You speak like a misogynist

Well hasn't it been a long time since I've posted. I don't like new year resolutions but it should be a sort of one to write more. Who knows, it might help with the real writing. I finished my data coding a couple of days ago (I took about a month away from it to do some more reading) and ... now what?! I'm revising my codes and creating categories to try to link things together into themes but it's daunting - I mean, what do themes look like? Does each Research Question have a theme? It's been easy when I've done it before, but this is my baby and has to be right! Small bits of writing, I think.

Anyway I blog today because it seems Iris Marion Young's famous phrase from 1980 "throwing like a girl" is still being used today, unbelievably. Actually, sadly believable, because there's nothing worse than being called a girl/girly! Especially if it's the president of the USA. Apparently he throws like a little girl, according to an American TV presenter Jow Scarborough. See WVON on the case here.

Obama certainly gets a lot of body policing but this one really gets to me.

Little girls throw just fine; and a "weak" or incorrect throw, if there is such a thing, should cast no aspersions on gender, race or any other stereotypical way of using and inhabiting the body. Obama throws like a girl? You, Joe Scarborough, you present TV like a misogynist!

Me and PE

Between the ages of 17 and 22 I didn't even own a pair of trainers. When I visited a friend and she had Kung Fu class, she invited me to join in, but I put a mental block on it and refused to see myself doing it. Aged about 22, I don't remember why but I bought a pair of trainers and some jogging bottoms and joined the gym at the local leisure centre. That lasted about three years, on and off, maybe once every two months on average over the whole period. Then I broke my finger and didn't get back into it once I recovered. I still have that same pair of trainers and they look pretty new. Since I stopped going to the gym I reckon I've worn them about ten times (for football or squash). I went jogging on Hove seafront once, for about 300 metres.

I'm not inactive - I've played tenpin bowling weekly since I was 11, with only about four years off in that time. I also went out dancing a lot during uni. And I never once got a car or bus to school, ever.

But that's not very active for someone in a Sports Science department. Most other people here either are or were competitive in the Athletics Union, trained to be a PE teacher, or they jog, swim, play football, etc. regularly. Not me, despite studying young people's constructions of status in physical activity. I think I keep guiding my research towards answering a few of my own questions about my own relationship with activity - why was/is it irrelevant to me?

Thinking about "new femininities"

Supervisor and I are going to a conference next week to present work from the Geographies of the Body project for the first time. Something that has gone in the paper is a mention of "new femininities" which at first I didn't understand but I'm getting that it means sexy but girly, go getting but male-centred, heterosexed and still in high heels. The Cosmopolitan womanhood I suppose. Recently there was a post at The F Word responding to a piece in a rag by Agent Provocateur about female sexuality where basically they are still prescribing to women a male centred notion of sexual "freedom" but packaging it up as pro-woman. Now women are prudish if they don't wear AP's uncomfy bits of lace. Forgetting that feminism brought the ability for women to say yes to sex. And it reminded me of the new femininities that suggest empowerment but really offer male pleasure still.

New femininities are being discussed in our paper with regard to movie Bend It Like Beckham. I'm unsure whether I find BILB as bad as some people think; it is stereotypical but might offer some girls role models who experience similar tensions between family and football. And the Sikh Indian stereotypes are not the only ones; it is not only the Indian girl who is not considered normal. So I guess the film does attempt to offer a new femininity that is fixed and ideal - western, attractive, not too sexy, still in love with the guy, sporty but in a way that doesn't make your body look "wrong". I've ordered another couple of DVDs of women football films so I'll see what they turn out like.

Kelly Brook gives weak not-really-support to airbrushing warning labels

My feminist-in-training boyfriend just pointed out this disappointing video report from Newsbeat, interviewing Kelly Brook on her new advert for Reebok - a full body naked (except for trainers) billboard poster. The Newsbeat reporter asks Brook does she think the poster was airbrushed ("probably") and does she support warnings labels to show where a photo has been airbrushed ("maybe, if they were small").

A missed opportunity for Newsbeat to push for the warning labels and critique airbrushing and naked billboard posters. Oh, my mistake, that wouldn't be impartial enough for the BBC would it?! Yet they'll give a 2 minute platform for Brook to talk about herself, support photoshopping, and give some free advertising to Reebok

My bit on niqabs and fear of the hidden face

David Mitchell wrote an opinion piece in the Observer this weekend about why banning burqas is unliberal. Other people say that burqas (I think they mean niqabs because I'm never seen a burqa outside of TV pictures of Afghanistan) are horrible because they show women being forced to do things by men or religion. I say:

We don't know that it's not a choice for women. Here's two reasons for a start: maybe women who cover dislike being looked at sexually by men (of course, the real solution would be men stop ogling and sexualising women); maybe the hair is constructed as being as personal, not for viewing in public, just as many cultures have constructed breasts/bottoms/genitals as personal and not for public show. The construction of shame and the need to cover certain parts of the body is exactly that, a construction, and totally arbitrary. So there is no way that anyone can judge Muslim women for constructing a need to cover the hair, unless they believe that there is an imperative for everyone to go naked all the time.

Mitchell's piece is problematic, mainly for this bit:
"those women who feel pressured into wearing burqas by cultural or familial forces might become aware that they're living in a society where questioning those forces is welcomed."

