[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Blogging Pitfalls: Plugin Purgatory
- Going overboard with WordPress plugins can have an adverse affect on your blog in many different ways, possibly resulting in a blog that barely functions.
So before you click “Install” and add yet another one of the latest and greatest WordPress plugins, it’s important to take a moment and make sure it is actually in the best interest of your site…
- Great, Now I Hate Everybody
- [Fugitivus]
A reader recently emailed me asking for some advice. She’s having her feminist “click” moment, and now finds that she is incompatible with almost everybody around her. Suddenly, the presence of rape apologism, racist jokes, sexist sneering, and other such Socialization Aids is inescapably fucking gross instead of invisibly malforming. She finds she can’t talk to anybody without finding out they believe something that is offensive, oppressive, and/or horrifyingly inhumane. She asked me, to briefly summarize: What the fuck do I do now?
…There’s a larger social/political/cultural structure at work when you try to live your feminist ideals, something bigger than you and your relationship with another individual. Sometimes the structure and your daily life can’t be separated viably. But other times, it’s just you and another person, and you want to know how to get along with them without considering your Feminist Value Points, or ethical consistency, or a life philosophy. The desire for positive human contact can easily outweigh all cerebral considerations, and that’s a good thing; without it, I don’t think any of us would even be able to get out of bed long enough to give a shit about feminism. I, personally, am invested in feminism and anti-oppressive ideas because I see these ideas as ways to create a world where more people are willing to connect with each other, because there are less artificial, constructed, hierarchical fault lines keeping them apart. So it’s not good enough for me to decide that my feminism just means I have to be lonely from now on. If I don’t connect with and care about people — real individual people — what the hell is feminism for?
[Discusses dropping relationships with people who take certain attitudes about rape. -L]
…I have less of a strict limit with abuse. If somebody voices out loud that some woman or another probably likes/deserves/wants abuse, that’s a warning sign, but not necessarily a “dead to me” sign. That’s because I know where they’re coming from. I used to believe that, too. I believed it about myself…
It takes practice to identify my limits. And that practice necessitates getting hurt a lot. The most important thing for myself here is to stop treating myself like shit every time I get hurt. It’s not wrong or bad or weak that I feel pain, and it’s not always something to be “gotten over.” I have to start from the premise that I am acceptable as I am, at this exact moment in time, that limits are not bad things, that selfishness is a good thing, that what I want or need is okay to want or need for no reason other than I want or need it. Only when I’m able to do this for myself do I feel comfortable moving into relationships with other people.
- Feminist Perspectives on Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Feminists have a number of distinct interests in, and perspectives on, science. The tools of science have been a crucial resource for understanding the nature, impact, and prospects for changing gender-based forms of oppression; in this spirit, feminists actively draw on, and contribute to, the research programs of a wide range of sciences. [...]
Feminist perspectives on science therefore reflect a broad spectrum of epistemic attitudes toward and appraisals of science. [...] The content of these perspectives, and the degree to which they generate transformative critique, depends not only on the types of philosophical and political commitments that inform them but also on the nature of the sciences and subject domains on which they bear. Feminist perspectives have had greatest impact on sciences that deal with inherently gendered subjects—the social and human sciences—and, secondarily, on sciences that study subjects characterized in gendered terms, metaphorically or by analogy (projectively gendered subjects), chiefly the biological and life sciences. Feminist perspectives are relevant to sciences that deal with non-gendered subject matters, but perspectives vary substantially in content and in critical import…
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