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Heart of Gold


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Via Today's Modern Mother.

From my inbox--a new journal, Critical Discourse Studies:

Critical Discourse Studies has been established in response to the proliferation of critical discourse studies across the social sciences and humanities. We will consider for publication papers that meet the needs of scholars in diverse disciplines and areas of study which develop critical perspectives on the relationship between discourse and social dynamics. Relevant areas and disciplines include: anthropology, communication, linguistics, sociology, politics, political economy, education, psychology, media studies, geography, urban studies, cultural studies, management studies, literary studies, history, technology studies, legal studies, philosophy, gender studies, migration studies, ethnic studies and others. We also welcome papers which connect critical academic research with practical concerns and agendas, including those of activist and grassroots political movements.

Becky has posted her proposal for her master's thesis on Revolve. I like the way she's using Kenneth Burke's theory here.



A...dare I say?...vapid speech given by Alan Greenspan on intellectual property. Via Sivacracy.



Feministe has a thorough post on rape culture with a lot of links.



Many of our convictions on bioethics are no longer being represented on Bush's bioethics panel. As if we needed another reason to boot him out of office.



Hydrogen peroxide discovered in Mars' atmosphere.

is coming back, according to Yahoo! News. I'd like to see the same happen to Jake 2.0!

One of the problems in conducting qualitative internet research is ethics: Are we studying texts or are we studying people? If it's the latter, how do you do your research in an ethical fashion? The Association of Internet Researchers has a lengthy treatise (beware, this is a big PDF), but I'm liking Arete's idea. She's doing a project on blogs as sites of healing, and as such, she wants to look at blogs whose authors have gone through traumatic personal experiences and blogged about them. She's asking for volunteers to let her use material on their blogs. It's, I think, a feminist way to go about a research design. I might use that later.

A new collection of essays, Reading Sex and the City, has just been published, and you can read an excerpt of one of the chapters by David Greven on representations of men in Sex and the City. It's quite a scathing critique of the show, and it really makes me look at the show differently. This claim is particularly thought-provoking:

The freakshow mentality of Sex and the City ends up being neither a post-feminist nor post-gay interrogation of privileged white male heterosexuality - despite the depiction of members of this group as freaks - but a reification of the very privileged status of the category. It is the women themselves, shakily stuck in their haunted liminal position between representing both "real" women and gay men, who are ultimately revealed as the chief freaks.

According to this article, gender roles in Kenya are changing for the better. Via Mary Otieno.

Seeing as how I talked about writing this piece a few days ago, thought you might want to see how it turned out. I don't have full bibliographical citations here--I might include a list later today or tonight. But if you want any of the citations in particular, email me at ratli008@umn.edu.

Research that is classified as “feminist” usually meets one or both of the following broad criteria: It takes gender or a specific group of women as its object of analysis, and it is designed in the service of an emancipatory political agenda. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist standpoint theory, the theory that the feminist standpoint has epistemological privilege because the perspective of the oppressed provides a more accurate view of reality than that of the ruling class, who only sees the world in ways that legitimate their power, was considered a favorable approach to feminist research. In the 1990s, however, the influence of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, which is marked by the rejection of universality, truth, totalizing top-down structures of power, and essentialism in favor of the view that society, identities, and ideologies are discursively constructed and that power is multiplicitous and malleable, became evident in feminist research. The following essay is an attempt to review systematically the problematics in feminist standpoint theory and its knowledge claims that the postmodernist and poststructuralist critique brought to the fore.