Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

to follow up on what I wrote last night, I wrote this to a friend but ended up sending it to a more public forum: So, I went to the feminist book club meeting last night. We’d read Alexandra Robbins’ insider account of sororities. I had to laugh, of the twelve women in the room [...]

Have you ever heard that expression? “If you don’t like the weather in this town, just wait awhile. It will change.” It gets said everywhere I’ve lived. Well, in this town, it’s true. I walked to work, nice morning. The rain finally stopped. In the late afternoon, I sat in a park for a late [...]

So, yesterday, I related Agustin’s discussion of her fieldwork with the Progresistas, an organization that advocates for the rights of sex workers, mostly by handing out condoms. They believe that solidarity — among sex workers and between all women — is the method for obtaining women’s rights. As a consequence, they have a tendency to [...]

So, why the title of the earlier post, pt 1 of a discussion of Agustin’s Chapter, ‘From Charity to Solidarity,’ from her book, _Sex on the Margins? I entitled that post, “Did you hear the one about a sex club owner and some nuns?” Agustin draws on her fieldnotes, which she sets of in sans [...]

I’m going to skip ahead to the chapter I’d mentioned was most interesting in Augustin’ book, _Sex on the Margins_, which comes toward the end of the book. This is partly because I figure I won’t have time to get to the rest of the book before it’s due back from interlibrary loan. But it’s [...]

as I mentioned in an earlier post, Agustin’s second chapter, “Working to Travel; Traveling to Work,” in her book, Sex at the Margins, intervenes into a set of binary oppositions we hold about traveling, work, migrancy, agency, autonomy, and victims. The discourse around migrancy, Agustin argues, too often views women as having no agency. They [...]

there’s this guy on lbo who spend 99% of the time pulling stuff out of his ass and flinging it around so everyone else can enjoy the stench. which is to say, he’s almost always writing from the cuff, asking questions that would have been answered had he actually bothered to read the post or [...]

while this is out of order, I couldn’t resist writing a bit about Agustin’s ethnographically thick description of attending a conference on prostitution, one led by what we typically call abolitionists — activists who are opposed to prostitution and want to abolish it. Agustin calls them moral entrepreneurs, which tickled me because it’s an old [...]

dayum. I’m on the last chapter of agustin’s book where it gets really really good. she’s moving between thick description, anthropology-style, and analysis, covering things like the imposition of solidarity on sex workers on the part of progressive women who hand out condoms. they aren’t the moralizing sisters who are trying to rescue. no. they [...]

seriously. this really is related. as i mentioned in previous post, i couldn’t be arsed to travel my lazy ass up the stairs to go get another book, so i trundled postone’s book to the porch with me and my cuppajoe. i flip open the book to where i’d last been, which was toward the [...]

I haven’t had time to sit down and write about Agustin’s book, Sex at the Margins, but I will try to get to it before it’s due back. Problem is, they’ve ramped up the pace at work, so I worked a long week, which left little time for anything substantive — other than getting to [...]

a few years ago, in some one or other of the various instantiations of some sex war over prostitution, I pointed out at punkass blog that I knew of at least two women who had migrated from a rural area to an urban area and that they did so wanting to be sex workers. This [...]

if you have any interest at all in sex work, sex positive feminism, migrants, migrant workers, the prostitution wars then you really must read Laura Maria Augstin’s _Sex on the Margins_. I’ve mentioned her work before, quoting her articles and blog, and posting an interview with her on Doug Henwood’s radio program, Behind the News. [...]

cleaning out files and came across this book review, which I’m archiving here. It’s a review of the horrid, horrid awful book, Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein. Well sure,” said I, when asked to review an anthology with the nifty title Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed. “What self-respecting woman wouldn’t [...]

I heard Clay Shirkey on NPR a couple of days ago, so I’ve been reading up on his latest book, “Here Comes Everybody.” I’m probably going to use some of his stuff in a presentation I have to do for work. At Amazon, I read this in one of the reviews: Writing in sharp contrast [...]

we’ve been shopping all day. my dogs are tarred. i am lusting for one of those homedics massagers i tried in the store. about four balls roll around and massage your back. i enjoyed it so much, when one of those balls rolled and hit the small of my back, i jumped and made noises [...]

Lemme get this straight: getting in the groove of the moment when hunting for the first time, or getting a thrill out of eating what you’ve caught and prepared with what sound like some real characters, suggests a generalized ideology of nature-romanticism? Do I have that right? My argument is that he is not opposed [...]

Answer to the title question? Obviously, I think not. Since I also had on my shelf Pollan’s _The Botany of Desire_ (look, if some wanker is going to tell me that I didn’t read The Omnivore’s Dilemma even after I quote line after line from the book, I’ll go out and read every thing Pollan’s [...]

In this post, I take on the irritant of Pollan’s inability to see all the labor involved in the production of even his hunted and gathered meal. It strikes me that someone like Pollan, who talk repeatedly about how everything is connected in an ecological system, can’t extend that same thinking to *people.* At 05:14 [...]

As andy’s increasingly angry responses reveal, what seemed to really motivate was the assumption that if you criticize pollan, you must be someone with rilly rilly declasse tastes. Which, I don’t know, might have been more a reaction to me and Andy’s assumptions about who I am. Which I hand’t considered until just now. Anyway, [...]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 1:39 PM, shag wrote: > Andy, I apologize if I’m dense, but I am having a hard time parsing the > sentence. Are you saying that you don’t understand why people think Pollan > romanticizes nature? That you took him as someone who doesn’t? Both? > Neither? At 11:19 [...]

Here, I start to show, in a rather long convoluted way, that Pollan’s arguments ultimately lead to a weird kind of antipathy to science that encourages sciency types to lurv him anyway. I think they are self-hating sciency types, is what it is. *snort* but more seriously, what I’m getting at is the way pollan [...]

In response to Andy’s objections that Pollan is most certainly not a reviled romantic, I wrote a couple of posts showing that Pollan is not at all opposed to capitalism, and wouldn’t be ashamed to be described as a pro-market capitalist. Rather, the enemy for Pollan is a kind of “bigness”. More precisely, the enemy [...]

I have no idea why Shane Mage responded the way he did in my quote below. But he did. And of course it pissed me off that anyone could justify that paying of substandard wages, especially somone like Mage, who I consider a pretty hard core Marxist. Alas, shouldn’t be surprised. This was my restrained [...]

as other reviewers of Pollan have noted, Pollan gives an uncritical pass to his protagonist, Joel Saletin, in _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_. Saletin has some pretty reprehensible politics and Pollan largely lets him off the hook. If he scolds anyone it is the urbanite for hating on rural farmers like Saletin, rather than investigating Saletin’s belief [...]