Her Beautiful Mind - Interview by Deborah Solomon for The New York Times, March 8, 2009
- As a British psychoanalyst known for your social activism and literary output, you argue in your new book, “Bodies,” that all of the globalized world — men and women alike — is suffering from a warped sense of beauty.
- What I am seeing is franticness about having to get a body. I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update.
- “Body hatred,” as you call it, has become a leading Western export. Young women in South Korea are undergoing surgery to Westernize the appearance of their eyelids.
- It’s supported by their parents. They don’t experience this as a terrible thing, that they’re being passive victims and idiots. They see it as a chance at modernity. Fiji is the country where 11.3 percent of girls were bent over the toilet bowl three years after television was introduced...more..
Iraqi Surveys Start to Unveil the Mental Scars of War, Especially Among Women - By Alissa J. Rubin for The New York Times, March 8, 2009
Baghdad — Only when the guns fall silent does the extent of damage wrought by conflict become visible.
So in Iraq, as security improves, only now are the full effects of the violence on the Iraqi people emerging.
Two studies being released this weekend, one on mental health and the other on the status of women, paint a sobering portrait of the enormous difficulties that lie ahead as the country tries to recover from years of war and state-sponsored terrorism under Saddam Hussein and the more recent sectarian and ethnic strife that followed the American invasion.
In the mental health study, released Saturday, the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization surveyed 4,332 Iraqis over 18 years old nationwide and found that 17 percent suffered from mental disorders of some kind, with depression, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety among the most common...more...
Lives on the Line
Facing a resurgent Taliban, Afghan women have had to cover up and take cover. By Alisa Tang, for MS Magazine - Last September, Malalai Kakar, police chief for the department of crimes against women in Kandahar—the former Taliban stronghold in the south—was fatally shot while on her way to work. Less than two months later, several girls were walking to school in Kandahar when two men on a motorbike sprayed them with acid. Two of the girls were blinded. Ten Taliban members were charged in the crime, with one reportedly confessing that a high-ranking Taliban member had offered a large sum of money for each girl burned.
In 70 percent of Afghan provinces, the Taliban is back, accompanied by a skyrocketing death toll across the country and an increase in attacks targeting women and girls...more...
Access Denied: Govt.'s Harsh Limits on the Reproductive Rights of Immigrant Women
Countless women are sexually assaulted as they attempt to immigrate into the US, but have extremely limited reproductive rights in custody.
By Kevin Sieff, for The Texas Observer, posted in Alternet.com, on March 4, 2009
When sexual-assault counselor Elia Alvarado first met Maria in 2007, Maria was wearing a blue prison uniform, sitting in a doctor’s office at the Port Isabel Detention Center. She was in her early 30s, but looked haggard, Alvarado recalls, older than her age. Two months and more than 1,500 miles after leaving Honduras, she had been detained at the border and taken to the immigration holding facility north of Brownsville...more..
An Empire for Poor Working Women, Guided by a Gandhian Approach
By Somini Sengupta for The New York Times March 6, 2009 - Ahmadabad, India - Thirty-five years ago in this once thriving textile town, Ela Bhatt fought for higher wages for women who ferried bolts of cloth on their heads. Next, she created India’s first women’s bank.
Since then, her Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, has offered retirement accounts and health insurance to women who never had a safety net, ...more...
Runaway Daughters
After her teenagers hit the streets, author Debra Gwartney faced desperation and panic. She talks about why her children left -- and how they finally returned.
by Katharine Mieszkowski for Salon.com, March 7, 2009 - Debra Gwartney was trying to escape a failed marriage when she moved from Tucson, Ariz., to Eugene, Ore., in the early '90s with her four daughters in tow. What the newly single mother didn't foresee was that, as she fled from her past to a different city and job, her relationship with her girls would be forever transformed, too. Enraged by the divorce and the move, her two oldest daughters, Amanda and Stephanie, soon ran away, seeking adventure on the streets and shelter in abandoned buildings with other teenagers like them...more..
Saved a child's life? Bad Catholic!
Posted in Salon.com by Kate Harding, Friday, March 6, 2009 - As Tana Ganeva at Alternet put it: "This is probably the most repugnant thing you'll read all day, week, month, or ever." A nine-year-old girl in Brazil was raped by her stepfather -- repeatedly, from the time she was six years old -- and became pregnant with twins. The pregnancy was terminated. Abortion is illegal in Brazil, but the law makes exceptions in the case of rape or risk to the mother's life, both of which applied here. As the doctor who performed the procedure told The Irish Times, "She [the girl] falls within the two and, as a doctor, I could not let a girl of nine years be submitted to this suffering and even pay with her own life."..more..
