The Play's The Thing

I took Theories and Methods of Cultural Studies in grad school, so I have read Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak on the theoretical complications of first world writers "representing" colonial and postcolonial groups; these problems range from stereotypes and race/class-based assumptions and paternalism to simply projecting Western cultural emotions and motivations onto Others, just to name a few. My feeling on the subject back then was that it would be better for a writer not to try to speak for the Other at all, rather than to try but get it horribly wrong and come out looking like an elitist or racist.

"Little did she know," a narrator might say, since several years later I am an expat and legal resident in Malaysia, and I'm really starved for the company of other people interested in writing. I was excited then when I saw that the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Center is inviting submissions for a short play festival. I have written several short plays, so I looked through my DRAMA file and found that my plays are all based on assumptions and cultural norms for the U.S. and particularly Louisiana where they were performed. I believe that good drama has the potential to speak beyond its own space and time, but I never claimed to be Shakespeare or even David Mamet. Besides, I think an event like this is a good impetus to write something new.

For the past two months I've been drafting a play in dialogue with Malaysian life and culture. Enter the concerns I listed in the above paragraph. Is it culturally sensitive? Are the characters authentic in terms of avoiding stereotype while presenting immediately recognizable personalities? Am I being so politically correct as to water down the aesthetics? I had a couple of Malaysian friends to read it for me, although even with them I wonder what the difference might be between how they represent themselves to expats, versus to each other. I get the feeling there's an entire other world I live in the middle of but am insulated from, and I am sure that's what causes some of the problems with representation listed in paragraph 1.

I'll have to wait a while to find out if my play is going to be performed, but it's been fascinating to write far, far outside my comfort zone. The hardest part has been considering my audience, mostly Malaysian with a few expats judging by the crowd at KLPAC events I have attended. What do you think about such a writerly cultural situation as mine?

Reflection on Cinco de Mayo in Malaysia

For my husband and me Cinco de Mayo means margaritas and fajitas served under a pinata and flanked with paper mache flowers, and we decided to bring an evening of Mexican yummy goodness to Malaysia. We didn't even know what the holiday actually stands for until checking on Wikipedia when our first guest confirmed attendance and asked what Cinco de Mayo was about since she's Indian. As the confirmations and regretful declines poured in, so did the questions about our holiday which Malaysians, Australians, and the British had never enjoyed. In the parts of the U.S. I have lived, this holiday means less anything about the outnumbered Mexican army's defeat of the French and more about enjoying a contextless tribute to Bacchus in the form of tequila, jalapenos, and cheese on everything.

While party planning, the little devil on my left shoulder that spent a lot of time reading cultural studies theory in grad school whispered that I was appropriating culture and serving it up for consumption as though Mexico could be condensed to a playlist of Mariachi bands; shouldn't I use this opportunity to raise awareness about Mexican immigrants, drug cartels, or the missing women of Juarez? Or would my espousal of any activist sound bites be equally reductive, albeit with noble intent?

There is a weird multi-level of nostalgia wrapped in all this for me. My fifth of May is a bright, enjoyable picture of what Americans imagine of Mexico, and to bring the celebration to Malaysia I have to create the idea of Mexico for the guests while also creating the nostalgia. My interpretation becomes a double level of nostalgia for the way Americans celebrate nostalgia for Mexico, but I can only succeed in it if I make abject the pieces of Mexican culture that didn't fit into the party mold.

All my mental meandering isn't stopping us from hanging red, yellow, and green balloons from the ceiling and making quesadillas, Mexican cornbread, and 7-layer bean dip, but I don't think that means these aren't questions worth asking. What will you be thinking when you raise your Corona on Tuesday?

A few of my favorite things

One comment to my April 1st post ushering in National Poetry Month suggested that I tell you my favorite places to read poetry online. These are just a few of the many places I like to browse when I am searching for a new poem to write or want to read something besides what's on my shelves.

