This week's diary seems hard to write. My attention has been consumed by the shootings of black children and men by white policemen. I am a white woman who teaches and I see the arguments play out in my classrooms. I sometimes force the issue. I asked my students to do a syntactic analysis of the narrative part of the Michael Brown autopsy (real world practice, you know, not just theory) and nearly all of them were struck by the sentence "the gun was discharged." To be sure the medical examiner is not supposed to be drawing conclusions about anything other than the body, but still . . . Yes, I know that's part of the genre of autopsy narratives but it's amazing what a little passive voice does to the scene.
And of course, the week has been full of discussions about the Rolling Stone article about gang rape at UVA, an article that has some journalistic flaws (source checking especially) but also some other lessons which I will discuss below the orange squiggle.
My topics this week--
UVA
Bill Cosby
Astronomy Shirts:GAG!
Bad News from Turkey
Follow-Up on Gamergate
More Positive News via ramara
Follow me below:
The discrepancies and the gaps in the Rolling Stone original article have now had plenty of responses as journalists and bloggers have pursued the story. Here are some of the follow-up stories, including one here at Kos:
UVA's Immediate Reaction Think Progress
Think Progress Follow-Up
Salon
Daily Kos
It isn't clear what produced this story from this woman, about this university, and this fraternity. But before everyone starts ignoring the core of the story--gang rape does occur on college and university campuses--I would like us all to think about why this story needs to be told, even dramatized and even fictionalized. One thing the writer did was capture the absolute terror such a scenario creates. What it raises for me is nothing so much as testimonio, that genre of group narratives, often of pain and suffering, and often written by woman and doubted by everyone, or shall I say mostly male others. (There is an academic literature about the feminist aspects of this genre and please Kos-mail me if you're interested.) The story seems familiar and awful because it collects many of the most-feared possibilities of rape, of gang rape and not necessarily because it is wholly or even partly true. So before those other critics start up with the denials, we need to remember that campus sexual assault and rape are part of the living truth. Think about it at the same time we think about the journalistic (especially) failures.
And then there's good old, paternal, friendly Bill Cosby. All I can say is, YUCK!! Here are some stories about the now conservative former tv father figure:
The Guardian
Salon
And a friend reminded me of this video by Nikki Giovanni about pere Cosby:
Time
Enough said here.
In international news, we seem to be seeing a serious move toward restricting women's lives by Turkish President Erdogan:
Huffington Post
The Guardian
One obnoxious shirt; much casual sexism:
Slate
One follow up on Gamergate:
Rawstory via The Guardian
And finally, as I couldn't get my head out of the dumps, ramara provides us with an terrific story about Columbia University Law Professor Patricia Nichols. She is a featured writer at The Nation and has written a terrific book and many many important law articles. She's very readable.
May we all have a better week. Keep fighting!