q-sputnik

Junichi and Toru, the two greenpeace activists, who got arrested for stealing the whale meat in order to provide it as evidence to the government, appeared in court this morning. The judge ordered them held for another ten days without charges. The appeal is tomorrow morning so apart from blogging about it here is what you can do to support them:

• Post a link to the action in Skype or instant messenger: http://www.greenpece.org/tokyo-two
• Post a link in MySpace or Facebook account, ask people to do the same.
• Create a YouTube video or come up with your own way to get more people joining the call to FREE THE TOKYO TWO
• blog about it
• write letter

Every message that we send in the next 12 hours will be counted and presented to the judge with the appeal.

I have been looking for sef-narrating feminist blogs from people who experience mental illness but haven’t been particularly lucky, at least in the uk. The latest venture is the Crazy Like Us? blog. It came out of nectarine’s Because I miss my sisters blog who initially posted to see if there would be any interest in a feminist mental health blog. She got a lot of responses but the women who felt happy to contribute in the blog don’t write about mental healt in their own blog. I was actually expecting quite an extensive self-exposure in personal blogs, personal accounts of how women handle their sickness in their everyday life, stories about medication and doctors but I either don’t know how to search or women are reluctant to share this kind of experience and write all sorts of other less personal stuff in their blogs. To be sure, i am referring to feminist only blogs. I have managed to trace diaries of women (for example The secret life of a manic depressive) who suffer from bipolar (manic/depression) disorder or other stuff but they don’t think themselves as feminists but don’t necessarily come out as a feminist in their blog.

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This is a dead period, non-productive because it is non-communicative. I am talking about the dissertation planning period, the before. Ιt entails an extensive diving into different materials which makes me feel a bit lost and small, in knowledge and thus sense of self. I have not planned this post and, as always, will not edit it afterwards. It has however a subject which is actually the implications of creating an ‘about me‘ page. This is a personal problematic that has underlied my publishing since I created it and may be formulating (itself) as an academic question. I’ve been reading Liz Stanley’s ‘From self-made women to women’s made selves: audit selves, simulation and surveillance in the rise of public woman’ in Cosslett et al. (eds) ‘feminism and autobiography’ (2000).

Writing the ‘me’ page has actually taken me a longer time than other posts. I wrote and deleted. Unable to define my readership but assuming they are not steady (except for a few people whom I know in my off-line life), I made a profile that rather resembles a CV for a -surely alternative- job. I define myself there in terms of my education and academic interests, in terms of my NOW rather than my THEN, of locality and interests. I provide a web-camera snapshot I myself took but not at the time I was writing the resume. I also give contact details. Even though this is a public profile which I obviously approve, it contains a whole lot of personal information which I only feel comfortable of giving because of the assumptions I have already done about my readership.

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My core interest is how the undermining of stable gendered subjects undermines consumerism and global capitalism altogether. Here I give an overview of contrasting views about the political potential of cyberqueer.

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