Women and Islam Week this week

Via an email forwarded by Marquette Empowerment, a schedule of events for the occassion. (These should at least be interesting workshops; but it must be said that The Word Warrior’s or an individual contributor’s reporting of an event or events does not constitute an endorsement of said event[s] or the views expressed thereat.):

MONDAY, October 26th

 7 pm–Islam’s Heroines, AMU 407

This will be a lecture given by a local community member from the Islamic Society of Milwaukee concerning the many strong and influential women during the life of Muhammad, and their impact and importance during the early history of Islam. Ethnic refreshments will be served. 

 TUESDAY, October 27th

12:30 pm–Hijab How-to Workshop, AMU 407

We will have a presentation/how to workshop on wrapping the hijab (headscarf) in preparation for Hijab-for-a-Day on Wednesday. We will have girls wearing different styles of wraps, and discuss how it is done and what goes with the wearing of this particular garment.

6 pm–Love, Marriage, and Chocolate, Raynor Conference Rooms

Have you ever wondered what marriage and love is really like in Islam? We will have a young couple and an older couple come in to demonstrate what successful marriages are like in Islam,  and to address the attitude of Muhammad (PBUH) toward his wives, and the relationship of Adam and the Eve, the first human couple ever to exist. Chocolate sweets and coffee will be served. 

WEDNESDAY, October 28th

HIJAB FOR A DAY–All day, Marquette Campus!! [sic]

Try to wear hijab for a day! Experience what it feels like to dress as a Muslim, and what the wearing of the hijab represents.

 7 pm–My Body, My Right, AMU 407

What does modesty mean in different religions? Why is it important? Come find out and share your experiences! We will have a panel of MU professors who will address the concept of modesty and the body in various theologies. Afterwards, you will have a chance to share your thoughts regarding your experience wearing hijab for the day. Refreshments will be served.

 THURSDAY, October 29th

6 pm–Muslim Women in the Workplace, AMU 407

Come listen to a panel various Muslim women professionals as they discuss their experiences in fields such as nursing, psychiatry, and medicine. Soup and rolls will be served.

 FRIDAY, October 30th

 8 pm–Spoken Word Performance, AMU 227

Muslim spoken word artist Tasleem Jamila Firdausee will be coming to perform and to discuss her experiences as a Muslim female in art.

Monday Morning Surrealism

Wilfredo Lam, "The Jungle," 1943

Journalists should not try to be funny

Because this is what happens when they do:

Going Rouge is compiled by Richard Kim and Betsy Reed, two top editors of the left-leaning weekly The Nation, and includes essays by Nation regulars like Katrina vanden Heuvel, Naomi Klein, and Katha Pollitt. It’s the first release from OR Books, a fledgling outfit founded earlier this year by publishing veterans John Oakes and Colin Robinson that “embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business,” according to its website

Bill Donahue is an asshole

This ruined my whole damn day.

There’s one pundit who can get under my skin and scratch at my insides. It’s not Michael Moore, who moralizes his childish antics in cosmic terms, or Glenn Beck, who scares people for money. It’s Bill Donahue, president of the dubiously named Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties, and frequent cable-news go-to guy for a shouter. Today, he got a guest column in the WaPo for some reason today. (Probably to promote his dumb new book for which couldn’t get blurbs for the back cover–at least from anyone other than Steven Colbert.)

Given a platform in a nationally read newspaper, he filled his space with this:

Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity. They know, deep down, that what they are doing is wrong, and they shudder at the dreaded words, “Thou Shalt Not.” But they continue with their death-style anyway…

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

When I’ve had the chance, I’ve been banging out a reply to these most egregious points. It’s right now 483 words, but still not presentable. Main point: It’s disappointing the Washington Post would run content so void of substance and full of unconcealed hate. Now, in the past, I’ve been hasty and dumb speculating out loud as to whether or not everyone who votes against gay marriage is a “bigot,” and have been looking for an excuse to apologize/correct myself. I take the opportunity to…apologize and say I was hasty and dumb.

But “deathstyle?” I can only imagine that if I were gay, “deathstyle” would be exponentially worse than “faggot.” That’s in the league of people who say AIDS or 9/11 are God’s punishments for breaches of Leviticus. We talk about people feeling threatened by overblown predictions about the repercussions of accepting gays or enfranchising them into marriage, or simply being stupid having never known a gay person. Bill Donahue just hates gay people.

I wonder what he would say to a closeted 12-year old niece or nephew facing bullying who tried to confide in him. I wonder if “deathstyle” would occur in the conversation.

Also, by way of factual errors: The claim that gays, collectively (as if they could be spoken of collectively) have a “pathological hatred” of Christianity is verifiably false. Earlier this year, I blogged a Barna Group study which indicated 70 percent of American LGBTple identify themselves as Christians, and 60 percent describe their faith as “very important” to their lives.

Fucking hell.

Fuck Bill Donahue.

Luckily, there are two forms of catharsis. First, there’s this video from a rally in support of Maine’s enfranchisement to same-sex marriage, which might be overturned in the upcoming elections:

Secondly, appealing on a more visceral level, here’s Bill Donahue getting sawed in half by Jesus, with help from Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

That’s better.

Staying power

Did you know that the staff of the MU’s only independent student publication, The Warrior, has an opinion blog?

No?

Well, apparently neither does The Warrior staff. It hasen’t been updated since February.

Can the state of an entire sex be done justice in two pages?

TIME does their darndest.

Monday Morning Surrealism

The case against character

Gustavo Dore's portrait of Immanuel Kant composing his "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten," as Johann Gottlieb Fitche looks on.

