Election '08

Feminist Ultimatums: Not in Our Name

This article from Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler on The Huffington Post is electric.

The collaboration of these two women made me smile this morning. It's a small glimpse of nexus. Kimberle Crenshaw is a prominent African-American legal analyst on the subject of race (in other words, she does a lot of work with Critical Race Theory), and she also has written extensively on race, gender, and anti-essentialism. Eve Ensler is a white Jewish playwright and artist (a controversial one), well-known for her work The Vagina Monologues and the theater event V-Day:

V-Day raises funds and awareness through annual benefit productions of "The Vagina Monologues." In 2007, more than 3,000 V-Day events took place in 1,150 locations in the U.S. and around the world. To date, the V-Day movement has raised over $40 million and educated millions about the issue of violence against women and the efforts to end it, crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns, launched the Karama program in the Middle East, reopened shelters, and funded over 5,000 community-based anti-violence programs and safe houses in Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq. The 'V' in V-Day stands for Vagina, Victory and Valentine.

In this article's current political and social context, it is perhaps the most embracing of intersection, the most respectful of the politics of young women, and the most reflective and hopeful treatise to the evolution and growth of the feminist movement in relation to the Clinton/Obama fracas I've seen in the past month.


Sylvia's picture

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Who could have imagined that in the United States, with its independent judiciary, thousands of men could be rounded up in the night -- many only because of their Muslim religion or foreign nationality -- without recourse to a trial, without even an acknowledgment that they had been arrested? Who could have dared to suggest that there would ever be "desaparecidos" in America? And there it was as well, torture being discussed as a legitimate option to protect a community in peril, and then being used in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, and even obscenely photographed in Iraq -- yes, there they were again, the depressing echoes of my Chile.

But worse perhaps than all of this was the erosion of the moral compass of America, the seeming indifference of the seeming majority to the suffering of others, the casual acceptance of "collateral damage" as an unquestioned consequence of the war on "terrorism," the demonization of an ubiquitous foe who had to be destroyed without second thoughts -- and often without first ones as well; without, in fact, any thoughtfulness at all. That was far more terrifying than the criminal attacks on New York and Washington: To realize that the Chile of strongman Augusto Pinochet was not that far away, not that difficult to imitate, that it was already hovering in the future and ready to materialize if we were not vigilant.


— Ariel Dorfman, Memories of Chile in the Midst of an American Presidential Campaign
TomDispatch - Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman on the struggle for America’s soul


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