In the introduction to Primate Visions, Donna Haraway states that she will use “potent verbal and visual images” to show how primates have been manipulated by human culture to explore relationships between numerous binaries such as nature/culture and sex/gender (2). For Haraway, the symbolic and the real figures of primates become a vehicle to explore these rigid binary distinctions because, as she claims, “Primates existing at the boundaries of so many hopes and interests are wonderful subjects with whom to explore the permeability of walls, the reconstitution of boundaries, the distaste for endless socially enforced dualisms” (3). Haraway’s inclusion of these (visual) representations of primates further elucidates the connections between visuality and the construction of knowledge, yet her inclusion and erasure of certain images leaves me wanting more. Juxtaposing Palmore’s Reclining Nude, a poster created by the Guerilla Girls, and the absent/false image of Carl Akeley’s triumph, I will demonstrate the ways in which Haraway’s argument can sustain itself and erase itself, and by creating a continuum—or rather a triangular relationship—of these images, I aim to show how Haraway’s visual element falls short of producing her desired attempt to make bitter these “enforced dualisms” by forefronting a discussion of absence/presence in these images and their contexts.



“Primatology is Simian Orientalism,” a major segment of Haraway’s introduction, is the only subsection that features a visual image—Tom Palmore’s Reclining Nude. Haraway writes, “Sex and the west are axiomatic in biology and anthropology. Under the guiding logic of these complex dualisms, western primatology is simian orientalism. [Figure 1.1]” (10). This is the only introduction or context for Palmore’s painting. Conceivably, this could be a stylistic move. If “sex and the west are axiomatic” in certain discourses, it is only logical that this statement is suggested in Palmore’s painting according to the text. Yet, the absence of context to this painting suggests pure presence; it just is nothing is needed to buttress its inclusion in this section. Turning to Marx’s phrase—“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (10)—allows for a connection between Orientalism and primatology and the insertion of Palmore’s Nude. The primates cannot represent themselves in art, and thus humanity must do it for them. As a result, Palmore’s painting is “axiomatic” and sheer presence marked only by the absence of context and description.

In contrast to this image of Palmore, I turn to Haraway’s chapter on “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” and more specifically on her discussion of Delia Akeley’s biography of her husband. The discussion and presentation of Delia’s Jungle Portraits is marked by an absence in a similar way that Palmore’s work is marked by presence. Of importance here is the absent photograph of Carl Akeley’s restored morale, a photo that is a lie or hoax perpetuated by Delia: “Delia produced a biographical effect at odds with the official histories; she showed the messiness behind the ‘unified truth’ of natural history museums” (50). Haraway’s investigation of this image seems to compliment her discussion of truth/fiction—another important binary she explores—and yet its “absence” from her text is marked by the complimentary contexts and analysis of its perpetuating lie concerning manhood and adventure. This photo remains a lie/hoax in Delia’s text, but Haraway shows the way in which it discloses a fact: “The accompanying photos in the archive suggest a version of reality, a biography of Africa, which the Museum and its official representatives did not want displayed in their Halls or educational publications” (50).

Palmore’s Reclning Nude and Delia’s absent photo are two instances in which Haraway’s text perpetuates this binary distinction between absence and presence. By including Palmore, Haraway engenders and creates a certain truth/lie—that of the axiomatic West—whereas with the Akeley she creates a lie/truth—that of Museum culture’s purposeful elision of reality to produce particular forms of masculinity. By introducing a third term into this binary distinction I have highlighted in Haraway’s text, I would like to show how the Guerrilla Girls’s poster, Get Naked, uses the binary of absence/presence to be “especially productive and especially problematic” and in so doing complicate Haraway’s binary (Haraway 12).

Get Naked first premiered in 1989 on NYC buses after being rejected as a billboard commissioned for the Public Art Fund. In ways that Haraway’s text and images cannot do, this poster manages to rupture distinctions between absence/presence and truth/lie. The inclusion of the gorilla image on the head of Ingres’s Odalisque creates a fiction. Likewise, the Guerilla Girls “assumed the names of dead women artists and wore gorilla masks in public, concealing their identities and focusing on the issues rather than their personalities.”5 Thus, the Guerilla Girls enact a fiction, and by seizing hold a slippage in language that occurs between the connections of gorilla and guerilla, they are able to “productively” use the image of the primate to further their cause and agenda. This can be contrasted with the factual, which is represented in the words of their poster. In this single, consolidated space, the Guerilla Girls are able to create an absence and presence that marks out the way in which the female body is ever-present—in the form of the nude subject—and absent—in the form of female artists.



