Category — Faculty note

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Dear Campus Community and Friends of Women’s Studies

On Tuesday, March 2nd, the course I teach on “Gender, Sexuality and Religion” will host Max Dashu, director of the Suppressed History Archives in Oakland.  She will be speaking on the vast legacy of Women Shamans from far-ranging cultural backgrounds, ancient to modern.  We’ve moved to a larger room to accommodate visitors: please feel free to join us.  The class runs from 6:00 to 8:45 pm, in Boccardo Business Classroom 003 (ground floor, accessed from the courtyard).  Click on the links below for more background on Max and the specific talk she is presenting on Tuesday.  Hope to see you there:

Date: Tuesday, March 2nd
Where: Boccardo Business Classroom 003 (BBC 003)
When: 6:00 PM
Who: Max Dashu, Director, Suppressed History Archives
What: Talk on Women Shamans
Hosted: Prof. Jennifer Rycenga, Comparative Religious Studies class on Gender, Sexuality and Religion

http://www.suppressedhistories.net/
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/catalog/womanshaman.html

Jennifer Rycenga
Professor, Comparative Religious Studies and Humanities

OMG! Check out this article by George Lakoff from UC Berkeley. http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/?p=77 .   This is exactly what I was trying to say in my last blog post. I guess great minds do think alike. Ha ha ha.

…The university is lot more than an economic engine: it is a quality of life engine. And when it is truly public, it is a moral engine.

And it is especially a moral engine because it educates millions of Californians. Education is about more than making money. It is about coming to know the world, about learning to think critically, and about developing the capacity to create new knowledge, new social institutions, and new kinds of businesses. It is about each of millions of people becoming more of what they can be. That is the real promise of California. It is our system of higher education that delivers on that promise.

The reason that the Master Plan designates “state-supported higher education” is that higher education contributes a disproportionate amount to the protection and empowerment both of individuals and of corporations, and to the creation of a California civilization.

All discussion of moral issues must start there, with the systemic and moral effects of higher education.

From this perspective, the university-as-factory metaphor is not only inaccurate, but is immoral. It is both because it hides all that — all of what public universities are about.

The university-as-factory metaphor sees the university as a factory producing educations in the abstract and selling them to students and/or their parents. All discussion of raising tuition or taking more out-of-state students who pay more tuition is based on that metaphor. The central argument is that students (or their parents) should be paying what the product is worth, economically, over a lifetime, and that they shouldn’t be complaining about fee raises because they’re getting a relatively good deal.

The factory metaphor misses almost everything. It obviously misses the enormous contribution to the economy of the state as a whole. But it also misses all the other forms of protection and empowerment, as well as shaping California civilization…..

Read full article here

Two articles on women and sports today:

A favorite topic of mine that we discuss in my intro classes is the impact of Title IX and the growth of girls’ and women’s sports on American culture.  Critics have long argued that women’s sports like the WNBA are simply not as economically viable as men’s.  This New York Times article offers an interesting argument that the reverse is true for young girls’ sports – that girls’ participation is more likely to involve entire families’ – and therefore be more economically viable.

The second article points to how women’s sports is constructed so as to be economically viable – specifically, how it caters to society’s homophobia.  Mike Wise at the Washington Post asks why a staple of  sports coverage – the “kiss cam” is not used at Washington Mystics games.  The Mystics manager says it’s “not appropriate” because so many kids are at the games, which directly touches on the double standard by which heterosexual family values are worshipped at a sports event which takes for granted its substantial lesbian support base.

On girls’ sports

Ten members of Kirsten Grant’s family converged here last week to watch her play in a major youth softball tournament. Her mother, father, sister and brother had driven 13 hours with her from their home in suburban Toronto. Other relatives had traveled from as far as Salt Lake City. During lulls in play, they all went shopping and visited local attractions.

