Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.
You can see my photo report from the last Women’s March 2017 here.
And you can see more of my photos from this 2018 march here, here, and here.
Please enjoy these radical feminist images from 2018! Yours in the struggle FAR family!
All photos by Marie Cartier
Continue reading “Photo Report from the 2nd Women’s March, January 20, 2018 by Marie Cartier”
Like many in the FAR community, I participated in the world-wide 2017 Women’s March. So did Madge, the bodacious cartoon character who took me by surprise in 1990 and went on to become the narrative character of The Maeve Chronicles. Her life in print, as the first century Celtic Magdalen, satisfied her until….November 8th, 2016 when Madge returned, mouthy as ever, to rejoin us in our own times.
On the first anniversary of the historic march, I’d like to share a little of Madge’s millennia-spanning story and a few images from her two books of cartoons, now published in one volume.
Madge first appeared to me in 1990 as a line drawing of an ample woman sitting naked at a kitchen table drinking coffee. I had recently finished writing a novel, The Return of the Goddess, A Divine Comedy, and felt I had nothing more to say. I decided to play with magic markers for a while. Madge, as the naked woman introduced herself, was far from done with words. Fleshed out with peach magic marker, Madge told me she wanted “fiery neon orange” for her hair color. She also required speech balloons for her theological queries. (For example: If we are all members of the body of Christ, who is the twelve-year molar, the kneecap, the colon?) Enchanted with her sass, I invited her to be in my next novel. I pitched ideas to her. She rejected them all as too dull and said, “I want my own book of cartoons first.” Continue reading “Happy Anniversary, Women’s March, with love from Madge by Elizabeth Cunningham”
Throughout my life I refrained from hard core cursing and substituted certain four letter words with modified publicly suitable words. I just didn’t think it was becoming of me to curse, but if and when I did do it it was about something pretty major, and I would softly let it out.
Being a woman and holding yourself with “old world” elegance means to negate any kind of cursing. I’ve always thought that until the last four years of my life. My cursing content has gone up 10 times since I became a mom. Suddenly it felt so much more potent to add f-ing to the word tired. Or instead of saying, “wow, that really sucks” and replacing with “that’s bullsh!t.” My choice of curse words has no boundaries anymore as it once used to. I feel sad about that. Like I’ve lost discipline–but in a way I also feel liberated.
It’s now a new year. The season to make changes to makes oneself better and to make progress to a healthier state of being. I could say, OK I’ll go back to my innocence, so to speak. I’ll refrain from cursing, since it’s totally taboo in my family to begin with, not really appropriate in my field of work, philanthropy, and simply not lady like. It really isn’t. But, I still enjoy it when I feel like using those words. Continue reading “Being a Woman & Using Certain FOUR-letter Words by Valentina Khan”
I needed to check out a camera for an assignment. I was in the small equipment room looking at equipment I clearly did not know how to use yet. But, I was required to check out a camera and start. I was excited to begin.
I turned around to ask a question of the guy who helped us check out equipment. I was surprised, and then stunned to see him close the door behind him. I don’t know if he locked it, but he stood in front of it, blocking my exit, and asked me, “How bad do you want that camera?”
I was a radical lesbian separatist who wore “ACT-UP FIGHT AIDS” T-shirts regularly to school. I stared at him and said the first thing that came to my mind, “I am not the person you want to do this to. Trust me.” We stared at each other. He laughed and slowly moved away from the door. I left, with the camera (I think), I finished that assignment and somehow passed the camera class. What I do know for sure is that I never checked out a camera again, and somehow convinced myself that the “equipment” part of film making was somehow too technical for me.
I had come out to LA from Colorado and was extremely proud to get into one of the best theater and film schools in the US. However, I was completely not “used to” the level of casual and cruel sexism women in the industry were subjected to. There was an unwritten code that if you wanted to make it as a woman—well, you better toughen up and get used to what the industry looked like for women. Continue reading “#MeToo or Why I Didn’t Make a Film in Film School by Marie Cartier”
I lie in bed with him, cementing the details in my memory. The way the morning air is heavy and green. The sound of 
last night’s raindrops continuing to drip from the overfull gutters on the roof. The insistent stab of a single-note bird song in the air. His head nestles in the crook of my arm the way it has done every morning for three years. Blond hair against my nose, breathing in the slightly baby smell of him. “This is the last time,” I whisper softly. “We are all done after this. This is the last time we will have nonnies.”
