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Blog
you can tell we no longer
know our classics
a postmodern breakfast
of
Greek and Latin
μετα− meta-: Greek preposition meaning
with or after
data: plural of datum
(past participle of the verb dare to give)
Latin for a thing given or granted,
something known or assumed as fact,
and made the basis of reasoning or calculation
μεταdata is definitely after: after the date
of my dictionary, printed in 1977
metadata is the data that comes with or after the book
a whole world of information and facts
attached to an eBook with ones and zeros
a spreadsheet of working days
column after column after column after column after
six columns of ISBNs
two ways of listing the title
long blurbs and short
subject matter and keywords
prices in different currencies
dimensions in metric and imperial
an excerpt and its source
a review and its source
and more …
and everyone wants something different
I’m after
and after
I’m over it
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Belgium's lower house of parliament last week voted for a law that would ban women from wearing the full Islamic face veil in public.
Yesterday South Australian Senator Corey Bernadi called for the burqa to be banned in Australia, warning that it was emerging as a "disguise of bandits and ne'er-do-wells” after an armed bandit used one for disguise in Sydney this week. His blogpost has been countered by Islamic groups concerned that to ban the burqa risks limiting Muslim women’s interaction in society.
The “full Islamic veil” is the burqa which covers the entire face and body, and covers the eyes with meshed cloth; the niqab is similarly full covering, but leaves the eyes clear. For visuals of the varying forms of veiling see this BBC site.
Several European nations are holding similar debates, with legislation mooted in France, Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands. Last month French President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered legislation calling the veils “an affront to women's dignity unwelcome in France”.
In northern Italy a Muslim woman has even been fined under anti-terrorism laws for wearing a burqa in public.
The debate has played out in France for the last two decades, and a great resource is Bronwyn Winter’s Hijab and the Republic.
The news in Belgium has been widely reported, with multitudinous opinions. Take for example the French imam who supports such bans. Hassen Chalghoumi is quoted in the UK Telegraph saying that women who wanted to cover their faces should move to Muslim countries where covering was a tradition and that "The burqa is a prison for women, a tool of sexist domination and Islamist indoctrination".
There is however a distinct lack of feminist voices – let alone Muslim women’s voices – on the issue. And it’s a divisive one. Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger weighed into the argument last year with a column which won her some support but gained her a lot of criticism, particularly from other women. It led to a brilliant debate at ANU with Haussegger alongside Julie Posetti and Dr Shakira Hussein
who both made a big point of declaring their respect for Haussegger, while respectfully disagreeing with her.
And Haussegger did make some decent points about why the topic should be discussed, hinting at the reasons such conversations get so heated, divided and ultimately undecided. But really she wasn’t preaching tolerance and understanding, rather more of the “them and us” argument that overtakes, arguing that a ban on the burqa would send a clear message that, “Here all women are free and equal participants in our society. No woman need cover her face or hide her identity.”
Of course all women should be free and equal participants in all societies, but we need to be very clear that that is what we are arguing for and not using persuasive ideals to promote other agendas.
Over the past week – and indeed whenever this topic raises its head – there has been much made of “safety” – the dangers of women in burqas driving, or the risk to bank staff serving women in burqas, but to me this also seems like a diversion. You can question the issue of “choice”, the appropriateness or otherwise of displays of religiosity in a secular society, or modern interpretations of the Koran, but not to obfuscate underlying arguments driven by fear, racism or control.
And of course to call for a ban of anything is to create polarisation, rather than solid debate or understanding. As Reed Brody, European press director for Human Rights Watch, said in response to the Belgian legislation, "Bans like this do more harm than good".
Geraldine Brooks deals eloquently with the issue of veiling in Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and summed it up aptly to me, “I wish politicians wouldn't keep trying to solve social problems through the bodies of women. Khomeini makes Iran look more Islamic overnight by ordering women into the veil, Belgium makes its immigration issues disappear overnight by ordering them out of it. No one wants to tackle the serious issues of underlying inequality. It's all so superficial and a real time waster and attention suck when the real issues are women's education, forced marriage and FGM. Let's see Belgium tackle those issues.”
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A guest post by Getting Real editor Melinda Tankard Reist. Originally published on the National Times site and posted on Melinda's website.
Women, we’ve arrived. We’re equal now with men. The conditions for equality have been met. Am I talking about political, social and financial equality? No.
Access to maternity leave, child care, the opportunity to balance work and family life? No. The ability to live free from harassment and sexual bullying. No.
We know we are empowered because now we can buy men like they buy women. Men can be prostituted to provide sexual services for women. Here is proof of our newly won freedom: we can participate in the sexual objectification of men in the same way we have been objectified through history.
