La Grande is Laura Gibson's third album and it seems it's not only the record business that has changed a bit since she released Beasts of Seasons. Today, a review in the Going Out Guide section on The Washington Post site talks of her emphasis on "the silence between the notes" on that particular album and how, on La Grande, Gibson "seems to have found a boldness, filling the voids with vocal harmonies and affectations". Here's a taster of what our reviewer Kaite Welsh has to say about the album:

"I am not a lamb, I am a lion," warns Laura Gibson on her third and latest album La Grande. This release shows a steel that belies the gentle, whispering melodies that have won Laura critical acclaim and a cult following. It is more ambitious than her previous effort, Beast of Seasons (2009), as well as more upbeat, although there is still time for contemplation on the dreamy penultimate track, 'Time is Not', where she admits she has worn her burden "like a halo". Her slightly raspy voice is best suited to those softer tracks, but rollicking country and western tunes like 'The Fire' are a welcome and enjoyable departure from her usual style and the title track is positively rambunctious.

Fans of the haunting intimacy of If You Come to Greet Me (2006) will enjoy 'The Rushing Dark' and the deliciously-titled second track, 'Milk-Heavy, Pollen-Eyed'. Dreamily evocative song names are part of the pleasure La Grande delivers: 'Skin, Warming Skin' is as tenderly sensuous as the title implies while the album closer 'Feather Lungs' has a floating, otherworldly quality, with lyrics to match...

Yesterday, the NPL blog ran a piece about the spooky video for the very atmospheric and film-soundtrack-ready title track.

Director Alicia J. Rose said the following about the concept behind it:

I wanted to make a video for "La Grande" that was both spectral and romantic, with a Hitchcockian otherworldly feel. When I first listened to the track, I instinctively felt the story of lost spirits caught in a forgotten place. When I asked Laura what her inspiration was behind the song, and she told me she wrote it during a stay in the newly reopened -- almost 200-year-old -- Hot Lake Hotel in La Grande, Oregon, I started doing research about the place and fell madly in love. It's a hidden but sprawling old hotel with a steam-billowing 208-degree natural hot lake on the property. The opportunity to shoot the entire video there went far beyond kismet -- it had never been captured on film -- so the place itself as well as its history served as powerful characters in our story.

Click here to read on and comment on Kaite's review of the whole album...

0 comments // Permalink // Tags: folk, Laura Gibson, music, reviews

Via Facebook and RAINBOW website:

Calling all European young people

RAINBOW (Rights Against INtolerance - Building an Open minded World) is now seeking submissions of short films made by young people aged 15 - 19 years from European countries.

The films, up to 10 minutes, must enter one of the following 3 the categories:
1. live action
2. animation
3. documentary

In one of these two different issues about sexual orientation and gender diversity:

1. Surroundings: being gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual at school, in the family or in sports
2. Relationships: me and my friends

Deadline for entries is May 11th, 2012
(The films must be delivered by May 11th)
The films must be produced in the years 2011-2012

The film should correspond to one of the given categories and send to:

Rainbow Short Film Competition against Homophobia
Centro di Iniziativa Gay ONLUS
Comitato Provinciale Arcigay di Milano
Via Bezzecca 3
20135 Milan - Italy

The Rainbow Project team will appoint an international jury - involving experts and LGBT professionals connected to the Milano Mix Festival - Gay and lesbian cinema and queer culture that will award a weekend for 2 people in a European city (flight and accommodation in hotel 3* BB) for the 2 best movies.

The winning films and a selection of the films participating (shortlisted films) will be screened at the 26th Milano MIX Festival - Gay and lesbian cinema and queer culture, in Milan, Italy, June 2012 and in other festivals organised by partners of the Rainbow Project.

Film submission form and competition guidelines can be downloaded at the website:
www.http://rainbow.ecfa.info/

0 comments // Permalink // Tags: competition, film, LGBT, SO-GI

Image shows a revolving door. Used under a Creative Commons License, courtesy of Dan4th on Flickr.

Trigger warning: this post and links in it contain descriptions of self-harm.

A report following an unannounced inspection of Styal women's prison by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick has made serious criticisms of the prison's provision for women with mental health problems.

...the jail's Keller Unit, which looks after vulnerable inmates, is still 'wholly unsuitable. He said prison officers often had to use force to remove ligatures from the necks of women intent on harming themselves. And he said the plight of the women in the unit was 'more shocking and distressing than anything I have yet seen on an inspection'. ... there were too many women serving very short prison sentences, and mental health services were stretched.