This is not the first last time for me, but it is the last, last time. The first baby was born 14 years ago and gathered to my breast with all the tenderness and uncertainty and instinctiveness of a first, first. “Do you want nursies?” I whisper to that new little boy, and we begin the next steps in our bond, nursing for nearly three years, until one day, six weeks away from the birth of the next baby boy, I decide that we truly have to be done. I am a breastfeeding counselor for other nursing mothers and I feel like I should want to tandem nurse my two boys. I fondly envision their hands joining across my body, the easy love and camaraderie between them blossoming through this shared time with their mother. But, I feel an intense irritation with nursing while pregnant, nearly a sense of revulsion and the almost irresistible urge to shove away my sweet little boy as I prepare to greet the life of another. I talk to my midwife about my feelings and she explains that with her own two daughters, the agitated feeling at nursing the older one did not go away with the birth of the second, but instead became dramatically worse. After hearing this, I feel panicky and I decide we do, in fact, have to wean. He is a very verbal and precocious toddler and I am easily able to explain to him that it is time to be finished nursing. One night though, he lies in bed with me crying and begging to nurse. He says he really needs to. I tell him, “remember, we’re all done, but if you really, really need me, if you really, really still need to have nursies, you can.” He doesn’t nurse, but instead falls asleep, reassured that while our nursing relationship might be over, I’m still here.
I recently noticed that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about financial security, the way class systems work in the United States context, and how these types of realities inform my feminism. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that for the first time in my life I am not a student with multiple part time jobs, but rather am a “real” adult working full time at a job that offers retirement and medical benefits.
As I’ve written about before, I grew up in a poor family in rural Wisconsin and as a result I am often hyper vigilant about my finances. While I likely go a bit overboard when organizing my budgeting, balancing, saving, and spending this type of organizing is something I can control. The simple act of paying a bill, or determining how much I can spend on groceries this week gives me a profound sense of safety because for the first time there really is enough coming in to support my basic needs.
Continue reading “Empowering Toys and the Problem of Class Divisions by Katie M. Deaver”
“You need to take a step back. You need to take a pause, relax, reassess. Two steps back, you can see more clearly, then you can move forward.” That’s what my brother first told me as I shared with him the overwhelmingness of my life. My first reaction was: Well – that is easier said than done. Plus, the thought of taking a pause and relaxing only made me think about how much more behind I’d fall on everything. I confessed to him that beside my regular teaching-related responsibilities, I commit to too many other things – only to end up feeling poorly about my performance.
“Do not be that person,” he said. I knew he was right. Some of my situation of overwhelmingness I do to myself; knowing I have limited time available, I nonetheless say “yes” more often than I say “no.” This is born of my own compulsion and socialization. But, as Dawn noted in a comment she left on Tuesday’s post, I need to remind myself that “my compulsion…is often just my compulsion.” Much of the time, I can choose otherwise. Continue reading “Listening Deeply to Yourself by Xochitl Alvizo”
Just the other day, I realized that discussion of my housekeeping has been a fairly regular conversation throughout my life. One of my earliest memories is being about four years old in my yellow bedroom on Ruth Avenue in North Canton, Ohio, sitting amidst what seemed like a mountain of stuff. I was trying to organize and put it away at my mother’s behest. I had a red bandana tied across the top of my hair, and I was pressed up against a large cardboard box decorated with Disney’s slapstick hero, Donald Duck. I was young and apparently had not learned how to differentiate all my consonants, because, as the story goes, I complained that all I ever did was “cwean, cwean, cwean!”
As a teenager in my mauve bedroom on Demington Avenue in Canton, Ohio, my sister and I, who shared a bedroom, were under the constant scrutiny of our stepfather. I don’t remember it being exceptionally messy in there; the space was probably maintained better than average for kids our age, but the house was managed like the army. Once, the appearance of the room was sufficiently troubling as to result in the removal of our bedroom door from its hinges. I am still not sure what the purpose of this weird punishment was (humiliation?), but I recall feeling this to be one of the lowest points in my whole housecleaning career. Continue reading “Neither My Duty nor My Honor by Natalie Weaver”
My brother is, in this own words, an “old school street, squatter, gutter punk.” Indeed, he lives outside the system. He is an anarchist atheist and has lived many nights of his life on the streets – by choice. He has a quick and easy smile and makes friends effortlessly. Recently, while stuck in Seattle during an extended layover on his way back to Europe, where he’s been living the last few years, he passed the time making new friends and exploring the immediate area –
Continue reading “Feminist Gutter Punk Freedom by Xochitl Alvizo”
Ever since the election of You-Know-Who, I have been doing a lot of creative writing.
Ever since the election of You-Know-Who, I have been doing a lot of creative writing. Unlike academic publications, policy reports, or my dissertation, creative writing, much like my mentor Dr. Marie Cartier has written about, provided me with a needed escape from a world that seems to grow darker with each passing day. In college, I served as Poetry Editor for the Wisconsin Review, the oldest literary journal in Wisconsin. Continue reading “What I Believe (Post-2016) by John Erickson”
Feminism and Religion 