Category: Body

Shedding Shame by Joyce Zonana

As I follow my program, I grow clearer and stronger. I know exactly what I want and I take it. When I sit down to eat, I feel my appetite, healthy and strong. I feed that appetite, choosing just what I need and what will truly nurture me. When I get up from the table, I am complete and whole within myself. Whether I reach my “goal weight” or not, I’ve already succeeded. And so, this New Year, I won’t be making any new resolutions. I’m already on my path, shedding shame.

jz-headshotAt the lovely small Chanukah party I attended earlier this month, I did not taste the latkes, those delicious potato pancakes fried in oil and typically served with sour cream and applesauce. My hostess offered them to me repeatedly, proudly noting that she’d used her Polish grandmother’s recipe. But I politely said “no thank you,” I’d just started a diet. “Who starts a diet in December?” someone asked. Someone else pointedly wondered “How can you not eat latkes at Chanukah?” but I quietly insisted that I needed to refrain. I promised, though, that I’d have some next year, once I’d shed the extra pounds that were making me uneasy in my own body.

In my Middle Eastern Jewish home it was the height of rudeness not to partake of what someone offered you to eat. So my refusal was difficult on many levels. But in fact, we never ate latkes at Chanukah. Instead we had deep-fried beignets, little balls of dough, sticky-sweet and drenched in rosewater-scented sugar syrup. I wouldn’t be having any of those this year either. And though another friend at the party assured me I didn’t need to lose weight— “You’re zaftig and beautiful just as you are,” she said—I’d decided a few weeks earlier that, Chanukah or no Chanukah, Christmas or no Christmas, this December was exactly when I wanted to begin my journey to what I believe is, for me, a healthier body weight.

Continue reading “Shedding Shame by Joyce Zonana”

Navigating Social Space as Power-Struggle, Pt. 2 by Elisabeth Schilling

Disclaimer/Trigger Warning: This post contains details about unwanted sexual advances. Read Part I here.

After Sicily, I went to the English countryside for an intended two weeks in a work exchange. A retired, but part-time, lecturer of Greek and Latin in his 60s was moving house and needed help packing and cleaning and cooking. There would, in a day or two, also be a male student from Lithuania and a Brazilian couple joining the communal house, and I found the position through workaway.info, a site one must pay for that I used three years ago with no problem.

On one hand, I have to use sites like this from time to time due to financial reasons. On the other hand, after traveling alone for awhile, I long for the communal exchange. I enjoy helping someone learn a language, cook for their family, organize their clutter because of the conversations along the way. They have a house and extra food. I have the time (my two classes I teach at university online do not take much) to help. If the people involved are mindful and truly grateful for community and shared work and resources, it can be a sacred return to a way of life where people can practice sharing, non-greed, and carrying each other’s burdens. We practice living with strangers, with all the challenges that presents, instead of isolating ourselves in presumed comfort. Continue reading “Navigating Social Space as Power-Struggle, Pt. 2 by Elisabeth Schilling”

Navigating Social Space as Power-Struggle, Pt. 1 by Elisabeth Schilling

The space we take up by our bodies is an element of the sacred. As we move from bed in waking, through our houses and then out into the world, if any of that movement places a woman in close proximity with a man or men, she might do well to observe how the male presence may modify her behavior, from adjusting orientation, position, and flow.

I was in Sicily for four weeks, and as I lived about 15 km from the town center, I took the bus. There is no on-the-minute bus schedule for my stop, but I could calculate when the bus would depart from the station and how long it might take to get to where I lived. Sometimes if felt like the bus just wouldn’t come. Continue reading “Navigating Social Space as Power-Struggle, Pt. 1 by Elisabeth Schilling”

Jewish Hair, Witch Hair, and the Problem of Identity by Jill Hammer

This is a time of increased vulnerability for many minority populations in the United States: people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, native peoples. The policies and rhetoric of the current administration have left all these groups exposed to hostility.  Women are also feeling the pressure, as the gender split in voting in the past election suggests. And, Jews also are facing increased visibility.  In addition to the murders in Pittsburgh, anti-Semitic incidents around the country have increased in the last few years.  All this has me thinking about visibility, chosen and unchosen.

My father, an Ashkenazi Jew with curly black hair, green eyes and dark skin, came from an immigrant family that arrived here in the early 20th century from the region of Poland known as Galicia.  His mother in particular valued assimilation into American identity, and prized blond hair as a sign of this identity– she in fact later dyed her black hair blond.  His aunt had blond hair and it was considered a family coup.  (There’s much to say here about developing an assumed American identity of whiteness, as well as the presumption of Christianity.) When I was a little girl, I had blond hair and blue eyes.  My father used to call me his blond-haired, blue-eyed girl.

“No,” I would insist.  “My hair is brown and my eyes are green.” Continue reading “Jewish Hair, Witch Hair, and the Problem of Identity by Jill Hammer”

Lei by Elisabeth Schilling

Mauro Drudi’s installation of LEI (SHE/HER/YOU – formal) in the Chiesa de San Cristoforo on the Sicilian island of Ortigia where I usually take a bus to daily has become the shrine of women I’ve been searching for. Each time I cry, I am glad I can feel something: those tears are a mixture of communion, comfort, and recognition.

