to pay for things like transportation and/or childcare, if you can get the day off from work, or if you can get out of town without telling your parents.

Infographic via http://www.thirdwavefoundation.org

Infographic via http://www.thirdwavefoundation.org

Abortion stigma is also about controlling how people who have had abortions feel about their decision. Needless to say, it’s different for everyone, but the point of any stigma is to ignore that tiny detail. Recently, I attended the CLPP conference, From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom, held every year at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. In a workshop about early abortion, the provider (who asked that her name not be shared)  told us, “People wake up from their abortions and say, “Oh my Gd, you just gave me my life back,” as well as about folks who change their minds before the procedure begins.  “The language people use when they come in indicates how they’re feeling about the abortion.” For some folks, this means talking about babies and death, for others, feelings of joy and relief, and everything in between.

April is Abortion Well Being Month, based on the not-so-crazy notion that if you have an abortion, you deserve to be supported, regardless of, well, everything. If you’re having emotional hiccups after reading that sentence, If you’re thinking “But what if it was a later abortion? What if it’s this person’s second (or third, or…) abortion?,”  you have probably absorbed some abortion stigma.  It’s okay. You have it because you’re alive in the world, the same way we all carry around racist, sexist, classist notions that we’re not even aware of. But that’s not an excuse. We still need to take care of each other.

 

Posted on April 20, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment

Revisiting The Feminine Mystique

mystiqueby Chanel Dubofsky

My copy of The Feminine Mystique has a smell that I associate with trashy romance novels. I haven’t opened it in years, probably since I read it for a giant paper I wrote in college, about Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, confessional poetry and the domestic trap of the 1960’s. If you haven’t read it, here’s the deal (but you should read it): Friedan interrogates “the problem that has no name”, which is the misery of women living in material comfort who have husbands and children.

In short, women are told their entire lives that they will and must find fulfillment exclusively in their roles as a homemaker, wife, and mother. At the end of the book, Friedan discusses the importance of shifting our thinking around femininity, fulfillment, education and activism.

The book scared the hell out of me. I read it in my dorm lounge, and at the risk of being dramatic, my reaction was probably proportional to that of people when they saw “The Exorcist” during its original run in theatres. Whatever hallmates happened to be around were pulled into the lounge and asked, “Can you believe this shit??”

The idea of not having a choice in whether or not you got married and had children was terrifying. (I was not yet necessarily critical of marriage as an institution, but I was heading there). What was perhaps the most distressing about the book was how women were made to think of themselves as martyrs to the causes of wifedom and motherhood, suppressing other desires and needs that made them full humans.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, and there’s been various and assorted conversation around it. How far has feminism come? Have we accomplished anything? Are things better? (You know, not vague questions at all.) Read more

Posted on March 7, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism Leave a comment

Contributors Pick the Best of 2012

Person on podiumHappy New Year, everyone! As is our tradition, I asked the Gender Focus contributors about some of their highlights from how they spent the past year, and here’s what they came up with:

How to Survive a Plague PosterFavourite Movie:

 

Ashli Scale: Prometheus

Chanel: I have two: How to Survive a Plague is a documentary about the activism around the AIDS crisis. I went in expecting to spend two hours analyzing direct action tactics, and left feeling devastated, but weirdly hopeful.

From the Black, You Make Color is a documentary (yes, I only watch documentaries) about a beauty academy in Tel Aviv and its students and staff, all folks on the periphery of Israeli society. It’s an important, insightful piece about identity and class.

Jessica Mason McFadden: I’ll go with the one movie I saw: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.

E. Cain: The Odd Life of Timothy Green. I didn’t watch many movies this year, but this one is a super cute family film.

Favourite Book Read in 2012:

 

Sarah Jensen: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. A fascinating look into curb heights, street widths, and the importance of parallel parking. Really interesting to learn how crucial city planning is to building strong communities.

E. Cain: Prisoner of Tehran, A Memoir by Marina Nemat. My boss gave me this book for Christmas, a powerful memoir written by a strong woman - I highly recommend!