Mannequin Envy is a site that I enjoy as much for the poetry as for the carefully selected images that accompany the texts. The poems on the first read might seem "off the cuff," but they aren't messy first drafts. As I reader I feel that these poems hit the unexpected, get dazed, and keep going in order to do it again.

H_ngm_n: A Journal of Online Poetry and Poetics is fun to navigate, and the layout feels fresh. They publish a handful of poems and longer poems by the poets so you get a good sense of each individual voice. This poetry seems to need to be read aloud, preferably in the company of an improvisational jazz band in the background; it makes me feel like I need a cigarette and I don't even smoke.

There's no need for me to say anything about what Ploughshares offers in poetic quality since so many established writers have been published there, but what you may not know is that the web editions of each issue rotate which texts are available. So if the Duhamel poem is locked today, next week it might not be.

No Tell Motel updates with a new poem almost every day, and they usually publish several poems by each poet so sometimes I find someone I like and start looking for other things they've written that are available on the web. The styles and subjects are really varied, so if the first poem isn't to your liking, just keep scrolling down for something different.

And lastly, I adore The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Each writer has a Southern Legitimacy Statement,but they are mostly not Jeff Foxworthy rip-offs. The poetry and fiction are well-crafted contemporary pieces with dashes of regionalism, identity, and place.

So tell me what are your favorite places to read poetry (or any other genre) online?

Happy National Poetry Month!

NaPoWriMo has arrived! April is National Poetry Month, and Read Write Poem is celebrating with a thirty poems in thirty days challenge. Here's my angle: write all the poems on a theme and have a draft for a chapbook. Yes, some days I might miss a poem, and on other days everything I write might frankly stink. That's what good friends and revision are for. But that won't be the case every day, and getting a few gems out of NaPoWriMo will be worth joining this big alliterative orgy of clever slant rhymes, puns, hypertexts, wit, and sharp social criticism.

An excellent place to look for inspiration is Poets.org's Poem A Day e-mail list, which is also archived on the website. I could list my favorite online places to read poems, but I think it's more fun to find your own. Start with the great work on Fringe and start following links. I always arrive to something cool, most recently Hit and Run Magazine.

Still not fired up? Read Charles Bernstein's satirical Against National Poetry Month. He's right perhaps about what the aim of the corporate sponsorship of NaPoMo is about, but that's no reason to ignore perfectly good free poems a day, and if you're inspired to write anti-poems sometimes, that's good, too.

One thing paper can do that laptops and phones can't

I may have been risking my life in a nerdy version of the stereotypical blond using a hairdryer in the bath tub when I gingerly balanced my laptop over the edge of my bubble bath this afternoon, but I try not to make a regular habit of it. Usually I relax there with a magazine or book, but today I just wanted to keep up with my Live Journal friends page and soak at the same time. Clearly technology has a way to go before we can safely lay claim to being a paperless society.

A few years ago in a graduate seminar on reading culture we had a great discussion about books/notebooks versus digital books/laptops (although there's some slippage now since some laptops are called notebooks--clever, marketing teams). I loved and still love the idea of saving trees by doing more things electronically and eliminating the paper trail, and if people do actually find it not annoying to read a novel on a computer or phone screen, then by all means save those trees! But there are some places that I just either can't or really shouldn't use electronics for my reading.

Another great example is reading while exercising. I like to read novels and magazines on the stationary bike, and during my dissertation I would read articles and edit my criticism on the treadmill and elliptical trainer. But I don't think I will be reading from my phone there any time soon. I guess all my arguments for why not stem from a possible glare on the screen and small font problem to the difficult of changing the pages, although the latter problem also occurs with paper which I manage just fine. The beach is another place that although I can technically use a laptop there, I will be fighting the glare problem, and getting sand or water inside my technology will cost a lot more money than one accidentally waterlogged journal.

Reading in bed is fine either way, and I do both, but I've also then kicked the laptop off the bed and then panicked. I never panic when I kick a book in my sleep. And falling asleep with the computer in my arms lacks some of the romance of cradling a novel. But I'm not a total Luddite. I love the idea of having cell phone access and wireless on airplanes, and I just wish they'd figure out a way to waterproof our gadgets so we could bathe with them, too.