By acknowledging how extremely “productive” the Get Naked poster is, I also acknowledge how “problematic” this poster and the position of the Guerilla Girls can be. In fact, this co-opting of the image of the gorilla resembles an Orientalist approach, in which the dominant position uses the subordinate position as a resource for/of power. Thus, the Guerilla Girls can easily adopt a gorilla/guerilla identity because of their position of power over primates and as academics or art critics. Also, the use of the mask and the creation of fictional identities shows how “mobile” the Guerilla Girls can be (Haraway 10); anyone could wear a mask. This position and poster, then, uses the primate in a way that is at once “popular, important, marvelously varied, and controversial” (3). While they are making an audience aware of a deficiency of female artists in museums, they do it at the expense of the gorilla.

Haraway’s inclusion of arresting images is important because it shows how our visual representation of primates has shaped the discourses of primatology and humanity. The silent distinction between absence/presence in Haraway’s text stands in contrast to the poster because of its use of image and text to correspond to one another, something that is lacking in the two Haraway “images.” By introducing a third term—the Guerilla Girl’s poster—into the continuum of Haraway’s images, we can see how Haraway’s exploration of binary opposition creates another one between absence/presence that is elided in her inclusion of the Palmore and Delia’s photo. Haraway’s text and images rely on binaries in order to be presented; thus, her work can be critiqued for the binaries that she overtly overlooks or manipulates in order to explore the primate’s liminal position.

Do You Believe In Me?

A most amazing public speaker. That is exactly how I would describe Dalton Sherman. You can see rhetoric at work in the speech of this Dallas public school student. I was so motivated by this video that I blurted out at the beginning of class to my unknowing, much-too-sleepy, and completely shocked comp class, "I believe in you!"



It was so weird because Sherman talks about something so simple and yet so complex. We sort of got into this last week when talking about feminist teaching and the de-centering of authority in the classroom. Are there ways to avoid it? One pessimist in class just kept harping on the fact that we still have to turn in grades at the end of the semester/year and that no matter what this is an authoritarian position we will never be able to escape. (She even decried my methods of my equal power as silly. As if letting students grade themselves will allow them to learn anything. Well, wouldn't they be able to learn how to evaluate others?)

Body Politic

"Nature is only the raw material of culture, appropriated, preserved, enslaved, exalted, or otherwise made flexible for disposal by culture in the logic of capitalist colonialism. Similarly, sex is only the matter to the act of gender; the productionist logic seems inescapable in traditions of Western binarisms. This analytical and historical narrative logic accounts for my nervousness about the sex/gender distinction in the recent history of feminist theory. Sex is 'resourced' for its re-presentation as gender, which 'we' can control. It has seemed all but impossible to avoid the trap of an appropriationist logic of domination built into the nature/culture binarism and its generative lineage, including the sex/gender distinction" (Haraway 198).

"Is there a connection between this state of mind--the Cold War mentality, the attribution of all our problems to an external enemy--and a form of feminism so focused on male evil and female victimization that it, too, allows for no differences among women, men, places, times, cultures, conditions, classes, movements?" (Rich 221)

"But for many women I knew, the need to begin with the female body--our own---was understood not as applying a Marxist principle to women, but as locating the grounds from which to speak with authority as women. Not to transcend this body, but to reclaim it" (Rich 213).

"Every person is at the center of his world, and circumambient space is differentiated in accordance with the schema of his body. As he moves and turns, so do the regions front-back and right-left around him" (Tuan 41).

Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 183- 201.

Rich, Adrienne. "Notes Towards a Politics of Location." Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985. New York: Norton. 210- 231.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. "Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values." Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. 34-50.

Haraway Rocks!

I have been meditating over this reading I have to do for class this weekend. Donna Haraway is at once so completely confusing and so amazing! I have never been so absorbed in theory in quite some time.