Free from restriction, the sex industry is now open to all. And there’s lots of pseudo-feminist rhetoric to make us all feel good about it. It’s all there in a piece in The Age, which reads like a free plug for a new male escort service (”She needs more Melbourne-based men and older men, in their late 30s and 40s”).
But just because it’s women doing the buying — and the pimping — doesn’t make it liberating. Being able to trade in human flesh doesn’t mean that emulating the sexual behaviour of men and their sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, is progress.
This move is part of a capitalist celebration of the female sexual consumer who can choose to buy dildos, botox, pole-dancing classes, new breasts, Brazilians, surgically altered and coloured labias – and men. These are the tokens of our emancipation? This is what ”freedom of choice” has delivered?
This is a parody of liberation in which women become a mere participant in a mass-marketed orgy of so-called sexual freedom.
I do have some sympathy, however, with the argument that women cannot find men they want to be with intimately. In our pornified culture we are raising men who are callous and insensitive to the needs and desires of women. We knock tenderness out of them with a diet of brutality from the earliest of ages. Boys’ role models are celebrities and sporting figures who see women as conquests, there for the taking.
But buying a man won’t fix that. It is a reflection of distance, disconnection, a lack of intimacy and a subtraction of emotion from sex.
And it’s dishonest to tell women who want something more than a quick $500 f— that they can have ”the whole boyfriend experience” — hair stroked, hand held and even a walk in the park with her, her kids and her dog. For a mere $1200-$1500 a day. That’s a lot of money for simulated intimacy. That’s a pretend boyfriend, not a real one. How does that ”make a woman feel special”?
Hiring prostitutes remains fundamentally a male preserve, which is why we don’t see huge line-ups of women wanting to buy the bodies of boys and men. When women pay men for sex, it doesn’t have the same social effect because there is no history of women enslaving men, the porn industry is still primarily driven by men’s sexual demands. And there’s no social construction of men as sluts who enjoy their own degradation.
The rise of male ”escort” services reflects a devaluation of sex because of the primacy of exchange and commodification of another person.
All we’re seeing with this new men-for-sale business is the democratisation of objectification. Buying and selling male or female bodies for sex will always be reducing them to a means to an end; a denial of their full humanity.
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you can tell we no longer
know our classics
a postmodern breakfast
of
Greek and Latin
μετα− meta-: Greek preposition meaning
with or after
data: plural of datum
(past participle of the verb dare to give)
Latin for a thing given or granted,
something known or assumed as fact,
and made the basis of reasoning or calculation
μεταdata is definitely after: after the date
of my dictionary, printed in 1977
metadata is the data that comes with or after the book
a whole world of information and facts
attached to an eBook with ones and zeros
a spreadsheet of working days
column after column after column after column after
six columns of ISBNs
two ways of listing the title
long blurbs and short
subject matter and keywords
prices in different currencies
dimensions in metric and imperial
an excerpt and its source
a review and its source
and more …
and everyone wants something different
I’m after
and after
I’m over it
View/Add Comments .....
|
A guest post by Kill Your Darlings associate editor and Spinifex friend, Jo Case
The Miles Franklin longlist for 2010 has been announced – and with only three of the 12 writers women, the signs are ominous that there may be another sausage fest writes Jo Case in her Kill Your Darlings blog (aka all-male shortlist) this year.
In strictly objective alphabetical order, the longlist is:
Patrick Allington, Figurehead
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
Brian Castro, The Bath Fugues
Jon Doust, Boy on a Wire
Deborah Forster, The Book of Emmett
David Foster, Sons of the Rumour
Glenda Guest, Siddon Rock
Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly
Thomas Keneally, The People’s Train
Alex Miller, Lovesong
Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones
Peter Temple, Truth
While there’s not the very obvious omission of female literary heavyweights that there was last year (when Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Amanda Lohrey and Joan London all missed out), the gender imbalance is still curious, to say the least.
It didn’t take long for Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game and Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath to spring to mind as surprising books to be left off the longlist. And what about Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion? (‘It’s a mystery why Andrea Goldsmith is not a household name,’ wrote Jennifer Levasseur, reviewing the book in The Australian. ‘Her latest offering should be welcomed with the excitement that greets the best Australian novelists working today.’)
There’s a robust conversation about this online already (along with debates about the interpretation of ‘Australian life in any of its phases’), with some of the best discussions happening in the comments sections of James Bradley’s blog and the blog of Stephen Romei, editor of ALR.