Blogger Spotlight

The Fringe editors aren't the only ones getting all the buzz: our bloggers are doing pretty well for themselves too!


Cindy has had three poems published in the Winter 2008/9 issue of Conversation Poetry Quarterly, and one poem in both the Women. Period (2008) anthology from Spinster's Ink Press and the Empowering Women Through Literacy (2009) book from the Women Expanding Literacy Education Action Resource Network.


Sean's poems appear or are forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, Elimae, Diode, In Posse Review, Willow Springs, Taiga, Weave, Willows Wept Review, Oranges & Sardines, RealPoetik, New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Juked, Eratio, Ditch, Pineapple War, Redactions, and Quarter After Eight. His book reviews wil be featured in Rain Taxi. He is currently working on two books: a 500-trail hiking guide for Oregon, and a nonfiction manuscript, Smoking Waters. His blog site is theimaginedfield.blogspot.com.

Cat had two Soapbox columns in Boston's Weekly Dig in 2008: Liberla Schmarts and Broken appendages cause bonding . She has also taken over as Head Copy Editor for Fringe!

Julie also found success in the Weekly Dig, with her Soapbox column in December. She also recently had an article published in Sirens Magazine about the ways in which overly-educated women are coping after a job loss.


Please, no photographs.

Pollyanna All Grown Up

You know how irritating it is when you got up at 5:30 a.m. & someone complains about getting up before noon? That's how I feel about the "Go Green" and "Stop Global Warming" movements. See, in the summer of 2001 I was a 21-yr old bright-eyed canvasser for the Florida Consumer Action Network (FCAN) for roughly a month. We were trying to get TECO to upgrade the coal filtering system on a nearby power plant whose out-dated technology was exempt from EPA regulations because it had been grandfathered under the Clean Air Act. FCAN had science on our side, and the mission at hand was small, attainable (they did finally make TECO retrofit the plants), and non-threatening to the status quo. As a canvasser, my job was to educate the public, get them to write petition letters, and solicit donations preferably $15 or more. The "public" was different middle class neighborhoods in the Tampa Bay area, some of which were close enough to the TECO power plant that you could see smoke stack over rooftops. I thought the job would be a cinch.

I was cussed out, got doors slammed in my face, was called a liar, and even worse, I was educated that people can be so cold that even when they didn't attack message or messenger they were still not moved to do a darned thing about their own environments--an insight into how people can not vote in their own interest. On my last day of canvassing under the hot Florida sun my only donation and letter came from a teenage girl who worked at Pizza Hut. After four hours of solid "no's" and a particularly rude old lady who husband was on an oxygen machine, I was crying on a curbside. My lesson learned was that the adult world didn't want to hear an inconvenient truth. I had a little hope for the upcoming generation but concluded that if our parents and grandparents wanted to breath dirty air that increased sickness in the elderly and infants, then they deserved what they got.

Fast-forward to the present, and I feel like I did as a 2002 peace protester by the time the general population questioned the Iraq war in 2007. Sure, you are better late than never, but while I was arguing with you hard-heads, look how much worse the problem has become. What I have now is not hope but apathy. I'm glad the general population wants to go green and wants to save polar bears and virgin rainforests and water sources, and I believe that every small change we make has a small effect on the world (as a vegetarian I save roughly 100 animal lives a year), but for most people environmental issues are a sexy fad that environmentalists are wise to capitalize on to get as much change on the books as they can. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I won't be holding my breath. I will however be reading Fringe Magazine's environment issue!

Women's Studies First on the Chopping Block in Hard Times

Women's Studies, African Studies, and other multicultural university departments and programs are first on the chopping block amidst steep budget cuts. Last year the USF WST department pulled a massive effort together to oppose merging all the "marginal" cultural departments into one department, and they were successful not because of the letters from famous feminists on their behalf, but because of student-lead protests. As an alumnus of USF and beneficiary of the strong WS department there (the largest in the south and the oldest in FL) I was proud and relieved to see its survival, and with the Obama presidency, I saw the pendulum swinging back toward the important work of small departments like these.