Here are some points that stopped me for a while and that I wanted to share:

Weeding out science (186) - "We unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our 'embodied' accounts of the truth, and we ended up with one more excuse for not learning any post-Newtonian physics and one more reason to drop the old feminist self-help practices of repairing our own cars" (186)

I think what H is saying here is that even objectivism became too subjective because post-structuralism and postmodernism showed us that "objectivism" is a ruse. So we reverted backwards (?) instead of learning something fundamental about this. If we can't escape a location/rooted ideology, where are we if we wish to question this and other past positions?
"Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything. Here, we, as feminists, find ourselves perversely conjoined with the discourse of many practicing scientists, who, when all is said and one, mostly believe they are describing and discovering things by means of all their constructing and arguing" (187).

VERY IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH - 187 - "We need the power of modern critical theories of how meaning and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future" (187). ----

I think here H is talking about how we need the multiplicity within the "local knowledges" in order to recognize the plural in the world at large. We are not looking for some grand key to unlock it, we are looking for the maze (path)? We are already in the room.

I can't wait to talk about these topics in class so I needed to share them now. Yes to education!

WTF South Africa?

I don't think of myself as an activist or very political, and sometimes I really wish that I was more into solving the world's wrongs. I feel so little sometimes that I simply don't always know where to start. Someone recently asked me in an interview, "If I had to kill someone, who would it be?" At the time, I was said someone who was attacking me, you know defending myself. But I think rapists would be right after that. I'm not saying I am going all vigilante like Jodie Foster, but it would be nice to see criminals get their just due sometimes.

So, where is this stemming from? Feministing just posted this blog about men in South Africa raping lesbians so that they will their sexual orientation will be "cured." I nearly barfed when reading this out of this weird mixture of fear, anger, and hate. The dark side. This "corrective rape" as it is called pisses me off, and I just can't wait until the day when EVERYONE IN THE WORLD realizes that there is nothing wrong with homosexuals, lesbians, intersex, or transgendered people. Spread the love. Befriend someone in the community--it's a place to start.

Reading Notes (on Feminism)

This article I was editing for TSWL cites Susan Gubar's 2006 work, Rooms of Our Own, and I was so struck by the description of the book that I decided to take it home and read it. While I did have to go through the text really fast because it was on Interlibrary Loan, I would definitely like to check it out again since it sort of exemplifies this weird genre that I have been trying to conceptualize in my mind (and perhaps even write about in the near future). [Although at this point I should totally thank my friend Court for helping me think through some of these ideas and for even coming up with some impetus for me to pursue this idea.]

I think one of the best ways to classify this genre is creative criticism. Sort of like a variation on creative non-fiction. I have been finding some works that fit into the genre and was thankful to come across The Intimate Critique--a bright prospect for future reading!

Well, what I want to share comes from Gubar's text. In her rift on Woolf's Chapter One and talking about first-wave feminism, Gubar writes:

"Still the poorer half of humanity, still woefully unrepresented in political circles, women have nevertheless begun to earn wages nearly equal to those of men. The Pill, birth control, abortion: did these trigger transmutations in sex (the biological manipulation of the body) and in gender (the societal manipulation of the roles of mother, caregiver, nurturer), or was the real basis for change economic, the opening up of virtually all professions to women for the first time in history? In any case, birth control and woman's greater employment had driven home and the real point behind Wollstonecraft's and Fuller's, Mill's and Schreiner's polemics, their attack on biological determinism, their resistance to the idea that anatomy is destiny, that biology justifies or dictates social norms." (pg. 32)

This particular question really got me thinking. Is one of the reasons that we have a shift in how we conceptualize gender today because of the technologies of birth? And how much does our understanding of genetics and hormones influence it? Gubar's question made me realize the significance that birth plays in how we think of gender. If woman uses the pill and aborts fetuses, is she not a woman? If a woman hates her offspring, is she a man? I had thought of these questions in some form or another before, but it was reading this that catalyzed these thoughts. And yet even if anatomy is not always destiny, it is important to remember that anatomy is important sometimes. So, I guess it is a good question. What causes a change in people's thinking, woman's control of their body or woman's ability to be equal in the social arena? And doesn't woman's ability to be equal socially (say in the workforce in particular) may entail a control and manipulation of their biology?