But last year, when Kirsten’s older brother, Erik, played on a traveling baseball team, the experience could not have been more different. Parents rarely accompanied the team, he said, and the coach frowned on anything that distracted from the game. “No leisure activity,” said Erik, 19. “It was eat, sleep and drink baseball.”  More here

On the lack of “kiss cams” at Mystics games

“Why don’t they have a KissCam at Mystics games?” a young friend asked last week, which preceded an awkward pause and an even more awkward answer.

Really, why doesn’t the inclusive WNBA franchise in the nation’s capital, of all places, send their video cameramen and camerawomen to find unsuspecting couples in the stands during timeouts and capture their mugs for all of Verizon Center’s crowd to see? And wait for the couple’s reaction, which usually involves a polite, if awkward, peck on the lips.

Just like they do at NBA games and other sporting events in which the participants are men.

“We got a lot of kids here,” Sheila Johnson, the Mystics’ managing partner, said when asked last week at a game. “We just don’t find it appropriate.” More here

Also see story at Out Sports

John Hope Franklin, a prolific scholar of African-American history who profoundly influenced thinking about slavery and Reconstruction while helping to further the civil rights struggle, died Wednesday in Durham, N.C. He was 94.

…Dr. Franklin also taught at some of the nation’s leading institutions, including Harvard and the University of Chicago in addition to Duke, and as a scholar he personally broke several racial barriers.

…He often argued that historians have an important role in shaping policy, a position he put into practice when he worked with Marshall’s team of lawyers in their effort to strike down segregation in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the nation’s public schools.

“Using the findings of the historians,” Dr. Franklin recalled in a 1974 lecture, “the lawyers argued that the history of segregation laws reveals that their main purpose was to organize the community upon the basis of a superior white and an inferior Negro caste.”

See full story at the New York Times:  John Hope Franklin, Scholar of African-American History, Is Dead at 94 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

The next event in Women’s History Month is a panel discussion with the women of SWAN….the Service Women’s Action Network in MLK 255/256 noon-1:30pm.   SWAN is “a group of military service women and allies who came together in 2007 to create a network of support for military service women and also women considering military service.” In this panel, veterans will “speak to the realities of life in the military and demystify the illusions often marketed by military recruiters. Panelists will address the myths and realities of the messages often promoted to target young women.

It is a crucial time for women in the military

• Over 155,000 women currently serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• 15% of our military service personnel are women.
• The current VA system provides limited services specified for women.

Learn more about SWAN...

Michelle stands boldly in a White House where she is mistress, not slave. Her body is for her own pleasure, her own adornment, her own vanity. She is not reduced to the mule. Her labor will not enrich white folks, it will supply her family. She is not reduced to a breeder. Her children belong to her and she is free to love and protect them. It is an act of resistance for a black woman to demand that her body belong to herself for her pleasure, her adornment, even her vanity, because in the United Sates black women’s bodies have only been valued to the extent that they produce wealth and pleasure for others.

from THE KITCHEN TABLE.

NEW YORK – A global women’s rights treaty completed 30 years ago has a better-than-ever chance for U.S. Senate ratification this year, yet the hunt for the needed 67 favorable votes is likely to incur the wrath of activists on both the left and right. [Read more →]

Global Disconnects: The Internet & Human Trafficking
February 20-21, 2009 Berkeley, California

Brought to you by The Center for Race & Gender (UC Berkeley), Students & Artists Fighting to End Human Slavery (Northern CA), and The End Internet Trafficking Coalition (USA)

As the internet has become more and more a part of the everyday in the U.S. and the global north, questions have arisen: How has the internet used as a tool for violence, for the trafficking and sexual exploitation of people? How has it used as a tool for social change to counter violence? In 2008 the End Internet Trafficking Coalition formed to address the increasing usages of services on the web to exploit people through labor and sex violence. In an effort to further the conversations that began with a national call through emails to collaborate, the coalition recorded an online presentation on the issue. February 20-21, 2009, in a conference meeting titled, “Global Disconnects: The Internet & Human Trafficking” the coalition and collaborators will be meeting at UC Berkeley to address the complexities of human trafficking and the technoscapes of the web, as well as the prospects for countering human trafficking through theory and practice.