But I was breathing that sigh of relief too quickly. Jenn Moore posted this information on the Women's Studies list serve: "This year something similar [to USF], but arguably more dire, is happening at Florida Atlantic
University where the school is may be using the recession as an excuse to dissolve the Women's, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies department and its MA program."

The global gag rule has just been reversed, and the Lily Ledbetter Act has passed congress, but feminists are so, so not out of the hot water. I am not surprised that people against WS would use this time of financial crisis to get rid of progressive departments, but we can't let them win. It's true that budget cuts are very real and very big, but it's a repression of information and educational opportunity to systematically ax multicultural and gender/sexuality focused departments and programs of study, as Jessica on Feministing reports is the case in Georgia.

Post-feminists are using this opportunity to use economicspeak to argue that WS has outlived its usefulness, akin to arguments that American car companies deserve to fail if they aren't profitable. But to this charge, I answer that I've been involved with WS programs at three universities, and they had strong enrollment and an excellent record of service and community involvement, the professors strong records of publication and leaders in their fields. I know it's not just about WS, because for instance philosophy departments are also having to defend themselves, but what the fields most often in trouble have in common is that they are are seen as more "feminine" and generate less revenue, lead generally to lesser paying jobs, are in essence less "masculine," so while there are targeted attacks on race and gender studies, there are also attacks that consider themselves to be quantitative but succumb to patriarchal assumptions of value.

Hmpf.

"Body Positive" Simpson and a Girl's Internalized Ideal

I can't name a single song Jessica Simpson sings, and I only saw her act once in The Dukes of Hazard film which some ex-boyfriend or other dragged me to see, but I've followed her life and beauty transformations via the continuous updates to the headlines on supermaket tabloids. When she lost weight after the divorce and emerged better than ever, I took note because her weight loss was accompanied with muscle tone; for that reason she's been a fitness icon for me along the same lines as Angelina Jolie (another fitness letdown since post-babies she's just ghastly thin) circa Lara Croft films.

But since last week pictures of a heavier Simpson have emerged, along with long lines of discussions about it that range from nasty and abusive to celebratory, or murmurs of publicity stunt. I stand somewhere in the middle of all these ideas. On one hand, yes, in the middle of a global economic crisis why is the media giving a celeb's weight gain this much press, and shame on all of us including me for giving the topic so many brain cells. And while she's not super-skinny she's not "fat," and if she walked into a bar just as she is, she'd find herself surrounded by admirers, some of whom are denouncing her weight gain at present. Really she should be applauded for not apologizing away her weight gain as depression-related and instead just saying she's happy with herself as she is.

At the same time, well Simpson at present is no fitness icon. When I pulled her picture up on my computer, I said to my husband "Oh, my goodness, Jessica Simpson is bigger than I am!" I felt betrayed. I work out for 2 hours 4-5 days a week to stay in my size 4-6 clothes, and when I do all that work, I have the vision that my life is resembling as closely as possible that of the rich and famous at least when we're all sweating at a pilates class. I don't do it for men to notice me. My husband wouldn't care if I wore a size 12, but I do it for the little girl inside of me who hasn't outgrown her dream to be revered on the red carpet, and it's important to me that the women who do "make it" appear as perfection I'll never achieve. That makes it feel fair to me that I'm at home eating peanuts while they wear ball gowns that cost more than my car. This is the same line of thinking that causes me to hold writing from writers my own age who've "made it" to an insanely high ideal.

Perhaps this is a publicity stunt from which Simpson will emerge triumphantly thin and touting some diet or exercise program. And if she is really here to stay as she is, well I say let's be body-positive and extend to her the same standard we give our girlfriends whom we love and find beautiful at whatever shape or size. But for myself, I'm staying on my exercise routine at present, just in case. I guess it will take more than one star crossing the divide between "them" and "us" for me to believe it's okay for me to also relax. Perhaps there are others I can look toward instead, like did you see the muscle tone on Anne Hathaway's thighs in Bride Wars?