Sharing Some "Oh My!"

I came across The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould recently when I was reading some essays by Barbara Kingsolver. I don't have much to say about it except that it was a really interesting read. I wanted to share this particular section about female brains/skulls because I just thought it was too interesting not to.

Gustave Le Bon was a follower of Broca's school of thought in the field of craniometry. In La psychologie des foules (published 1895), Le Bon wrote:

"In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studies the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely. [....] A desire to give them the same education, and, as a consequence, to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera....The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women, leave the home and take part in our battles; on this day a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear" (pg 104-105 of Gould)

To think, to give woman the same goals as man would mean the ruination of family! I guess you could see why I went, "Oh My!," when reading this. Of course, there was a bit of giggling at 3 am when I read this, but I still think it is important to discuss things like this. Undoubtedly, someone in America, or even the world, still thinks like this.

More Anticpation

Now, I have something to look forward to after the new Byatt is published in May. Margaret Atwood's new book is coming out in September (unless they move the publication date).

Here's some scoop I found out, (thanks Fantastic Fiction)

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

"An epic of biblical proportions, The Year of the Flood is a feast of imagination and a journey to the end of the world. Adam One is the leader of the God's Gardeners, a religious group devoted to living under the command of the natural world. They wear beige cloth-sacks, cultivate mushrooms, harvest honey and curse each other by shouting: Pig-Eater! Their community is only tolerated by the CorpSeCorps, the ruling power, because they are not perceived as threatening. But, this is a world where gene-splicing is the norm; where lions and lambs have become Liobams and pigs have human DNA. The times, and species, are changing at a rapid rate, and with loyalites as thin as environmental stability, the future is a dangerous place. And, if the Waterless Flood does indeed arrive, as predicted by the Gardeners, will there even be a future to contemplate? Ren is a trapeze dancer at Scales and Tails, and can work a plank just as well. After a rip in her biofilm she is placed in solitary confinement until they can guarantee she is without disease. Her story is one part of our gateway into this uniquely constructed world. The other is Toby, an ex-counter-girl at SecretBurger ('Because we all love a Secret'), a natural cynic and source of extensive homeopathic knowledge; she knows her aminatas from her puffballs. Their stories weave beneath the holy teachings and saintly-songs of Adam One to create a truly apocalyptic vision, a world that harnesses Atwood's wit, dystopic imagination and sharp insight. The result is a collective blast of a novel and one that will remain with you until the Waterless Flood comes."

I love Atwood's novel. If you haven't read anything by her, I would recommend starting with The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake. Check her out when you get some time.

What will we be known as? Or using office hours productively!

I just had one of the most fascinating conversations about postmodern theory with the most unlikely of people--my favorite librarian who specializes in government and military history. I stopped by to inquire about getting my old summer job again. Then, one thing led to another, I was already late for my office hours, and I decided to stay and continue talking to her about this most interesting topic we arrived at. After the witty banter and catch-up, she sort of posed this odd question that took me a while to answer: "In the future what age will the 20th century be known as?" I was kinda stuck on the answer. She continued with some great speculation and started to explain her reasoning. She mentioned how in all the centuries before use there were some many adjectives and qualifiers to describe the time: Augustan, Victorian, Renaissance, Neolithic Era, etc. And then she got to the point of mentioning the reason, which was she never understood why we ("English majors") came up with postmodernism. Why not just have a new word altogether. Of course, I then got onto my spiel about Grand Narratives, explained some stuff about capitol letters and lower case letters. Ultimately, she stumped me yet again with semantics that I had not really put together.

"It would seem that every age or time period were modern if you in it in the present moment so using modernism as a designations seems strange."

Of course, I started to draw on some pop culture references and mention words like technological age or post-industrial as a good qualifier. And yet, at the same time were seemed not necessarily to really be talking time periods but rather about the concept of experience. (One of my newly discovered favorite imaginative and intellectual wandering topics.) She posed a rather great question that made us both laugh, "How do I know my desk is in my office if I am not in there?" I immediately thought of Toy Story having just mentioned it was one of the few VHSs that I have left. And yet it so true. And all this ultimately got me to think about last night's Contemporary American Lit course and our discussion of Adrienne Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck."