Way to assume low/zero education and knowledge of Britain in a group of women! How infantilising! I think women know where they live!

And he rests a lot of his argument on what he sees as his right to take the piss out of women who cover. As someone who intensely hates being made fun of, that's not really something I can get behind.

Here's some articles which present a better take on it; however, as one of them says, why don't we stop blathering about clothes and start discussing war or poverty or education! And stop using women as a way to dress Islamophobia up as liberation.

Racialicious

Muslimah Media Watch on a potential ban in Quebec

MMW again


Is choice not the issue? Should there be a debate about head to toe covering in Europe, if it can stop wringing it's hands over cultural relativism? Mona Eltahawy says this

I think she's right in reminding that Islam is not monolithic and that full coverings might be coming from only very right wing cultural interpretations of the religion, but I don't think Western governments and commenters can presume to kn...ow how many Western Muslim women are choosing to cover and how many are forced. Actually a woman wearing a niqab walked past me where I'm sat in Loughborough Uni library just ten minutes ago; I don't know whether she wishes to dress like that or not and it's not really my business because although niqabs and burqas might be a symbol of misogyny, talking about women's clothing is not going to stop violence against women, or racism, which Eltahawy seems to suggest will stop if women don't cover (the bit where she mentions the group Ni Poutes Ni Soumises). If the French were really bothered about misogynistic violence and racism then they would address those problems directly, but instead they focus on a fear of the unknown (a hidden face and a different type of clothing) and say the face is central to Western identity and human interaction. I don't want to be culturally relativist, because British Muslims don't live under a government that demands covering, therefore we might question why a woman feels the need to wear a niqab in a country like Britain, we might ask why she feels it necessary, but either way clothing doesn't bring social justice.

Sometimes I feel like covering my face (bad skin) and lots of women might hide their identity behind a shovel full of make up, and maybe some men use beards to hide behind. These are body presentations issues too but no one talks about liberating women from make up regimes because I am suspicious that for a lot of people the issue is that Muslimahs who cover are rejecting Western beauty trends and the imperative to dress for men, to be viewed by men. And Westerners don't get that.

Really the way to stop misogyny and racism and violence and work for tolerance and social justice is to address the causes of intolerance, bring education and stop fear. It's like the way that anti-rape campaigns preach to potential victims "don't go out late on your own, don't wear slutty clothes, etc" - but you don't stop rape by changing women's behaviour, you stop rape by getting men to stop raping. Likewise, you stop Islamophobia, racism and misogyny against Muslim women not by changing the women's behaviour or dress, but by stopping racists from meting out frightened violence, educating against violence against women, and solving the poverty, unemployment and segregation that is behind a lot of hatred of the Other.

Musical aside

I just came across an old notebook from my undergrad years and it in was a set list from a time I DJed for Offbeat in the Coventry Colosseum (now Casbah); gonna try to post some of it up here. From the looks of things, I DJed this around mid 2001.


Slightly-forgotten indie-rockers Silversun with 'Julia'


Catatonia while they were still alright, with 'Sweet Catatonia'


They are still my favourite band, Bluetones - 'Solomon Bites the Worm'


Another band/album I don't listen to anymore, Blue 'Tracy Jacks'


REM, 'Harborcoat'


The lovely 'Kate from Ben Folds Five


Tha Manics and 'From Despair to Where'


This probably wouldn't be allowed to be released these days, it's Travis' 'U-16 Girls'


This video shows two Gorky's songs but I just played the first, Patio Song:



This isn't as good as I remembered it. Ultrasound, 'Kurt Russell'


From Green Day's first album, twenty years old now, 'Knowledge'


Gomez 'Love Is Better Than A Warm Trombone'


Hefner - 'Hymn For the Cigarettes'


SFA - Chupacabras (I just learned today that this is named after an animal)


this was from a Levi's advert, the Sta-Prest ones I think. Lilys, 'Nanny in Manhattan'.


Enjoy!

Reflections on BSA Youth 2010

Oh dear, I neglected my blog again. Two weeks ago I attended the British Sociological Society's Youth 2010 conference in Guildford. I presented, for the first time, some findings from my data collection/production, and managed to speak ad lib about it fairly well I think.

There I met Max Mauro from Dublin Institute of Technology, creating a video ethnography of transnational identities of boys in football clubs. He reflected, with surprise and a little dismay or puzzlement, that he and I were the only two speakers working on sport or physical activity issues, which for a conference on youth might be considered strange; the overall theme of the week was 'Transitions, Identities and Cultures' and this had been predominantly interpreted as sub-cultures, music, clubs, although youth un(der)employment was also an issue in some talks. There were plenty of things about accessing identities and cultures which I found useful, anyway. It seems like a nice group to get involved in ... which leads me onto thinking about another issue:

As I search for articles for reading, I find lots of book chapters, reviews, etc. written by PhD students and I wonder whether the way you get into this type of writing is a case of who you know? Being asked to write a chapter in a book by an acquaintance? Aside from the central areas of my PhD, I wouldn't know what to write about, or I wouldn't know anything to write! But I keep thinking about it as something important. Maybe movies about women in sport, being something tying women's equality in sport, and visual cultures/cultural resources, together... Need to find something other than Bend It Like Beckham ...