Living Overseas and Maid Wages

A good friend of mine used to joke that "only boring women keep clean houses," and being anything but boring myself, I have always vowed to pay someone to do my cleaning if I could ever afford to do so. But I got a rude awakening when I triumphantly posted in my Livejournal that I'm paying my new maid 500 ringgit a month for eight hours a week of labor. To see my actual cost, divide that by 3.5. When I posted that blog, I did so with the idea that my American friends would be jealous, a rare occasion because having a maid is one of the few perks of living in Malaysia. Instead, my friends informed that this 40-yr old woman will be make $4.46 an hour, making me a sweat shop slave driver. The money I am giving her is what she asked to be paid for the amount of work that she proposed to do, though, so what that amount meant hadn't entered my mind. And I have the air conditioning on with NPR's All Things Considered in the background. Surely she could do worse.

My conscience was unsettled, though, so I decided to check up on whether she's getting a good part-time wage for Malaysia. Actually, it appears that house maids are doing pretty well according to this salary guide. There currently is no minimum wage in Malaysia, but look at this article which proposes a minimum wage of 1,200 ringgits. My maid earns almost half of that for eight hours a week. If she has two other houses, she's doing better than that, and if she works 40 hours a week, she's making almost double what authorities here think is a living wage. Despite what you might think, by paying maids so highly, we are empowering these women in a market where their unskilled labor would earn far less in other sectors.

But if all of this is true, then why do I feel like I am doing something wrong? I boycotted Nike shoes and Taco Bell tomatoes back in the day because of labor abuses. Of course, my house cleaning is hardly a matter of out-sourcing U.S. jobs or paying illegal immigrants less than locals. In fact, I am paying her more because it's possible to get Indonesian girls to work for you full-time for 500 ringgits. But do I only make myself feel better by saying "Oh, but someone else is worse!" Or am I legitimately doing what any overseas employer does, which is to pay the local going rate? Methinks I doth protest too much.

Form Over Style in ESL Fiction Workshops

For the first time today I attended the monthly Silverfish Books fiction forum, a group that is advertised as an opportunity for fiction writers to share their work. There were 17 people at the forum but only three people were reading their work, and most of the other people present seemed to be also writers and not just friends dragged along for the writers' moral support. The levels of experience with writing varied from contest winners and those with a first book to novices who'd yet to volunteer to share their work.

There was no announcement of etiquette except that the moderator stressed that we were there to discuss "storytelling" and not "editing," which ruffled my feathers a bit because telling a good story isn't only plot, but also language. One control over our not discussing sentence level was that people didn't bring copies so we couldn't see the stories for ourselves. Anyway, the general process was that someone read a story, then we commented on it while the writer more or less sat in silence, which is typical of most workshops. What was different is that we bypassed the cursory positive comments before cutting our teeth on constructive criticism. The criticisms were about believability, cliches, character development, continuity, conflict, and mostly anything that wasn't word choice.

When I taught intro to creative writing, I used Janet Burroway's The Art of Fiction and encouraged the students to think about plot and style together as a package,
but in reflecting on the language criticism ban, I see the argument that developing writers who aren't writing in their native language should start by telling good stories in English and then secondly by telling them well. In Bahktin's sujet and fablua distinction, then the assumption is that with a better plot and form, better style will follow. I didn't use that approach to creative writing, but in the composition classroom my pedagogy included a belief that with better research and critical thinking processes before the drafting stages, a better-crafted draft would result.

In any case, I am going to the fiction forum again next month. And I don't think this post would be complete without a mention of what today's stories were about: bankrupt film maker makes Malaysian porn film with help of loan shark; workaholic loses wife and daughter and overcomes depression by designing Japanese toilets; and another story that can't be paraphrased, but it includes a chef cooking mushrooms that grow on his daughter. Oh, and did I mention a brief reading from Shih-Li Kow, whose first book was published December? And she's only been writing seriously for two years. Perhaps this Malaysian method of workshopping is worth a shot.