I was so completely ready to call the book of myths patriarchy. Patriarchy is fueled off of adventure and exploration; it is how a man is made. And patriarchy is where the name of woman does not exist. For the name of woman cannot exist in patriarchy, for in patriarchy man creates the name of woman. Man names. Woman is named. I was working up this great speech that I left undelivered for class about how the book of myths feature women merely as props for male fantasies and how myths are romantic and adventurous and, yet, woman becomes nothing more than a prop or creation of man within them. And how, of course, Rich would want to associate myth with patriarchy because she wants to unmask the myths that patriarchy has, have, and will continue to perpetuate within society.

That is why the experience of Rich and the experience of reading her poetry is so interesting and fascinating. Of course, everything will be modern for someone in the present moment, just how every person can only see through there own eyes and there own experiences. Azar Nafisi said that it is when we accept difference and attempt to embody difference--to immerse ourselves in the lives of the Other--do we truly appreciate and understand our own culture. We know ourselves much more than we let on, and it is only through an understanding of others--walking in someone else's shoes--that we can truly learn or experience something unique.

Response to The Waves by Virignia Woolf

"It was a pretty boring day," said Michael. "There was lots of self-reflection and sleeping. Northing actually. Just voids of time spent doing things. Things over and again. Things done before, things done now, things to do later. Abstractness personified. Personality erased and abased. Tons of thinking about life and experiences. Lies to the self and to others. I can't believe I told my mom that I was having a good day. It was more of an average day. I did this and that. Nothing special. Nothing every really that special when it is all just the routine. Can anything ever stand out from a routine."


"Get up, sit down, move around. Actions repeated over and over again with little to no concious deliberation. Sadness, happiness, interest, and boredom all on this mathematical wave expansion table that the computer in the brain moves around and around on the x-y axis grid of my conciousness. Feel this, feel that. Cold, hot, anger...where does all of it come from? Why does looking at the window produce this feeling of loneliness and sterility inside? I can't create the world around me. I can't create anything material, just words on the page, words on the screen, words in my head, words in conversation. The condensed nature of my production swings laboriously over and around my thoughts."

Secret Life of an American Teenager

Because of DVR, I was lucky enough to catch a marathon of the first six episodes of ABC Family's new television show, Secret Life of an American Teenager, and of course, it wouldn't be a typical summer without latching onto some weird television show that I will indubitably not end up finish watching once school starts. Of course, the big "secret" is that teenagers have sex and that you can get pregnant the first time that you have sex. Wow! I didn't really know that those facts were that secret.



Monopolizing on the rather public pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears, ABCF decided to jump on the disturbing "new" trend of redefining "family values." Every episode is followed by a PSA about preventing teen pregnancy, however, it seems the only way to deal with it is to get married and have the kid (uh, disgusting). Of course, I was overly thrilled at the idea that Amy, the main "pregnant" character might actually succeed in getting an abortion. I mean, since the first episode, the word was mentioned and the seed planted. However, I should have known that a network with "family" in the title wasn't going to allow sweet teen Amy to actually follow through with it. This weeks episode was the final straw. She actually made it into the operation room of the clinic after being bombarded by a pro-life, evangelical ex-cheerleader and her new boyfriend who wants to marry her and make everything better. The naivete of half the cast is so lame and sort of passe when it comes to TV drama.


The redeeming features of the show, however, are Molly Ringwald as Amy's mom and India Eisley (quite the newcomer) as Amy's sister. While Molly Ringwald is playing the opposite end of her 80s roles, she does a pretty good job of acting like the adult version of her former roles, sometimes. India often steals the spotlights from the other characters of the show. The dry delivery of her lines seems to make her acting style seem raw and lame, however, her quirky lines and forward-thinking sensibilities outweigh her own childishness concerning her inability to understand adult relationships. And before I forget, I have to mention Francia Raisa as Adrian (the school's resident bad girl who enjoys sex and quite frankly may have the best lines of the show so far) and Amy Rider (Ben's friend and resident romance/sex statistician who seems to know more about sex than those two dudes from Loveline).


So, what is Amy's way out of this pregnancy? Well so far her options are abortion (which is probably a no-no), marrying Ben (which is lame and shouldn't happen), or getting together with the baby-daddy (which will probably happen for ratings and plot twists). Ah, conventional television.