Many of the difficulties experienced by prisoners are exacerbated by the excessive use of jail terms as sentences for people whose needs would be better served - and who would be less likely to re-offend - if, instead, better services were offered to them in the community.

It's a vicious cycle: inadequate welfare provision pushes the prison population up, which makes it harder for prisons to cope, which worsens the problems that prisoners continue to face after they are released - a dynamic heartbreakingly exemplified in the awful story of Neil Carpenter, sent to prison by magistrates to "get [him] over the hardest part of winter".

It's a strange kind of fiscal austerity in which the enormous expense of jail terms has come to be positioned as any kind of alternative to proper social services.

Custodial sentences are especially unsuitable in the particular circumstances faced by many foreign national women, who form a seventh of the prison population in England and Wales and whose experiences are discussed in a recent briefing by Hibiscus and the Prison Reform Trust. These women are disproportionately sentenced to short prison sentences for non-violent, non-sexual and non-robbery offences:

Foreign national women are far less likely than UK nationals to have committed serious violent or sexual offences or robbery. Only 15% of foreign nationals are serving sentences for serious crimes compared to 41% of UK nationals. A disproportionate number of foreign national women are in prison for drug or immigration related offences. The briefing's findings reveal that the average length of sentence given in 2009 for drug offences was six years, with findings of guilt after entering not guilty pleas resulting in sentences of up to 15 years. The average sentence for false documentation was eight months and for deception 12 months.

The briefing points out that too little is done to effectively ascertain whether offending by foreign national women is connected to trafficking or coercion, and to rethink sentencing accordingly:

Worrying cases are also uncovered where the woman has been smuggled into the country to escape persecution or has entered the country on debt bondage or other forms of people trafficking and for whom survival has necessitated accepting work in illegal activities or use of fake documents to survive. ...

Despite the fact that the UK government has ratified the European Convention on Trafficking, with its emphasis on victim protection, there is little attention given by their legal representatives to identifying evidence of exploitation or persecution, or women acting under duress, and the standard advice given is that there is no option but to plead guilty on the immigration related charges.

These women are therefore sentenced, with the assumption of deportation, before they can disclose the necessary information to be assessed as victims or genuine asylum seekers. Failure to get appropriate legal advice on immigration issues in the early stages of court appearances thus prejudices any chance of a positive asylum or residency outcome, as they are slotted into the category of "foreign criminals".

0 comments // Permalink

Women in Scotland are likely to be pressurised into releasing their medical records for use in court. The advice from the Crown is for prosecutors, and is supposed to be an attempt to increase conviction rates for rape, which currently stands at 7%.

The reasoning appears to be based on defence lawyers' usage of previous mental health problems in the victim as a way to discredit them, so if the prosecutors can bring up medical records first, it will give them an advantage to present them in a positive way.

However, it is misguided. Firstly, there is the issue of privacy.

Sandy Brindley, from Rape Crisis Scotland, explains in the Scotsman that this change will deter women from coming forward.

"People contact us and ask what rights they have [to refuse to disclose medical records]. But if they say No, that might mean there's no prosecution.

In addition, Fiona Raitt, Professor of Evidence and Social Justice at Dundee University, said,

"Everyone knows you get a horrible time as a complainer in a rape trial and I've been very surprised by the lack of concern over this. Do we have to give up all our privacy rights to complain about assault?"

As well as the privacy concerns is the issue that using victims' medical records in court is a way to effectively discredit the experiences of any woman who has a history of mental illness, or who has a learning disability.

These groups of women are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault, moreso than the general population, and this is, arguably, partially due to the fact that they are frequently disbelieved, are considered "unreliable witnesses" in the courts' eyes, and are not taken seriously. Encouraging the use of medical records in court cases further promotes the misapprehension that there are groups of people, chosen by dint of their health conditions, who are more, or less, believable than others.

Nor does it take into account that developing mental health problems, or any kind of emotional distress, after being raped, is a normal, understandable and expected reaction. Using this to discredit and undermine the victim in court is a foul, and all too common tactic.

Medical notes are a personal record of an individual's health. If refusing to surrender them to the mercy of barristers means your case will not go to court, there are serious flaws in the legal system.