Christmas For Christmas's Sake!

In the U.S., political correctness has steered us toward saying "Happy Holidays!" instead of "Merry Christmas" because not everyone should be assumed to celebrate Christmas. In the legal arena, the Christmas debate is playing itself out with lawsuits against placing nativity scenes on government property as well as petitions to do so, resulting with Christians, atheists, Jews, Muslims, etc crying "discrimination!" What a mess.

On the other hand, in Malaysia because I am Caucasian everyone assumed I was celebrating Christmas, and in almost every shop I visited this past week, I was wished a sometimes awkward "Merry Christmas," which seemed ironic given the turmoil of that phrase back home. I thought of the wish as an acknowledgement that I decorated my condo in red and green and was dreaming of a white Christmas. But on Dec. 23 I was at the gym making small talk with the Muslim woman on the treadmill beside me, and she asked me what I was doing for Christmas. I told her where my husband and I were thinking of going for dinner, and she said "Oh, and then church?" I was taken back. "No, we're secular Christians" I replied, pretty sure that I'd made the term up, although "secular Muslim" is a common phrase around here, so I knew she'd get the idea. But her assumption that I was celebrating this Christian holiday as a religious holiday wasn't unreasonable in context, since an atheist wouldn't celebrate Hari Raya, etc, so I asked myself if I am not celebrating Christ's birthday, what am I celebrating?

I have never celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday, but I have celebrated it with a religious fervor. My family has long-standing traditions of homemade cinnamon rolls, opening gifts at 4:00 a.m., Christmas eve dinner with Granny, Christmas day dinner with Mamaw. Any deviation from our Christmas ritual would be treated as sacrilege. This year, however, I am away from home for the first time, and I didn't do any of those rituals. I put up a tiny tree and a wreath, wrapped presents for my husband and our cats, and we played the Starbuck's Christmas CD, but this holiday wasn't an orgy of desserts, shopping, and parties. There was really nothing to celebrate except my nostalgia for those things, and I think the Christmas crisis in the U.S. has nostalgia at its roots as well.

If you take out the sentimentality and nostalgia, you have a meaningless "Merry Christmas" which should cause no more offense than joy, a manger that should inspire no more loathing than love. Just something that some people do, that means different things to different people, a signifier that's lost its universal meaning but not its wide appeal. Perhaps Christmas can transcend its religious roots (which of course historically have pagan roots), making itself into another altar altogether, and to that I say "Cheers!"

Freedom From, Freedom To: A Debate on Singapore

My husband and I just returned to Kuala Lumpur after taking a mini honeymoon in Singapore, which is just an hour away by plane. My frame of reference for Singapore was that it was supposed to be very clean and safe, but ruled with an iron fist that famously stuck to its guns and caned the American teen, Michael Cain, when he committed vandalism there in the 1990s. I was sympathetic to Cain during his trial, and with Singapore's executing a person roughly every nine days, I felt confident that no amount of cleanliness was worth such harsh penalities.

But when I spent some time in the city, I saw that the city's peace is not just about graffiti or litter. In Singapore no one ever made the obnoxious kissy noises at me that Malaysian men prefer over some American hoots or whistles. No cars honked at me to let me know they had power right then and I was a sex object. In fact, there were lots and lots of women walking alone to and from buses, subways, and shops. Unaccompanied women, at least not without another woman, are rare in KL because then you are even more likely to be the victim of a mugging, or "purse snatching" as the police frivilously categorize such crimes if you try to make a report. We even had a woman taxi driver, which is unheard of in KL because it would be like a roulette game with male passengers.

The downside of this utopian depiction of a city with four million people is that there were cameras probably every twenty-fourty feet or so on all the sidewalks, outside the entrances to buildings, etc. On Clarke Quay, there was a fine of 1,000 S$ for littering or riding a bike in the tunnel. Sure, that's a lot of money, but people shouldn't litter anyway, and bicyclists should assume responsibilty not to injure pedestrians, right? And in a broader sense, whatever the penalities for stealing, stealing is wrong, right? I might object to the strict drug laws, but then again, in such a lovely city what's there to escape from? Unless of course you are LGBT, and I do think that's not right because if everyone isn't free to love, then love is not free.