Chanel Dubofsky: The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg. If Jami Attenberg writes it, I will read it. The Middlesteins is her latest book, about a Midwestern Jewish family trying to avoid, deal with and make sense of each other. It’s startling, meaty and gorgeous.

Jessica Critcher: Why Have Kids? by Jessica Valenti. The title is all snark– it’s a rhetorical question. It’s a great read for someone happily living child-free (who occasionally finds herself defending that lifestyle choice). It’s also great for moms because it gets past all of the “mommy wars” crap that the media keeps creating and circulating. My mom loved it too– we recommend it to all of the moms we know.

Issue/Cause That Most Inspired You:

indigenousrightsrevolution

 

Chanel: Occupy, Occupy, Occupy.

Jarrah: #IdleNoMore. It’s been incredibly powerful to see a grassroots movements led by Indigenous people for Indigenous rights spring up and spread so quickly across Canada. It’s an almost unprecedented opportunity for non-Indigenous Canadians to put action behind our words by standing behind and supporting First Nations people in Canada.

Sarah: Food. In the last year I’ve learned so much about the impact that food has on my own health and the health of our environment.

Jessica Critcher: This is always hard! But since I have to pick, I would say the WAM! (Women, Action and the Media) campaign to build a grassroots direct action network for gender justice in the media. They had an Indie-Go-Go campaign over the summer and raised more than $10,000 to build a new state of the art website. Pretty legit.

Ashli: I’ve been most active in the Body Acceptance movement by doing body image presentations in schools.  I’ve been so inspired by Kate Harding’s blog “Shapely Prose”, which closed up shop in 2010 but you can still access the great resources on it like Kate’s visual BMI Project.        Read more

Posted on January 1, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism, Politics, Pop Culture Leave a comment

Surviving a Plague, Building a Movement

How to Survive a Plague Posterby Chanel Dubofsky

I have this memory of me, age 8, refusing for some reason to go to the bathroom before we left the house to go to the mall, and my mother saying, “Fine. You’ll have to go in the mall and you’ll get AIDS from the toilet and die in six months.”

I’m pretty sure I went to the bathroom only at our house from then on, and not in strange, unsupervised toilets, but I don’t actually remember. It seemed like a lot of people were scared then,  an insane, unsubstantiated variety of fear. Maybe you got AIDS from kissing, maybe you got it from open sores, maybe from sharing glasses? Maybe it would kill you in six months, maybe in a year. I don’t remember knowing that gay men were getting it, I don’t think I knew what a gay man was. I just knew from the news that was filtered through my mother that people were dying.

Last week, I saw How to Survive a Plague, a documentary about the formation and work of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the international direct action advocacy group that formed in New York City in 1987 in response to AIDS, which was rampaging through the gay community without any response from the government.

I went to see the film largely because the hosts of my favorite independent political podcast raved about it, and because I imagined myself drawing all sorts of exciting parallels between ACT UP and Occupy Wall Street. ACT UP and Occupy have worked together and informed one another on issues of direct action and movement building.

Posted on October 20, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in LGBT, Politics Leave a comment

S17: Creating a New Reality A Year Into Occupy

s17 stickerby Chanel Dubofsky

Last Sunday night, at the urging of various Occupy folks in the Twitter universe, I wrote the number of the National Lawyer’s Guild on my foot in blue permanent marker, for easy access in case I got arrested during actions on the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street (otherwise known as S17 – schedule of S17 events). It’s over a week later, and it’s still on there. I’m not trying to be a hero; it just won’t come off.

I didn’t end up needing the number, I didn’t get arrested. I’m lucky, I’m not one of the folks who got randomly pulled off the supposedly “safe” sidewalk and arrested in the street. There are 185 people who were arrested, which the media is very interested in, so you can easily find some version of those stories via Google. It’s not a small thing, the brutality of the NYPD, but to only talk about that is to eclipse the crazy, important, complicated beauty of s17 and the life of the Occupy movement so far.