But what really bugs me is that ABC Family won't just give her the abortion. Doesn't that happen in families? Is every family so story book? There are no gay families on the network. It seems as if the most they are willing to do is have inter-racial families (that are because of a foster agency not because of choice). (While I'm not an expert on the whole network, I'm pretty sure my statements are true, and if not, I apologize.)


Anyways, I'll keep watching it for a while, and who knows, maybe like Gossip Girl, a follow-up might appear in the future.

Welcome to Gilead....

At first I wasn't going to write about this until a friend of mine made a Facebook post with her own personal take. Let's just say my blood curdled when I was checking the news on CNN and came across this interesting headline: "Plan calls Pill, IUD abortions." It had the little camera icon next to it, which means that it was a video. Usually, I don't watch their videos because you have to let them load and sit through some cheesy commercial, however, with a headline like that, how could I possibly pass up some fervent discussion I knew was going to stem from this already controversial headline and amazingly interesting (and quite horrifying possible) subject at hand.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/08/01/todd.defining.abortion.cnn

What? Are you serious? So supposedly in some final act of Republican hoo-haa, the Bush administration is trying to push some bill/act through Congress that would question the scientific stances on birth--conception or implantation? To back up my already growing astonishment, I raked some other news sources and came across this article by The Wall Street Journal (thanks Callan).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121745387879898315.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

After just talking to Fink about how her Catholic college doesn't cover birth control, I realized that she could potentially be buying abortions under the new regime if this legislation is being passed. Yet again, I recall conversations in Scholars', of course all in Stave's classes, about abortion and what women go through to get them. I mean, do we really want to start having hanger-wire abortions and coke-a-cola douches again? Hell no. I still am just incredibly shocked by the hubris of man, thinking that he has the right to tell a woman what she can do with her body. Really.

All of this for me is just foreshadowing many conversations to come in my 1033 class. I've already printed out several articles, and I can't wait to start presenting some of this information to students to start getting them all riled up about personal and political issues. Of course, as the title of this blog alludes to, this is nothing more than a Atwood's dystopia coming to life before our very eyes. She warned us all, and unfortunately, a lot of us aren't taking her seriously.

The WSJ articles states, "A draft regulation, still being revised and debated, treats most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices as abortion because they can work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. The regulation considers that destroying 'the life of a human being.'" ... The article goes on a bit later, "If the draft regulation were to prompt some insurance companies to drop coverage for prescription birth control, 'that would be fantastic,' said Tom McClusky, a strategist with the conservative Family Research Council." OMG!? Are you serious? (I must hand it back over to Callan who ingeniously in her response to this posted a picture of the Duggar family, asking the question, "Is this what the American family should be like?" It wasn't framed that way, but it was along the lines of, is this what's going to happen without birth control. Of course, I don't think it would because we would still have under the counter abortions and new, ingenuous ways of aborting.)

So of course my own personal response to this issue is to want to go out and protest any possibility of this happening in our country. However, I realize that I'm probably part of a growing minority when it comes to this issues. Trying not be defeatist and wanting to flee America is not going to change the fact that continually this country is moving slowly towards fundamentalism. Sure, we haven't started bombing each other, segregating the nation, and taking away women's bank accounts, but with the way the environments keeps deteriorating, the economy weakens, and religious indoctrination continues...I just don't see any other possibility for this country. I mean I remember being in Ecofem and talking about the wars that America is going to be fighting 50 years from now over water. I mean I just can't handle it. Why do we have to impose religious beliefs, fuck even scientinfic beliefs onto others. I don't remember there being all of this hoo-haa when Lamarck (I think that's his name) was fucking up the agricultural life of Russia. Sorry for the mini-rant.

So what can we do? Callan says we should wish that Stevens doesn't drop dead and that Obama wins so that he can put more Democrats on the bench, but is that all we can do? No. We have to continue to educate others and show that having an abortion is not evil. Abortion is an option, and let's face it, sometimes it can be the best option. Should we keep bring babies into a world that would rather rip itself apart than live in harmony? Why is it that people feel the need to have their own biological offspring, is it some biological imperative or is it a hegemony that we have already bought into for so long we can see our way out of it?