Book Review
Writing Women: A JURY OF HER PEERS
American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, By Elaine Showalter, 586 pp. Alfred A. Knopf.
By Katie Roiphe, for The New York Times, March 8, 2009 - It may be surprising that there’s been no comprehensive history of women’s writing in America. But Elaine Showalter has now undertaken this daunting venture with her vast democratic volume, “A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx,” in which she energetically describes the work of long-forgotten writers and poets along with that of their more well-known contemporaries. In the 1970s, Showalter wrote “A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing,” which established an alternative canon of British women writers at a moment when feminist studies were very much in vogue, and her new book is an attempt to do the same thing for American literature. Showalter was, for nearly two decades, a professor in the department of English literature at Princeton (she was the head of the department when I was graduate student there), and she remains a grande dame of feminist literary studies...more..
End Torture, End Domestic Violence
by Rhonda Copelon for On The Issues Magazine. - When one compares what is done to a woman in an advanced domestic battering cycle and to prisoners subjected to torture, the situations are frighteningly similar. But only recently have they begun to be equated legally and culturally.
How would the world be different for women if domestic violence were treated as torture or as cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment?...more...
ESPAÑOL
Zapatistas inician en Oventic el encuentro internacional de mujeres 'Mamá Corral'
Está dedicado Concepción García de Corral, luchadora por la presentación de desaparecidos políticos recién fallecida.
Por Hermann Bellinghausen, enviado de La Jornada, México, marzo 7 de 2009
San Cristóbal dde las Casas, Chis. La mañana de este sábado dio inició el encuentro internacional de mujeres Mamá Corral en el caracol zapatista de Oventic, en el municipio autónomo San Andrés Sakamch’en de los Pobres.
Convocado por las comandantas del EZLN como evento “deportivo, cultural y político” para conmemorar el día internacional de la mujer, está dedicado a la memoria de doña Concepción García Esparza de Corral, octagenaria madre de desaparecidos políticos en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, fallecida semanas atrás...más...
Estado e Iglesia culpabilizan a víctimas de feminicidio: OCNF
El pensamiento fundamentalista las responsabiliza de las agresiones por indecentes
Entre agosto y diciembre de 2008 se registraron 246 casos, según cifras de procuradurías estatales
El estado de México encabeza la lista de asesinatos por causa de género
Por Emir Olivares Alonso para La Jornada, México .- El Observatorio Ciudadano Nacional del Feminicidio (OCNF) documentó que de agosto a diciembre de 2008 se presentaron 246 asesinatos dolosos de mujeres en 12 estados del país.En un reporte en el que se analizan esos crímenes, la agrupación –conformada por 43 organizaciones de 17 entidades– reveló que el estado de México es donde se presentó el mayor número de feminicidios, con 94; seguido por Sinaloa, con 56, y Jalisco, con 51...more...
DESDE CIMAC:
Muchos avances y retos pendientes
Día Internacional de la Mujer, casi un siglo de lucha - Por Nancy Betán Santana - México DF, 6 marzo 09 (CIMAC).- Casi un siglo tiene la conmemoración mundial del Día Internacional de la Mujer, tiempo durante el cual han sido incontables, incansables, los esfuerzos de mujeres por alcanzar igualdad, justicia, y paz en la convivencia: respeto a sus derechos humanos.
La idea de celebrar el Día Internacional de la Mujer fue de la alemana Clara Zetkin, maestra feminista y socialista, integrante del Sindicato Internacional de Obreras de la Confección, que hizo la propuesta en el Congreso Internacional de Mujeres Socialistas en Copenhague, Dinamarca, en 1910. ..más..
Feria por el Día Internacional de la Mujer 2009
Exigen Todas las mujeres, todos los derechos en el Zócalo
Por Sandra Torres Pastrana - México DF, 7 marzo 09 (CIMAC).- “Luchar por la igualdad y la equidad”, “alzar la voz para que ninguna mujer sufra violencia”, “por la dignidad y la justicia social, económica y jurídica”, “por el respeto a los derechos sexuales y reproductivos y la diversidad sexual”, por el hecho de ser mujer.
Fueron algunas de las demandas de cientos de mujeres, niñas y adolescentes que visitaron hoy sábado 7 de marzo la Feria por el Día Internacional de la Mujer 2009, en el Zócalo de la Cuidad de México, en vísperas de conmemorar el Día Internacional de la Mujer mañana 8 de marzo, bajo el lema “Todas las mujeres todos los derechos”. ..más...
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