I went into Washington Square Park on Saturday, September 15th to kill some time (non-violently) before the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual Book Launch, and decided to follow a march to Zucotti Park (Liberty Plaza, the site of the original occupation that began on September 17th, 2011) that was about to leave.

I wrote on my blog about the intoxication of marching, of yelling,of feeling powerful in the midst of a movement. In retrospect, I’ve become completely obsessed with understanding what is beyond that feeling, what else it means to be in the streets. Suzahn Ebrahiminan has an essay in the latest edition of Tidal, Occupy’s journal of theory, called “The Revolution Will Not Have a Bottom Line”, in which she writes: “When we understand success as an event, it becomes a constructed permanence, a ‘win.’ This action reinforces what I call the hierarchy of stability – where the thing that seems or can be made to seem permanent, containable, and quantifiable is understood to be legitimate (or more legitimate) authority.”

To people who asked me (and continue to ask me) what the point of S17 was, if the idea was to shut down the Stock Exchange, disrupt the financial district, cause chaos in New York City, celebrate the one year birthday of a social movement that is growing like a weed, the answer is yes, and more. Read more

Posted on September 25, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Politics Leave a comment

What Occupy Can Learn from the Jane Collective

Jane Collective Postcardby Chanel Dubofsky

One of the biggest misconceptions about  the Occupy movement is that its concepts and tactics are brand new. A closer look at (lady) history provides a different lens altogether.

From 1968-1973, the Jane Collective, an underground abortion service in Chicago, performed 11,000 abortions. In the pre Roe v. Wade United States, abortion was considered a homicide, and women who needed the procedure had to seek it out illegally. If you were wealthy, you could travel and find someone with medical training to do it;  everyone else had to take their chances with back alley abortions or homeade methods.

There are many startling and radical elements in the history of Jane that we can recognize in the current Occupy movement. One is  concept of mutual aid, in which those in Jane learned how to perform abortions and then taught others in the collective to perform them. The result is not having to rely on doctors, or the capitalist medical industry, in order to provide abortion care to the women who needed it.

The Jane Collective did not, of course, invent mutual aid, but the concept is again employed by the  Occupy movement via the People’s Library,  the Really, Really Free Market, and the Free University.  In short, mutual aid not only redistributes resources (in the case of Jane, this meant not only training everyone to provide health care, but also restoring power to women who had no access to abortion), and offers an alternative system in which people share skills and materials in a manner that runs counter to capitalism. Read more

Posted on August 15, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Politics 1 Comment

Reclaiming Hope at the Feminist General Assembly

Feminist General Assembly

by Chanel Dubofsky

I was late to the last Feminist General Assembly, so in a flurry of embarassment and neurosis, I am absurdly early to this one. I sit on a bench for a while, getting sprayed by the fountain whose water moves when the wind blows, watching the Women Occupying Wall Street crew in a beautiful, conspiratorial huddle. When the Feminist General Assembly sign is unfurled and held up, people start to gather. A middle aged, balding white dude in a polo shirt calls out, “Get a job!” and keeps walking past, accompanied by some women with sweaters draped over their shoulders. What I want to do is chase after him and yell a lot, but instead, I make a mental note to write him a strongly worded letter, which he will never read.

The GA, the theme of which is LGBTQ because of Pride Month, opens with a reminder that Cece McDonald is still in prison, and that today, Lisa Brown and Eve Ensler are performing the Vagina Monologues on the steps of the Michigan capitol, because dudes think vagina is a really gross and terrible word. We all shout “vagina”, and I have a series of flashbacks to being in college and yelling it during rehearsals for the Vagina Monologues, feeling subversive and kind of dirty and scary.

We get into small groups to answer the question “What words/names/terms have you had trouble using/receiving?” In my group, the words are queer, feminist and anything queer positive. We talk about young women being nervous about using the word feminist, although they benefit so directly from the achievements of it, and how the word “feminism” implies a monolith, in fact, there are many feminisms. Read more

Posted on June 25, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Politics Leave a comment
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