On the latter, former Miles Franklin judge Kerryn Goldsworthy was invited to comment on the gender issue. While she wasn’t particularly concerned about the make-up of this year’s longlist, apart from the omission of Cate Kennedy, she had been among those concerned about last year’s shortlist. She wrote:
The question of who’s writing ‘better books’ always comes down to the criteria that are applied in judging them, and I do think that a lot of the more traditional literary values are still skewed or coded ‘masculine’. Anyone writing a novel about private life, domestic life, family life or emotional life, anyone writing a short novel or a ‘small-canvas’ novel and anyone writing a novel whose main character is a woman (and I don’t mean some male fantasy figure like Lara … erm … Croft, I mean an actual warts-and-all woman) is often automatically, unconsciously disadvantaged in competitions like this, regardless of the quality of the writing. And not necessarily only by male judges, but by anyone who’s been taught to value ‘big’ books about ‘important’ subjects.
The conversation about gender and literary prizes is aflame overseas at the moment, too. Back in November last year, author, critic, editor and prize judge Lizzie Sturnick wrote a frustrated article in response to Publisher’s Weekly’s all-male Top 10 Books of 2009. The Publisher’s Weekly editors had explained the outcome thus: ‘We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration. We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz … It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.’
‘The publishing industry is no better at ignoring gender than your average obstetrician,’ Sturnick acidly responded. Giving an insider’s view from one judging panel she’d been a member of, she said she’d watched as books by men were labelled ‘ambitious’ (which she interpreted as: ‘had shot high and fallen short’), while books by women had been called ‘small’, ‘domestic’ and ‘unambitious’. In a line that has since echoed around cyberspace, she wrote:
‘I just want to say,’ I said as the meeting closed, ‘that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric.’
Interestingly, while Sturnick reported her experience of women’s fiction being judged as ‘small’ and ‘domestic’, a judge of another literary prize has come under fire for complaining of women’s fiction as ‘grim’. Daisy Goodwin, chair of the judges for this year’s round of the all-women Orange Prize said:
‘There’s not been much wit and not much joy, there’s a lot of grimness out there … Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing.’
She blamed publishers for ‘lagging behind what the public want’. It’s interesting, I think, that she’s based her analysis on reading the books entered to a major literary prize. It seems likely to me that publishers are basing their choices on what they think literary award judges (like herself) want. Sending in their more ‘ambitious’ books, perhaps?
‘If the books that are entered have been remarkably downbeat this year, it’s perhaps because editors of lighter books by women aren’t confident that they command the same respect as grim ones,’ retorted Jean Hannah Edelstein in The Guardian, remarking that witty, ‘pleasurable’ books by women are often marketed as specifically ‘women’s’ reading, decorated with pink covers and the like.
She went on to say that it was hard to imagine ‘our most beloved, funny female writers of the past’ (like Nancy Mitford) being in contention for The Orange Prize. Goodwin’s admonition for female writers to ‘cheer up, love’, she said, would be unlikely to be directed at a male writer: ‘Debates about who’s going to be the next Philip Roth are not coloured by criticisms of brilliant young male authors for not being cheery enough – I’ve not read any criticism that Legend of a Suicide, for example, lacks joy.’
Another writer, William Skidelsky, agreed with Edelstein, but put another twist on Goodwin’s remarks: she was only speaking the truth, he said. He reported ‘a growing feeling that, in order to be “serious”, novels have to be dark in tone … arguably, women have been affected by this much more than men, because of the pronounced divide in women’s fiction between frothy, commercial “chicklit” and more serious, “literary” work.’ This perception needs to be talked about, he said, as it’s affecting the kinds of books that are written and published.
Amanda Craig, one of the longlisted novelists, told Skidelsy: ‘There really is a sense that women writers have two paths – on the one hand, towards chicklit; on the other, the serious route. And if they take the latter, there’s a feeling that they have to be extra serious in order to be treated with respect.’
It’s an interesting debate. The Orange longlist, in full, is:
Rosie Alison, The Very Thought of You
Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
Clare Clark, Savage Lands
Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds
Roopa Farooki, The Way Things Look to Me
Rebecca Gowers, The Twisted Heart
MJ Hyland, This is How
Sadie Jones, Small Wars
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Laila Lalami, Secret Son
Andrea Levy, The Long Song
Attica Locke, Black Water Rising
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Maria McCann, The Wilding
Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Amy Sackville, The Still Point
Kathryn Stockett, The Help
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger
Originally posted 24 March 2010 on Killings, the Kill Your Darlings blog
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 In the cold winter of 1875, two rebellious spirits travel from the pale sunlight of England to the raw heat of Australia....  Beautifully written by First Nations women on Gurindji country where the fight for equal wages began. This book...  I am seen by many as a danger. As having failed to understand the new rules, the new paradigm of successful motherhood.
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The women in this book may be among the last to have babies without the medical stamp of approval.
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