[The image is a photograph of a woman taken at Slutwalk NYC. She has long blonde hair and there is a crowd behind her. She carries a home made placard which has a cartoon girl on it, and which reads "Punish rapists not victims!". It was taken by Dave Bledsoe and is used under a Creative Commons Licence]

2 comments // Permalink // Tags: legal system, rape, rape conviction rate, rape crisis, Scotland

This is a guest post by Sophie Mayer, who is the author of Her Various Scalpels and The Private Parts of Girls , as well as The Cinema of Sally Potter. She recently curated a retrospective of feminist documentary for Punto de Vista, and writes about feminist, queer and independent cinema and literature for Sight & Sound, Horizon Review, Hand + Star, Sound and Music, The F-Word and her own blog, deliriumslibrary

In the 1970s, Barbara Hammer romped nude, out and proud onto the American avant-garde film scene with Dyketactics (the depiction of lesbian love-making by a lesbian filmmaker) and Multiple Orgasms, and celebrated Women's Lib and lesbian community in Superdyke and Menses.

For 35 years, she has celebrated equally the life of the body and the life of the mind in a series of extraordinary films, most recently A Horse is Not a Metaphor (2009), made during chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. Even when documenting the remains of concentration camps or the erasure of gay, lesbian and trans lives in the US, as in her best-known feature Nitrate Kisses (1992), her films find secret, joyful, sexy forms of resistance (like lost footage of beautiful, semi-naked men in a 1930s Hollywood Biblical extravaganza) and share them with the viewer.

From psychedelic 16mm superimpositions to digital magic bringing Maya Deren's Sink to life, Hammer is still experimenting with film as with being, and nurturing queer artists around the world while remembering and recording our histories.

If you'd like to catch up with her inspiring film and video work at Tate Modern in London next month, we have a double season ticket to give away.

To put your hands on it, please answer the question:

Can you name one female artist whom Barbara Hammer has celebrated on film?

Answers via email to: ania.ostrowska@thefword.org.uk
Deadline: Wednesday, 1 February (23:59 GMT).
The Fearless Frame seasons opens on Friday 3 February.

Photocredit: Barbara Hammer
Changing the Shape of Film, 2009
© Barbara Hammer

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This is a press release received from Homeless International, a Coventry-based charity that supports slum dwellers throughout Africa and Asia.

Homeless International's year-long project to improve water and sanitation for poor communities in Malawi, Tanzania and Zimbabwe has brought improved water and toilet facilities to over 10,000 people. Many more are set to benefit over the coming year, with women in particular seeing a real boost to their livelihoods and way of life.

Poor sanitation and unsafe water is a major problem in slums around the world, claiming many lives each year. Contaminated water supplies, poor hygiene and a lack of decent toilets and sewerage increase the spread of disease. The burden is especially felt by women, who often walk long distances to fetch water, leaving them little time to earn a living.

For Esnat and her family, living in Nkhata Bay in Malawi, poor toilet facilities have long been a problem. They used to rely on pit latrines, which can pollute groundwater and are often unreliable, leaking and becoming unsafe to use in rainy weather. Pit latrines are not permanent and need re-digging each time they are full, costing families like Esnat's money and valuable time.

Over the last year, UK charity Homeless International has been working with its long-term partner organisations in Malawi, Tanzania and Zimbabwe to help groups of urban poor people - comprising mainly women - to plan improvements to water and sanitation in their communities and to build toilets, dig trenches and lay water and sewer pipes. In Zimbabwe and Tanzania, half of the builders trained through the project are women, who can now use their skills to work on other projects nearby to help them earn a living.

Through this project, more than 1,800 people now have access to a clean and reliable water supply, bringing great improvements to their health and quality of life. In addition, over 1,000 families - including Esnat's - have their own or shared toilet.

Esnat is one of many people who have built an 'ecosan' toilet. Unlike pit latrines, ecosan toilets are permanent structures designed to turn waste into safe and usable compost. As well as improving health, comfort and privacy for family's like Esnat's, ecosan toilets bring other benefits: in Malawi, women sell the compost produced, giving them an additional annual income of around MK 5,100 (approximately £20) - the equivalent of one month's rent.

Esnat also now has more time to spend with her family and in her community, where she helps to promote better sanitation and hygiene practices. Hygiene promotion has been an important part of the initiative, with community members like Esnat helping to spread messages about basic hygiene practices during community meetings and on visits to the sick and elderly. Over 48,000 people have been reached in this way.

Homeless International's year-long initiative may have now finished, but the number of people benefiting from improvements will continue to increase. Esnat, like many others, took out a small loan from a local community fund to build her toilet. She will gradually repay it, enabling the money to be used to provide loans to help other families construct toilets.

Images used by kind permission of Homeless International

0 comments // Permalink // Tags: Africa, clean water, community projects, Malawi, sanitation, Tanzania, Zimbabwe

The House of Lords last night voted against the government's plans to charge single parents a fee to use the Child Support Agency to collect maintenance payments from absent partners. Like many of the coalition's reforms, this would hit women hardest, as women make up almost 90% of single parents.