But there's no lack of art museums and small contemporary galleries, and there was far more nightlife in terms of live bands and friendly clubs and bars there than in KL. Not that KL doesn't have bars, but I've never seen one where the patrons looked entirely comfortable with each other the way people were in Singapore where I took such liberties as putting my purse in the seat next to me, walking on the sidewalk alone, and smiling at strangers. I am not kidding that you can't do those things safely where I live. Singapore does have gay bars, which the city tolerates, and I hope it continues to move in that direction. I would say that a lack of gay rights was the only discernible major problem, and that's not okay, but it's a great place to start in a country that has legal abortion and sex toy stores amidst the bustles of Orchard Street, the major shopping thoroughfare.

I am still against the death penalty in the U.S. for lots of reasons unrelated to this post, but what I like about a general enforcement of penalties and strong police protection is that if it works, you actually are protected, and you are free to do anything that's not against the law, which is like a civil liberty to me. In the U.S. women organize Take Back the Night, but in many other parts of the world, we'd need to start with Take Back the Morning and Afternoon. Not true of Singapore, and for that we'd do well to take note.

Global economic downturn is bad news for women's shelters

I normally think of large corporations as necessary evils (but mostly just evils) of a capitalist society, and although I care about the daily employees, I've felt a bit smug about some of the collapses in a nostalgic Fight Club sense--until seeing that the global economic crisis means less money for charities. And that as the Arlington, VA Doorways women's shelter rep says, "domestic abuse spikes during hard economic times — driving more women and their children to the shelters and safe houses." Doorways is looking at possibly losing only a fifth of its budget, which is bad news, but compare that to the Women's Aid Organization in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which has a shortfall of $200,000 USD, less than the Doorways shortfall, and yet that amount is 2/3 the total budget. The WAO shortfall is also due to the global recession, and if the money can't be raised soon, they will have to close the Child Care Center which allows abused women to bring thier children with them.

It's a commonly held fact that women and children need charity and social services more than men, but lately I felt that such a coversation topic was too divisive, given the broad range of people suffering right now from job loss. But even if men and women were losing jobs at the same rate, women would still be holding the shorter end, because as Susan Faludi so effectively argues in Stiffed, a whole new wave of violence against women is likely to occur, brought about by men who feel emasculated by not being a breadwinner, who can't handle the powerlessness that is intrinsic to suffering consequences of the actions of people more powerful than oneself. And those more powerful in this case are the hedge fund managers, CEOs, deregulationists in congress, and every small investor and motgage holder who attempted to hop onto that bandwagon once it looked unstoppable. And some of those people will also be increasing violence.

So, what the heck is this blog about? I am concerned about how the fall of these major employers will statistically raise incidents of domestic abuse and then concerned that the lack of corporate donations is causing women's shelters to be crippled at the time they are even more in demand. In my naive Fight Club fantasy wherein multinationals crumble because of overexpansion, it never dawned on me that the "extra" of women's well-being would be compromised in such an event. More than this, it never occured to me that of course in a global recession, women in nonwestern countries wherein feminism hasn't nearly made the impact it has in the west will suffer disproportionately; in KL the police are still just as likely to tell a battered wife to go home and cook her husband his favorite meal or ask her "What did you do to make him hit you?" as they are to refer a woman to services like WAO's. In such a climate, clearly the lack of education about violence against women makes fundraising and forming alliances even more challenging for groups like WAO. I'm not saying that charity groups in the U.S. have it easy, except by comparison. And what a sad comparison. Women and children deserve more, and so do men. Men could help by proving the statistics wrong and not increasing violence in the first place.

Roll up your sleeves, friends of women. It's going to be a long winter.

