Women's Bodies, Women's Freedom Poetry Cafe Feb. 5

 It's been fun, but Snowpocalypse 2011 seems to be almost over. By Saturday, roads should be open and life should be almost back to normal (at least for a little while). If you're in Oklahoma City, or can get to Oklahoma City, here's a great way to celebrate: OKC's own Lauren Zuniga will be the featured performer at a poetry cafe at Church of the Open Arms on Saturday night (that's Feb. 5th) from 7-9 p.m. The poetry cafe is a benefit for the Oklahoma Coalition For Reproductive Justice.

January 22nd marked the 38th anniversary of the 1973 US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which for the first time guaranteed women in the early months of pregnancy the right to obtain an abortion. Both nationally and in Oklahoma, that right is under increasing attack. In 2010, the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice formed to defend abortion rights, and met with a surprising degree of success. The poetry cafe is free, (and there will be refreshments), but if you can make a donation, 100 percent of all money collected will go to support the work of OCRJ.

In the interests of full disclosure, I ought to say that I am one of the poets who will be reading that evening.

Hope to see you there.

(Cross posted from Talking to Myself.)

When You Say Abortion

Here's the second collective poem from last night: (You can find the first poem here.) With this second poem, it seemed to work better to use the starting phrase only once, as the title. With both poems, I put in the verses in the order in which the slips of paper were given to me, and I tried to follow the line structure of the originals as much as I could. Now that these are down in "print," we can work with them and edit them as we choose.

When You Say Abortion

Billboard
Controversy
Who's right
Who's wrong
pain suffering
will there be a light at the end
of the tunnel.

You are talking about an issue
that is really none of your business
Stay out of it...It's up to me.

What if I hadn't been
born. I wouldn't be here to debate the issue.
When you say abortion
I say: Birth Control
Why not start
with that decision?

You think you have found the proof that any woman
who claims her own life must have innocent blood on her hands.

Let me come into the world now or not
it doesn't matter to me -- I am well
In your decision -- be well and love much

A seed
A flower
Should it live
or die
or take
responsibility
for actions

I think of Deborah, Tracy, Jean,
Julie, Terri, Grace, Susan, Amy, Brenda,
Mary, Bailey, Trina, Amber, Wendy...

I think every woman's choice
I chose to keep my child
but respect another woman's choice not to

It's My Body

Here's the first group poem from last night's Mary Daly discussion group. I ended up repeating the phrase "it's my body," because many of the segments didn't make sense without it.

It's My Body

It's my body.
My pleasure and delight are  my own,
but sometimes now I see my Grandmother in the mirror,
strong, soft, faded, fresh, vulnerable, powerful.

It's my body.
It's not a machine meant for making babies
and not some contraption designed to evoke delight in an outside observer.
It is me. It is my  home.

It's my body.
My spirit guides my body in its unique way.
to love and to birth.
I need no other spirit to interfere. Likewise
I shall not interfere with your spirit.

It's my body.
Justice means giving birth
Not giving birth
My body, my right -- poor, black, rich, white
all women

It's my body.
Everything about it belongs to me.
I will be the one to decide how it will be.
No one else has the right
to

It's my body.
and I'll do with it what I want to
let it be
run, jump, stand, roll
hold your arms
out and spin in
the sun.

It's my body.
Not your body.
I don't want yr insults or compliments
I can't believe we are still having this conversation
I blame you if I can't feed my baby
I can't afford your decisions

On the subject of young feminists

Here is a blog by a 25-year-old lesbian feminist medical student that I just discovered. She also wrote a really interesting post about the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Pauli Murray and the Indivisibility of Human Rights

Pauli Murray was a friend of Mary Daly's, mentioned several times in Daly's intellectual autobiography, Outercourse. They seem to have met during the time when Murray was teaching at Brandeis University, and Daly was less radical than she was to become later. As time went on, their approaches diverged. Daly left the Catholic Church and became an advocate for woman-only theorizing and activism. Murray, emphasized reconciliation among warring groups, and in 1977 became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. I'm not sure if these two women remained friends as their opinions diverged, but I would love to have been able to listen to a conversation between the two of them.

With that in mind, here is a term paper that I wrote about Pauli Murray for my US Women's Movements class:

Pauli Murray and the Indivisibility of Human Rights

At the close of the Civil War, the movement that had worked to gain freedom for enslaved African Americans and rights for all women was split by the controversy over passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution. These amendments sacrificed the goal of universal human rights in order to achieve a needed, but much more limited objective: political and voting rights for African American men. However necessary this compromise might have been, it had the tragic result of setting up antagonism between activists for the rights of African Americans and activists for the rights of women.

Nearly one hundred years later, this tragedy nearly repeated itself in the controversy over Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed job discrimination by private employers on the basis of race and other categories. As a joke, or perhaps as an act of sabotage, Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia added “sex” as a protected class under Title VII. Supporters of civil rights for African Americans worked to defeat this amendment. But then Pauli Murray, an African American lawyer and activist, wrote a powerful memo supporting the inclusion of sex as a protected class.

“The human rights `revolution’ transcends the issue of discrimination on basis of race or color,” she began. “Women’s rights are a part of human rights.” (MacLean, 70). Murray’s memo played an important role in helping this provision pass the US Senate (Murray 1987, 358). In this situation, she acted as a reformer. In other situations, she acted as a radical activist, such as when she was arrested and jailed in 1940 for violating a bus segregation law in Virginia, or when she helped lead nonviolent direct action to desegregate Washington DC restaurants in the 1940s. But whether her tactics were reformist or radical, her goal was always the same. Pauli Murray believed that human rights were indivisible, and that unity and reconciliation were the path to liberation.

Drug company milks breast cancer for fun and profit...

according to a post on one of my favorite blogs, the Feminist Peace Network.

The guy who talks in Tough Guise

Here is a link to the web site of Jackson Katz, the narrator of the film Tough Guise that we've been watching in the Mary Daly group.