Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

But what does it mean?

June 1, 2007 – 11:54 pm

This video has provoked an interesting discussion on a women’s studies email list to which I belong – can you see in it women’s gazes gradually beoming more direct and challenging, is it just a demonstration of the limited idea of beauty (limited particularly by race) in the West, or it a demonstration of the homogenising white male gaze?

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Inhuman treatment

June 1, 2007 – 4:18 pm

Over on Comment is Free I have a piece about horrible mistreatment of an 18-year-old asylum-seeker, here in Britain since the age of 14, who has beenn torn from her children – including the young baby who was breastfeeding – and only reunited with them by the efforts of campaigners. She was due to be deported today – I’m trying now to find out what happened to her.

P.S. Don’t read the comments if you are sensitive – there are some horrible ones in there.

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Fascinating and feminist

May 31, 2007 – 12:50 am

This book just went right to the top of my must-read list:

Chenciner’s study of 109 mountain women in Daghestan reveals a vast assemblage of signs, many shared with Turkic people, with Ossetians, with Hungarians and Sarmatians. Crosses, Stars of David and seven-branched trees (transposed into menorah) are seen not as the identity marks of either Judaism or Christianity but as part of an ancient Mesopotamian-derived cornucopia of protective symbolism. In Daghestan, the tattoos were made by elder women on girls, usually at the time of their coming of age….

AND …we can only be grateful for an author who does not tuck his debt to his vital local sources within a sentence or two, in “acknowledgements”, but names all 109 mountain women under their nineteen different villages.

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You’re a warlike lot, it seems

May 31, 2007 – 12:14 am

Well my little sidebar poll has been up for almost five days, and the result is not quite what I expected. Zenobia is streets ahead of the pack, with Queen Elizabeth I a distant second.

Or perhaps Zenobia just has a champion with an itchy finger? Just wondering…

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Finally, a bit of courage and sense

May 31, 2007 – 12:10 am

Australian government aid organisations have, for a decade, been unable to fund groups that give abortion advice – it was a trade-off for the conservative government to win the vote of a rightwing religious nutter in the Senate. (And yes, there was more than a little American influence there.)

Finally, however, a cross-party group of MPs has recommended the policy be dropped.

“It’s repugnant, it’s an insult to women. I think that is just absolutely an insult,” a Liberal [conservative in Australia’s odd political vocab]MP and doctor, Mal Washer, told the ABC.
“What is even more ridiculous or more repugnant is that we’re saying in these guidelines that if you go and have an illegal abortion where there is a 13 per cent chance of death on average and you happen to survive, we’re happy to give you counselling.
“Well, that’s good for those who didn’t die but for the 13 per cent, I think counselling dead people is pretty difficult.”

Of course this is only advice, and it is the Howard government… although hopefully not for long.

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Australian dreams

May 27, 2007 – 10:41 pm

Just imagine, John Howard and his band of not-so-merry, “human rights what are they?” men, wiped out:

A state-by-state analysis of Herald/ACNielsen polls for the past six months provides the first detailed impression of Mr Howard’s doomsday prediction last week that his 11-year-old Government faced “annihilation”.
The analysis of 8156 voters reveals that if voting intentions were carried into the polling booth on election day, as many as 46 of the 87 Liberal and Nationals seats could be wiped out.

It is highly unlikely, unfortunately, to happen exactly this way, but still, with a bit of luck, the Australian conservatives will enter a long period of wilderness like that endured by their British counterparts after John Major – through surviving in power too long.

Whether Australia can ever recover from them, however, is another question.

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