According to the Guardian:

Cross-bencher Lady Butler-Sloss, a former family barrister and judge, said there were fathers "who would simply not pay". She told peers: "The idea that a mother in very poor circumstances, where the father has left her with young children, who finds herself having to seek social benefit from the state which she may not have sought before ... she then has to pay a fee for the welfare of her children, where she may not have any money and he may have some, it is profoundly unfair."

The government has promised to try and overturn the ruling in the Commons, presumably because single mothers and their children are to blame for all our ills and therefore deserve to have their lives made as difficult and as miserable as possible.

Photo by scazon, chared under a Creative Commons licence.

0 comments // Permalink // Tags: children, cuts, parenting

The Troll of Random Misogyny

The Troll of Random Misogyny lives under many bridges; although the Guardian seems to be one of his favourite places to lurk, possibly because of its soft liberal padding. He likes to pounce at unexpected moments, his gnashing jaws slavering with oddly irrelevant comments about 'feminazis' and how women just want to destroy men or steal their children below posts about gardening and ways to cook chicken. The Troll of Random Misogyny often wears a thin disguise of Concern for Society, but beneath it one can clearly see his naked, shivering insecurity.

Like many trolls, this species often labours under the delusion that he is a smart, world-weary cynic armored with stinging barbs of sarcasm. Sadly, they are actually lumbering planks of wood with the word 'SARCASM' written on them in big letters and he aims them so badly that he usually ends up hitting himself.

Best defeated by: repeating to oneself the magic words "Don't read the comments!"

Subspecies: The Twitter Goblin

Like a troll but smaller, owing to the lack of space on Twitter status updates. Twitter goblins are, thankfully, easier to block and therefore ignore.

The Lesbian Porn Genie

This is how the Lesbian Porn Genie is summoned. Two girls must make brief stilted conversation in a random anonymous room before removing their clothes and approaching each other while panting heavily. If they then proceed to rub their breasts together for a few moments then before long - hey presto! - the Lesbian Porn Genie will appear. He traditionally takes the form of a naked or semi-naked man, and the wish he grants is always the same: to provide both the girls with the macho heterosexual sex they so crave.

It's not the most family-friendly of fairy tales but it does seem to have an enduring appeal among sections of the adult population, as evidenced by the number of DVDs and online sites providing variations of it.

Best defeated by: mocking this stereotype mercilessly until it melts from sheer embarrassment. (Hasn't happened yet, but you never know.) Or you could always watch gay male porn instead.

The Thought Criminal

The Thought Police are everywhere. Like tiny venomous elves, they creep into the brains of anyone who has the temerity to think non-PC thoughts such as "Aren't all women a bit stupid, really?" and "Let's be honest, anyone on benefits is a scrounger". Working at the speed of light, they arrest these thoughts and march them to tiny thought prisons where they can never escape through the medium of speech or text. This is why nobody in the media ever utters a single bigoted word.

There are some who wonder if the Thought Police are simply an invention of the Thought Criminals in order to allow them to insult people and come across as a victim at the same time. But those people are probably in league with the Thought Police.

Best defeated by: variations on the following conversation:
"Would you believe the Thought Police won't even allow me to say that fat people are lazy, poor people are thriftless and anyone with tattoos is probably going to break into my house?"
"Yes they will, because you just did say all those things."
"Oh."
"I suggest that your problem here is not some imaginary liberal authority figure, but your own kneejerk stereotyping."
"My God, you're right. I'm so sorry."

If for some reason this doesn't pan out, you could instead acquire some very small plastic figures, construct a Thought Police Force from them, and attempt to insert it into the ears of anyone who annoys you.

Picture of a snarling troll by Marchange, shared under a creative commons licence.

0 comments // Permalink // Tags: comments, Lesbian, political correctness and thought police etc, porn, trolls

Tory feminism. I've been avoiding blogging about this because the sheer physical pain that swells up in my fingers when I type those two words in succession, not to mention the blood boiling in my veins when I see Louise Mensch's smug little face staring out at me - yet again - from the pages of the Guardian Online (can we stop giving her column inches already?), is almost too much to bear. But in the face of this complete and utter nonsense, something clearly needs to be said.

Because feminism is not about privileged rich women overcoming sexism to make it in a world run by privileged rich men. Feminism is about ripping down the barriers that prevent ALL women from determining the course of their own lives. Sexism is but one of these barriers. So while it's all very nice that a select few female Tories sort of support abortion rights and think Page 3 should be banned, they can only claim to be feminists if they also address the other barriers that women face: ableism, ageism, class privilege, homophobia, racism and transphobia, among others. They need to understand that sexism intersects with all these other oppressions, that they can't just address the bits that affect them as privileged rich women then paint the rest of us as lazy, good-for-nothing scroungers if we don't reach their dizzying heights of success.