When one enters the church, there are two converging walls. On either side, a woman’s face is painted in shadow and light, gazing off toward the light, is reproduced over and over so that the number of women looks almost countless. They are the same face, a reproduction of Antonello da Messina’s “Annunziata” in the mode of pop art. The difference is not in expression. They all wear the same thoughtful, complicated, neutral countenance, holding deep thoughts and experiences of suffering and wise knowing, both acceptance and maybe resistance; they have lived and might be any age, although I see in our connection my own. The difference is between glossy, unblemished surfaces of wood vs. surfaces weathered, slightly ragged, sometimes scribbled on with ink. The former, found on the right when one enters supposedly represents the “positive” woman, the “western woman [. . . representing someone] happy, gorgeous, well-kept.” On the left, about these representations, Drudi says, “Which artist can paint the skin of a woman who has been abused, beaten, exploited, captivated or disfigured with acid? In my opinion, nobody, and so I let the material speak: the wall of a beach hut destroyed by a storm; woods and materials used and abused [. . .]; exhausted panels deriving from carrying tons of goods, tables, packagings, production wastes.”

Continue reading “Lei by Elisabeth Schilling”

I Was Brainwashed to Believe I Wasn’t Human. Now I’m on a Mission Against that Cult-Part 3

Trigger warning: rape, sexual assault, domestic abuse, graphic sexual content

In Part 1 of this story, I introduced a discussion of Johan Galtung’s theory of cultural violence as it relates to my experience as a young woman in an abusive relationship. To recap:

Cultural violence is: “…any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form. Symbolic violence built into a culture does not kill or maim like direct violence or the violence built into the structure. However, it is used to legitimize either or both.”

Cultural violence against women is: Normalization and promotion of pornography, prostitution, degradation, and sexual objectification of females in media, predominantly male language in civic, business, and religious institutions, gender roles and stereotypes, misogynist humor, gaslighting, minimizing or denying any of these forms of violence.

Continue reading “I Was Brainwashed to Believe I Wasn’t Human. Now I’m on a Mission Against that Cult-Part 3”

“First Blood” Celebration by Esther Nelson

This semester I’m teaching a course titled “The Abrahamic Traditions: Women and Society.”  Because I believe story is one of the best ways to understand a point of view, I use a novel or memoir to accompany each tradition. The novel I use in the Judaism unit is Anita Diamant’s, The Red Tent.

The Red Tent focuses on Dinah, Leah and Jacob’s daughter.  Early in the novel, the narrator says, “My name [Dinah] means nothing to you.  My memory is dust….The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men who had no way of knowing.”

The biblical account (Genesis 34) tells us that Shechem, King Hamor’s son, “seized her [Dinah] and lay with her by force.”  It also says that Shechem’s “soul was drawn to Dinah” and “he loved the girl,” and insisted that his father arrange things so Dinah could be his wife.  Nowhere in the biblical account do we hear Dinah’s voice. She’s portrayed as a victim and used as a bartering tool by Jacob and his sons in their attempt to gain power in the region.  Jacob and his sons required that Hamor and all the men within his kingdom be circumcised as a condition for the marriage between Dinah and Shechem.  King Hamor agreed, but on the third day after the men were circumcised and in pain, Simeon and Levi, two of Jacob’s sons, entered the city “and killed all the males,” for “defiling” their sister.  “Should our sister be treated like a whore?” Dinah then disappears from the narrative.

Continue reading ““First Blood” Celebration by Esther Nelson”

Fuck This Sexist Shit by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

Our whole lives, we are taught to be nice. To be considerate of others. To play fairly. To fess up when we mess up. Do unto others, turn the other cheek, respect your elders, obey the rules.

And for what? For what?

So some hyper-entitled coldhearted sneering rapist fuckheads can cheat and steal and lie and game the system until rape survivors are criminals and rapists are victims, while they rob us all blind, crush our freedoms, and rip away our future?

Fuck this sexist shit.

I am so done with this fucking misogynist society, where the president of the most powerful world empire mocks a rape survivor and laughs about assaulting women.

Continue reading “Fuck This Sexist Shit by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir”

Falling Rocks by Natalie Weaver

My dad took me to see Bill Cosby in Columbus, Ohio when I was a kid.  We used to listen to a record of him talking, which I could only pretend to find funny even then, but dad liked it and wanted to see him in person.  The venue had really narrow seating, and although I could barely hear Cosby’s routine, I laughed for most of the show.  I had brought a friend with me, who was heavier set, and she squirmed miserably the whole time, at one point looking pleadingly at me and whispering, “I’m trying to get comfortable.”  Now, he’s in the slammer, and I get a little ill every time I think of Pudding Pops.

Not too long ago, Uncle Frank died.  He terrorized three generations of women in my family.  My mom was a little girl when he exposed himself behind a door jam, so that all she could see was his ghostly pale member protruding through the open walkway.  She would laugh when she told the story but reminded us to stay clear of him.  He was regarded as a family clown, but on his death bed, as my mom put it, he finally “got her.” As she sat at the edge of his bed to bid him farewell, his toes wriggled contentedly into her buttocks.  He died with a smile on his face.  We laugh, but it isn’t funny.  Who knows what he did on his free time?

Continue reading “Falling Rocks by Natalie Weaver”

Playing Safe: BDSM & The Ethics of Justice and Care By Angelina Duell

From the archives – 9/23/11 – our first FAR year! 

This post is written in conjunction with the Feminist Ethics Course Dialogue project sponsored by Claremont School of Theology in the Claremont Lincoln University Consortium,  Claremont Graduate University, and directed by Grace Yia-Hei Kao.

It is Wednesday night and I am alone in the house. It’s dark; the only light is from my computer screen. A bead of sweat rolls from my brow as I delicately tap the keys of my keyboard until two words stare back at me, “BDSM feminism.” With bated breath, I press enter.

Just kidding.  Continue reading “Playing Safe: BDSM & The Ethics of Justice and Care By Angelina Duell”