I’ve mentioned several times in this space that I believe there is no substance to “the self.” I can think of no better analogy to it than a fictional character, the protagonist of a narrative the brain tells itself to winnow the data it is inundated with into something manageable. This winnowing necessarily omits some vital information, even about the mind’s own function. It overplays some trends and downplays others, usually to make itself look better than it is. (Once the individual believes the lie of excellence it has made, it can more readily convince others, too, of its excellence.) Contrawise, a depressive might downplay accomplishments and virtues as a means of rationalizing the low moods they feel, which may have begun prior to the recognition of any of any malady, shortcoming, or crisis. I proffer these examples to illustrate the statement: We are capable of a broader range of good and bad behavior than we believe ourselves capable of at any given moment. The Socratic imperative “Know thyself!” is impossible. At least, it is impossible to have a complete account of oneself; self-deception comes to easily. Even if we do come across every relevant true statement about our character over our lifespan, we won’t believe all of them at one time. If we are to be realistic, “Seek thyself tirelessly! But do not trust [s]he tells you!” is our command. Or, even more aptly, “Know thyselves!”

I find more support in the recent work of Kwame Anthony Appiah. According to Jeremy Waldron, writing in The New York Times Review of Books, Appiah is working to defeat the Quixotic campaign of Kant to understand ethics without reference to psychology:

Virtue theorists believe that the disposition to act and react courageously or honestly is deeply entrenched in a person’s character. As Appiah describes their position, a virtue is supposed to be something that “goes all the way down,” enmeshing itself with other aspects of character, equally admirable, and affecting what a person wants out of life, her conception of happiness, and her view of other people.

Are there such virtues? Well, the psychologists that Appiah has read report that character traits do not exhibit the “cross-situational stability” that virtue presupposes. He cites a study of ten thousand American schoolchildren in the 1920s, which showed that they were willing to lie and cheat in school and at play in ways that did not correlate with any measurable personality traits. It is not that the children cheated whenever they could get away with it; they cheated sometimes and in some settings (when they could get away with it) and not other times or in other settings (when they could get away with it). “The child who wouldn’t break the rules at home, even when it seemed nobody was looking, was no less likely [than other children] to cheat on an exam at school.” There was none of the consistent and comprehensive honesty, “all the way down,” that virtue ethics seems to presuppose.

This seems to be true for other virtues too: helpfulness or charity, for example. With respect to them, studies cited by Appiah show that people act in ways that seem vulnerable to odd and unseemly differences in circumstance. If you accidentally drop your papers outside a phone booth, the best predictor of whether people will help you pick them up is whether they have just discovered a dime in the phone’s coin-return slot: six out of seven of the dime-finders will help as opposed to one in twenty-five of everyone else. If you need change for a dollar, stand outside a bakery: the warm smell of fresh-baked bread makes a huge difference to the kindness of strangers. The beneficiaries will probably say of anyone who came to their assistance, “What a helpful person,” little suspecting that tomorrow when the bakery is shut down and there is nary a dime in the phone booth, the selfsame person will be as mean-spirited as everyone else.

Gender Inclusive Language

I am reading The Really Hard Problem* by Owen Flanagan for an philosophical independent study of sorts. The book is basically about finding meaning in a material world, and I’m not talking about Madonna’s material world, I’m talking about everything that exists is finite and material and there is no G-d and no metaphysical stuff.

Anyway, Flanagan who teaches as a James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Neurobiology at Duke University** and has been published numerous times in academia, DOES NOT USE GENDER INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE. What? This still happens? The Really Hard Problem was published in 2009, Flanagan was a young man during the beginning of the Feminist movement in the 1960’s, he should be down with the gender-inclusive language thing.

UPDATE! I jumped the gun, so to speak, when I wrote this. Flanagan uses female pronouns in his later chapters. My apologizes.

Needless to say, this really bothered me, not only being a woman but also being a minority in the field of philosophy. Women only comprise 21% of Ph.Ds in philosophy.*** I brought it up with a friend and fellow student of philosophy on a bike ride later . His opinion on the matter was that if both genders are equal and mean the same thing (he is just the masculine  3rd person just as she is the feminine 3rd person) then what does it matter if someone uses just he or just she in their writing? When it comes down to it if what gender pronoun Flanagan uses does not affect the premises of his argument. So why care?

My friend raised a good point, my only retort was that Flanagan excludes a whole people from his examples, which if you are arguing a universal point, as Flanagan is doing, looks un-universal. So, yeah my counterargument sucked and I was embarrassed. I want to know what you all think,

Does it matter if you use gender inclusive language when it comes down to it? Why or why not?

*His title is a smart-ass take on David Chalmer’s “hard problem of consciousness” (why do we have qualitative phenomenological experience at all).

** Vom, I have major beef with the wannabe “Princeton” of the South. But that’s neither here nor there, I just wanted to get in a little ad hominem action.

***“Salary, Promotion, and Tenure Status of Minority and Women Faculty in U.S. Colleges and Universities.”National Center for Education Statistics, Statistical Analysis Report, March 2000; U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement, Report # NCES 2000–173;1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:93). See also “Characteristics and Attitudes of Instructional Faculty and Staff in the Humanities.” National Center For Education Statistics, E.D. Tabs, July 1997. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement, Report # NCES 97-973;1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF-93).

No new “Dollhouse” this week

It’s been co-opted by some sport thing. But that gives all of you who haven’t been watching (VERY BAD WHY HAVE YOU NOT BEEN WATCHING) the perfect chance to get caught up on Season II, available on Hulu.

But in all seriousness, next week’s episode (airing 10/23) will explicitly address the themes of exploitation and human trafficking which have hencesofar only dealt with through science-fictive allegories. If there’s any dramatic television–at least on the networks–worthy of conversation in this space, it’s Dollhouse.