I was going to list all the glorious ways in which our Tory MP "sisters" and Mr Cameron, their knight in shining "male feminist" armour, have been kicking the rest of us in the teeth furthering the cause since they came to power, but Nat has already posted an absolutely fabulous take-down of Mensch's piece, complete with links aplenty, so I shall direct you over to Forty Shades Of Grey instead.

Mensch claims that she and her blue feminist pals "sit behind a frontbench that we know to be relentlessly focused on social justice and women's issues". I can't decide whether it's utter contempt for us plebs or privilege-induced delusion that makes her think we'd believe her.

Mock Tory poster by Blue Square Thing, shared under a Creative Commons Licence.

3 comments // Permalink // Tags: feminism, politics, solidarity, Tories

In the wake of the Costa Concordia tragedy, this week's Ask A Feminist considers whether "women and children first" is a feminist position.

Dear Laura,

I was talking to a friend about an article I came across recently and told her how I was puzzled to read that the "women and children first" saying used in a sinking ship situation was still being used nowadays. My friend answered that she could not understand how as a feminist I could say that. I went on to explain to her that for me, feminism was about seeking equality, not privilege; that I don't want men to make room for me, I don't want more rights than them, I want them and us to be on the same level and make my own way in life and when I succeed or fail, I want it to be about who I am as a person, not about my gender.

So here I am all confused: can I still call myself a feminist if I believe that the "women and children first" is outdated and should not be used any more (and that feminism is about equality, not privilege)?

- Selie

Feminism means different things to different people. In academic feminism in particular, there is an ongoing debate as to whether feminists should be focusing on achieving equality with men or on obtaining an "equality of difference". The latter position holds that rather than enabling women to succeed in a society structured around men's values and concerns, we should recognise that women are different from men and try and rebuild society with women's concerns, needs and values in mind.

While I personally find some of the foundations of this argument problematic (there is a tendency to make essentialist claims about women's nature, for example that we are by default more caring than men), I find it to be more practical and progressive than the equality with men position. The reality is that women and other people who suffer discrimination in our society do face different problems and have different needs to the rich, white, able-bodied, cisgendered men who control society and set out the rules of the game. This means we can't simply argue that women should be treated in exactly the same way as these men.

For example, demanding that a woman work full time, including evenings, in a workplace with no childcare facilities, and does not take extended breaks from that workplace if she wants to move up the career ladder like her male colleagues ignores the fact that many women give birth, breastfeed and have caring responsibilities. Treating her in the same way as a male colleague - who in today's society most likely has a wife or girlfriend to take care of the kids while he focuses on his career - will therefore not bring about equality, as her position in society and her needs as a woman are different.

When it comes to the idea that women should be evacuated first from a sinking ship (I'm going to ignore the children part here as that's another issue entirely), we need to look at the reasoning behind the assertion that women should be treated differently to men in order to judge whether it is feminist or not. Wikipedia points to chivalry as the underlying motive for women being saved first from sinking ships. Although chivalry is a medieval concept, of which a man's duty to the women in his life was but one part, in more modern times it has come to mean that men should protect and help women in certain situations just because we're women. The most common examples of chivalry include opening doors for women, pulling out our chairs so we can sit down, paying for dates and offering us a hand when we get in and out of transport.

The common theme here is that women are weak and incapable of looking after ourselves. In the case of the sinking ship, the fact that women are grouped with children, who (depending on age and development) are generally weaker and in need of supervision, confirms this. While there is nothing inherently wrong with being weak or needing support (the general view of these as undesirable traits feeds in to discrimination against disabled people), if we look at the world around us, containing billions of women and men of different sizes, strengths and abilities, the assertion that being female makes an individual weak and more in need of protection than a man is clearly false. More to the point, it's sexist -- against both women and men. Why should an evacuation official prioritise getting a woman into a lifeboat over a man? Particularly if that woman is stronger and more likely to be able to survive until help arrives than the man?

So, personally I don't think "women and children first" is compatible with feminism as I understand it (though I would strongly argue that children should be saved first). As far as I'm concerned you can certainly call yourself a feminist if you agree with me! But, as always, I'd welcome thoughts from everyone else.

Photo by VirtualEyeSee, shared under a Creative Commons Licence.

Want to Ask A Feminist? Email laura[at]thefword.org.uk.

4 comments // Permalink // Tags: ask a feminist, chivalry, sexism, stereotypes

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