Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed
- ZOMG! Facebook use and student grades
- Update – the wages of atheism
- Hillsborough, after 20 years
- The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition
- Happy Birthday, Hugh Thompson.
- Bread and Tea Bags
- I cried
- Glenn Beck's 'Liberal Fascism Hour': Revising history as Newspeak
- Quote of the Day
- Feminist Insight While Watching Heroes:
- My Antifeminist Childhood: That Damn Metal Bikini from Return of the Jedi Edition
April 16, 2009 – yet another media report grossly overstates findings from a small study
April 16, 2009 – Deborah gets some grease by being a squeaky wheel
April 16, 2009 – still no apology from the police for their actions at Hillsborough
April 16, 2009 – Quote: “This is all as laughable as it is predictable. Just a couple months out of power and they have suddenly re-discovered their fear of the Federal Government and their belief in the need to limit its powers.”
April 16, 2009 – remembering a true hero
April 16, 2009 – the most succinct post I’ve seen on the Teabaggers
April 16, 2009 – some of the elements around the appeal of Susan Boyle
April 16, 2009 – the evil art of muddying discourse laid bare
April 16, 2009 – terrifying rhetoric
April 16, 2009 – SPOILERS_SPOILERS_SPOILERS damn, this is so true. How very unsubverting of the dominant paradigm by the writers.
April 16, 2009 – who else hates the metalkini?
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Spoiler warning on the Heroes post (I’m not sure which episode it’s for, sorry).
@ lauredhel:
Oops. Will add spoiler warning.
Thanks for the link-love, Tig. And that “damn metal bikini” post reminds me — I caught Drumline a few nights ago. Fabulous movie, in a lot of ways. Campus melodrama about marching bands at black colleges. Wonderful performance set-pieces, interesting subtext about the construction of masculinity. Great, fluffy movie. My kid would love it.
Except.
90% of the screentime that women get in the flick, they’re bump-and-grind cheerleaders. If women were absent — if it was a movie about all-male worlds — I could work with that, but they’re present, and present in a way that’s not just creepy on its own, but which renders their absence from the main narrative creepy.
So I can’t show the flick to my kid. Which, you know, sucks.
Marching bands are all-boy? In Australia school and university bands and orchestras are usually predominantly female, or at least a roughly even split. Is this a cultural difference, or was is just who they chose to follow in the movie?
@ orlando:
We don’t really have marching bands at schools and unis here in Oz, do we? We generally don’t do marching bands except in the actual army here, or in community organisations with a paramilitary mindset. Certainly the community Highland Pipe Bands that I know are mostly male, and generally all-male up until a few years ago.
I get the impression that in the US the marching band is a big part of football matches, which we don’t include in our footy rituals here. The boys seem to march with brass and drum with the band while girls do marching as baton-twirlers, or are otherwise are on the football field as cheerleaders.
Don’t know about the movie but definitely school/college marching bands in the States are mixed gender IRL.
There are actually a few women in the marching bands in Drumline, but only a very few. The narratives in the movie, and the main protaganists, are all male.
But the bands in Drumline aren’t exactly traditional marching bands, even by US standards. This clip from the movie gives you a taste:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/S4tL9O6CP8w?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent