“Utopia Girls”: I’m disappointed

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Me, elsewhere: this is a crosspost of something I wrote for the Australian feminist blog Hoyden About Town. If you’re interested in comments, you should check there as well as here.

About a week ago, the ABC aired Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote, a documentary about women’s suffrage in Australia. I’d seen a few positive mentions on Twitter and Facebook, so this afternoon I went and hunted it down on iView and watched it.

The documentary opens with the narrator, Dr. Clare Wright, stating that:

These days, we all enjoy equal rights and seemingly endless choices. But just one hundred and fifty years ago, women were far from equal.

It’s nice that she thinks inequality is in the past, but she’s deluding herself. It would be facile to list all the groups who don’t enjoy equal rights in Australia (same-sex couples who want to marry being just one current and obvious example) but even if we limit ourselves to women’s rights and choices, it’s far from true. Women still earn about 15% less than men for the same work; abortion is still illegal or effectively so in Queensland; and take a look at the sort of misogynist crap that’s flung at Julia Gillard, Gina Rinehart, or the latest victim of a popular footballer’s rape if you want to see what attitudes to women in our country are really like.

So, no, Utopia Girls, the smug “we all live in a 21st century feminist wonderland” attitude doesn’t exactly fly with me. It’s not just inaccurate, it’s dangerous. Should we really be telling women there’s nothing left to work or fight for, or giving anti-feminists reassurance that women’s current concerns are unnecessary?

If that was all that Utopia Girls had wrong with it I’d be annoyed enough, but it just gets worse. The main focus of the documentary are the stories of a handful of middle class, white Anglo- and Irish-Australian women and their work for women’s suffrage in Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia. I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of the subject matter or the period, but it’s obvious even to me that there are voices missing here.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Elsewhere

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

It occurred to me that some of the people who read this blog might not know that I also have a food/craft/domesticity sort of blog over at oeconomist.infotrope.net. If you like that sort of thing, then you might, well, like it.

(People reading this via Dreamwidth will already know this, of course. This is for the rest of you.)

I’d include a shiny gallery of pictures of the tasty food I’ve been posting about lately, but WordPress is being a pain the arse. So just pretend there are mouth-watering food pix here, and that one of these days I’ll actually get around to posting pics of my recent knitting projects, too.

Parchment-baked brussels sprouts, tofu and shiitake mushrooms

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

This was a bit of an experiment, but I think it worked out pretty well. In winter I really enjoy baking things in the oven, so I decided to do that with these vegies instead of the more obvious stir-frying option.

All quantities are wildly approximate, and are what I used to make three parcels. Adjust as you see fit!

• 18 small brussels sprouts, cleaned and halved
• small packet of fried tofu, sliced
• 6 shiitake mushrooms, sliced (I used dry ones that I’d soaked beforehand)
• 1″ piece of ginger, cut into thin slices or matchsticks
• 3 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

If you’re soaking your mushrooms like I did, make sure you give them long enough, and there’s no need to squeeze them too hard to get the excess juice out; a bit of liquid won’t hurt at all and might help. (My version was a bit too dry from getting this wrong.)

I divided the ingredients into three little parchment-paper parcels. Then to each one I added a slosh each of:

• oyster sauce
• light soy sauce
• sesame oil

I folded the parchment parcels closed and bunged them in the oven at about 200C for half an hour.

Parcels, folded and ready to bake. Crimp lengthwise, then fold in the ends.

They’re done when you can stick a fork in the brussels sprouts. To serve, just up-end the parcel over some rice — we used black (“forbidden”) rice because we’re really into that lately.

Served over black rice.

It was great to have almost no cleanup (except the rice cooker, which isn’t as non-stick as it used to be and needed a good soak). I’ll definitely be doing this again, if I can think of other good combinations to go in the parcels.

Parchment-baked brussels sprouts, tofu and shiitake mushrooms

This was a bit of an experiment, but I think it worked out pretty well. In winter I really enjoy baking things in the oven, so I decided to do that with these vegies instead of the more obvious stir-frying option.

All quantities are wildly approximate, and are what I used to make three parcels. Adjust as you see fit!

• 18 small brussels sprouts, cleaned and halved
• small packet of fried tofu, sliced
• 6 shiitake mushrooms, sliced (I used dry ones that I’d soaked beforehand)
• 1″ piece of ginger, cut into thin slices or matchsticks
• 3 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

If you’re soaking your mushrooms like I did, make sure you give them long enough, and there’s no need to squeeze them too hard to get the excess juice out; a bit of liquid won’t hurt at all and might help. (My version was a bit too dry from getting this wrong.)

I divided the ingredients into three little parchment-paper parcels. Then to each one I added a slosh each of:

• oyster sauce
• light soy sauce
• sesame oil

I folded the parchment parcels closed and bunged them in the oven at about 200C for half an hour.

Parcels, folded and ready to bake. Crimp lengthwise, then fold in the ends.

They’re done when you can stick a fork in the brussels sprouts. To serve, just up-end the parcel over some rice — we used black (“forbidden”) rice because we’re really into that lately.

Served over black rice.

It was great to have almost no cleanup (except the rice cooker, which isn’t as non-stick as it used to be and needed a good soak). I’ll definitely be doing this again, if I can think of other good combinations to go in the parcels.

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.

Entering a sewing phase

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

I haven’t been posting much about crafts lately because, um, no very good reason I guess. I suppose it’s because of the name change which meant changing my Flickr account (because Flickr doesn’t have any way to change your URL once you’ve set it) which meant moving all my pics across which would then let me change the Flickr account tied to my Ravelry account and then, presumably, re-set all the pics on my knitting projects and … yawn.

So, no craft posts lately. Though I really should get on all that Flickr/Ravelry stuff so I don’t have the excuse.

I’ve been knitting lots over the last few months but just lately, the last couple of weeks, I’ve been on a sewing kick. I started by hemming a handful of things that had been sitting round waiting for it for months or in one case years, and now I’m on to actually sewing dresses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Entering a sewing phase

I haven’t been posting much about crafts lately because, um, no very good reason I guess. I suppose it’s because of the name change which meant changing my Flickr account (because Flickr doesn’t have any way to change your URL once you’ve set it) which meant moving all my pics across which would then let me change the Flickr account tied to my Ravelry account and then, presumably, re-set all the pics on my knitting projects and … yawn.

So, no craft posts lately. Though I really should get on all that Flickr/Ravelry stuff so I don’t have the excuse.

I’ve been knitting lots over the last few months but just lately, the last couple of weeks, I’ve been on a sewing kick. I started by hemming a handful of things that had been sitting round waiting for it for months or in one case years, and now I’m on to actually sewing dresses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.