Oh dear… Germaine Greer on the cover of a vintage edition of Life magazine from 1971. The text reads: “Saucy feminist that even men like.” Yes! Feminists are woefully preoccupied with how attractive they are to men. Men have an aversion to feminists… unless they’re deemed attractive. This is a fantastic example of why even on a surface level, feminism is important in challenging sexist notions of what it means to be a woman and a man. Feminism for all! Image via Sarah Jensen.

Oh dear… Germaine Greer on the cover of a vintage edition of Life magazine from 1971. The text reads: “Saucy feminist that even men like.” Yes! Feminists are woefully preoccupied with how attractive they are to men. Men have an aversion to feminists… unless they’re deemed attractive. This is a fantastic example of why even on a surface level, feminism is important in challenging sexist notions of what it means to be a woman and a man. Feminism for all!

Image via Sarah Jensen.

This is a wonderful resource: A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures. Click on the map and take a tour around the world, to see just a few examples of how other societies organise gender beyond a male-female binary. It’s a neat way to show the social construction of gender, illustrating that what we see as the “natural”, fixed and oppositional differences between masculine and feminine are actually fluid. (via Two Spirits | A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures | Independent Lens | PBS) High-res

This is a wonderful resource: A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures. Click on the map and take a tour around the world, to see just a few examples of how other societies organise gender beyond a male-female binary. It’s a neat way to show the social construction of gender, illustrating that what we see as the “natural”, fixed and oppositional differences between masculine and feminine are actually fluid.

(via Two Spirits | A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures | Independent Lens | PBS)

Science Confirms the Obvious: Literature is Good for Your Brain

zeezeescorner: This is great for lovers of literature and critical thinking, and especially for Jane Austin fans:

By asking a test group of literary PhD candidates to read a Jane Austin novel inside of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a Stanford researcher has found that critical, literary reading and leisure reading provide different kinds of neurological workouts, both of which constitute “truly valuable exercise of people’s brains.”

The study was conducted under the supervision of cognition and neurobiology experts at Stanford, but it is the brainchild of literary English scholar Natalie Phillips, who was interested in figuring out exactly what the value of studying literature is. Aside from the pursuit of literary knowledge and the aspects of culture, history, and the humanities that are tied up in our collected written works, does reading impart any kind of tangible benefit to us as humans?

In this great debate from 1971, Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky disagree about the fundamental qualities of ”human nature” and the key task of social science in helping humanity achieve its collective potential. Chomsky believes that the social sciences should draw up a framework for an ideal society where creativity, freedom and scientific discovery will flourish. He sees it is our task to help to put this plan into action. Foucault argues that there is no ideal concept of social justice that can be universally applied. Instead, he sees that social scientists are tasked with critiquing social institutions and relations of power in different societies. Foucault says:

…one of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me, over and above anything else, is this: that we should indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the relationships of political power which actually control the social body and oppress or repress it. What I want to say is this: it is the custom, at least in European society, to consider that power is localised in the hands of the government and that it is exercised through a certain number of particular institutions, such as the administration, the police, the army, and the apparatus of the state…. But I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.

One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows that the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help to support the political power. It’s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

Read the entire transcript . Watch the debate and bliss out: part 1 and part 2.

australianarchaeologyblog: Truganinni (1812 - 1876). Often referred to as the last full-blood Aboriginal woman.  Treated as a living museum exhibit, Truganinni lived away from country for most of her life, due to Europeans putting her on show.  Her and her husband “King Billy” were not treated as human by European peoples, rather as animals to be put on show. 

australianarchaeologyblog:

Truganinni (1812 - 1876). Often referred to as the last full-blood Aboriginal woman.  Treated as a living museum exhibit, Truganinni lived away from country for most of her life, due to Europeans putting her on show.  Her and her husband “King Billy” were not treated as human by European peoples, rather as animals to be put on show. 

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“Central to the various ways in which the history of Western subjectivity has been approached since the nineteenth century is the concept ‘discipline’. The premise underlying the bulk of contemporary social theory is not only that there has been a transition from tradition to modernity, but also that being modern means being disciplined, by the state, by each other and by ourselves; that the soul, both one’s own and that of others, became organized into the self, an object of reflection and analysis, and, above all, transformable in the service of ideals such as productivity, virtue and strength. The history of Western societies is seen to be characterised by an increasing objectification and disciplining of subjectivity, an ever-intensifying ordering of the soul, which, coupled with increasing individualization, seems to have turned us moderns into thoroughly self-controlled, administered, not to mention depressed ‘autistic neutrums’. Karl Marx observed the disciplinary effects of factory labour, the ‘dull compulsion’ of the commodification of labour itself, and the emergence of a working class which ‘by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of [the capitalist] mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature’. Georg Simmel also examined how personality accommodates to the requirements of an urban capitalist environment, emphasizing that punctuality, calculability and exactness become part of modern personalities to the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within’. Of the classical social theorists, Max Weber had perhaps the keenest interest in discipline, since for him the discipline associated with ascetic Protestantism played a crucial role in the development of Western capitalism, perhaps even constituting its uniqueness in world history.”

Robert van Krieken - The Organisation of the Soul: Elias and Foucault on Discipline and the Self (via thepovertyoftheory)