My brain is gold, just like my heart.


What Color is Your Brain?
brought to you by Quizilla

Via Mamageek.

Blackfeminism.org is a community blog about race and gender issues, which looks to be powered by Drupal. It's very new and smart, and I hope they get a lot of uptake. I look forward to the possibility that there will be some good discussion of race online; I've had a post gestating in my mind about race and blogging for a couple of days now, but I'm still working out what I want to say. I had a gobsmacking epiphany after reading Ann DuCille's article "The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies" for the second time for the paper I recently wrote for my Women's Studies class, and now race is going to figure into my dissertation project a lot more than I previously thought, as well it should.

I'm about to call my mom to wish her a happy Mother's Day. And I'm glad there's a day to honor this axis of her subject, this fraction of all that she is, and there's so much more: She's a breast cancer survivor, a watchdog when it comes to local politics (always getting mad when yet another person embezzles money from the city), a quick thinker, and she does right by everyone she knows. I can't think of anyone who knows her and doesn't respect and love her. But I'd be remiss if I didn't point out today that motherhood is revered in rhetoric and reviled in policy, to paraphrase Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels. The discursive construction of motherhood is damaging to so many women; I'm reminded of one of flea's posts, which sticks with me:

I'm angry that so many of us live our lives with that nagging fear that we could lose our children if we fuck up in front of the wrong person, or even if the wrong person misinterprets what they're seeing. I am angry that baseball players get paid millions of dollars for only doing their job well 33% of the time but mothers don't get paid dick and are vilified for not batting a thousand. I'm angry that I've internalized all this Martha Stewart/Baby Einstein/Perfect Celebrity Mom bullshit, even though I'm fighting it as hard as I can.



I wish it were different. I wish we could detail our fuckups without fear, because God knows we're all in the same leaky boat. But as long as the burden of parenthood falls 90% on the mother, 10% on the father (regardless of how often he co-parents) and 0% on the government, we're going to have to keep whispering our failures to each other while pasting on the "we're all fine here!" smiles.

Douglas writes:

We mothers have no paid maternity leave, no universal healthcare so that all our kids are covered, no comprehensive after-school programs, no genuine, truly revolutionary new support of our public schools that would revive them (No Child Left Behind already has become a massive joke). Too many workplaces have no onsite or nearby daycare, no flexible time, no job sharing. The right to control our own reproductive lives is under total siege.



Mothers feel they have been sold a bill of goods: We're supposed to be eternally nurturing, supportive and ecstatic about child rearing 24/7. We are never supposed to get angry, because the words "mom" and "angry" aren't supposed to go together. But if mothers in this country never got angry about how they and the nation's children were being treated, we'd still have child labor and laws discriminating against married women in the labor force. Mothers' voices have not been heard, especially during this presidential campaign season. It's about time they were. Check out two Web sites, www.mothersandmore.org and www.mothersmovement.org. And remember: Motherhood remains the unfinished business of the women's movement.

I know some of that isn't true for some women; sure, many do have paid maternity leave, comprehensive after-school programs. Some even have on-site daycare at work. That's great, but these women are the exceptions, and as long as that's the case, I consider it a problem.

I finally got my blurb done for my Food for Thought discussion at iLaw Friday night. Donna Wentworth is also leading one, and it sounds terribly stimulating, as does the one Frank Field is leading. Too bad I'll have to miss them.

Scholarly Publishing, Weblogs, and the Digital Commons

Right now, we are in the midst of a shift in scholarly publishing from print to online and, some might argue, from a proprietary model to an open access model. A profusion of scholars are keeping weblogs, and many are licensing the content under Creative Commons licenses. Moreover, several online academic publications, including the forthcoming edited collection Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, Classics @: The Electronic Journal of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, and The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal are publishing under Creative Commons licenses. As one who frequently converses with scholars about alternative publishing models, I will explain the resistance I have encountered to Creative Commons licenses, particularly those that allow derivative works. I hope to facilitate a fruitful discussion of ways that the current face of scholarly publishing can be changed, especially to the benefit of the public interest, libraries, and webloggers, who, I would argue, are making a significant and as yet unacknowledged contribution to knowledge-making in the academy.

How is it that I haven't stumbled upon the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy until now? The entries I've read so far are thorough and provide excellent overviews of issues and philosophers. See the entry for identity politics written by Cressida Heyes and the one for common knowledge by Peter Vanderschraaf.

JD Lasica, whose blog I should read more often, has put drafts of his book, Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television, on a public wiki. He says:

Goal: In the spirit of open media and participatory journalism, I'd like to use this wiki to publish drafts of each chapter in the book. I hope you'll participate in this effort by contributing feedback, edits, criticism, corrections, and additional anecdotes, either through the comments field below or by sending me email. Feel free to be as detailed as you like or to insert comments or questions. After all, you're the editor. (And remember, this is for a book manuscript, not a finished online document.) If you make a couple of helpful edits, I'll mention your name in the book's Acknowledgments (and buy you a drink next time we meet up).

Although this would be even cooler if he were using a Creative Commons license or Founder's Copyright (and he may do that later, but this text is at the bottom of Chapter 1: "{Many users mistakenly believe that material on the Internet not accompanied by a copyright notice is fair game for taking. Not true. In any case: Copyright 2004 by J.D. Lasica.}"), I like this collaborative model and that he has given us free access to the book.

Via Mary Hodder.

Buy Diana Krall's new CD. I've said before that Diana Krall, Sade, and Joni Mitchell are the holy trinity of musical artists, and Krall proves it yet again with The Girl in the Other Room. Many of the songs are written by Krall and Elvis Costello, but there are some covers on the album too, most notably the cover of Tom Waits' "Temptation," which I've been listening to over and over again. Aaah, perfection.

By way of the Creative Commons weblog come two journals that are publishing under Creative Commons licenses: Classics @ and The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal. Both are using the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license; I'm especially pleased that they are allowing derivative works, and I hope more journals and other academic enterprises heed the call of this model. Allowing derivative works is good--doing so will only enrich the original work, not compromise it. Come on in; the water's fine. :)