Procrastination, Pessimism, and Floral Design

This afternoon as my hands gently clipped the tape that wound around the petals of the bouquet's fifteen gerber daisies, it occurred to me I should have gone to buy the flowers myself. I had ordered a hand-tied bouquet from a Malaysian florist on the web at a bargain and gotten only what I paid for. The tape was not even plant tape but regular scotch, and around the stems the tape held the whole together, but suffocated it as result. After freeing the flowers' faces to open into outward embrace, I wished someone would snip the tape and carefully peel it from around the petals on my head.

I don't know why I spent an hour choosing the flowers to order and then another hour proving my identity since I'd used an American credit card to buy flowers on the other side of the globe. Then I spent a third hour removing the tape from the flowers and arranging them in a large green vase, ignoring the deadline for the Yale Series of Younger Poets only three days away. But no one has taped my laptop shut, nor webbed my fingers together so that I might only bang at the keys. I've got an excellent compilation that really would only require the teensiest bit of shuffling and last minute cuts. At least half the poems have been published in journals and zines, and almost all have been given the editorial eye by at least one poet I trust. They represent ten years of writing and reading and editing, but also represent well over a thousand dollars in previous contest fees and related expenses.

Most of my peers in writing workshops and at conferences have admitted frustration with unrequited appeals to be published. We're in good company if you like Coleridge or Plath, amongst many others. Besides identifying with melancholics, writers in moments of self-doubt console ourselves with stats bordering upon urban legends, such as that most manuscripts circulate for at least two years, some as much as eight, and then greatness is rewarded. We're told by writers who've "made it" and editors that if we keep trying, really good writing will find a home, but of course they would say that. The other option is too dismal for a floral-scented reading or workshop for which participants have paid. Yes, perhaps the writing is good enough, but like Blake or Dickinson we may never live to know it, or even worse, perhaps the work will never go anywhere, period--or worst, maybe despite all our desire and energy the writing just isn't that good.

This year I let the deadlines for fall contests lapse because I'd rather keep my petals closed than risk opening them once again to nothing, but I hate how whiny that sounds. The self-indulgent melancholy in this post creeps throughout with such thickness you'd have to clip through it with a weed eater. And would there be any point in clipping through it? The red and yellow fall bouquet on my coffee table is calling me a hypocrite to prefer suffocation wherein I hold the scissors, instead of relinquishing them to an editorial team that I'd trust as much as my Malaysian florist. Then again, I am probably less afraid of "putting pearls before swine" than of getting the one-rejection-too-many that makes me think I am just not a blooming poet at all.

Power and Pole Dancing in Malaysia

I lost my footing on the treadmill when I found the Asian Pole Summit ad in the Expat KL Magazine, which targets expats in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a Muslim country in Southeast Asia. My first thoughts as an American feminist were that the summit represents an unusual tolerance for female sexual expression, or maybe it’s not so different in this culture from belly dancing. Egyptian women once danced me under the table at a women-only party, but then I consider our proximity to the "lady sex" industry in Bangkok where erotic dance is more empowering to pimps than the dancers. Then I noticed the ad's Simone de Beauvoir quote, “one is not born a woman, one becomes one.”

The appropriation of this second wave feminist cornerstone made me ask “What is a woman--in Malaysia?" Beauvoir’s idea that “women” are a social construct threatens to crumble the Islamic gender norms, which circumscribe dress (even though the hijab is optional here), rights, and behavior. I let local women answer for themselves whether and how they feel might feel oppressed, but in any case the Asian Pole Summit’s audience lives in a society whose majority subscribes to strict gender norms and where men can take a two-hour flight and get all the pole dancing they want. In such a context, to tell women that they can empower themselves via a weekend of “killer workouts” and “exotic titillation” reduces the options for women to the virgin-whore dichotomy while doing nothing to challenge the patriarchal social structure wherein most married women have banking options that rival pre-1950s America.

This country is confused about women. Mini skirts and hijabs rival each other for majority so it feels to me that the only public woman seems to be a sexualized one, and therefore any choice a woman makes about her presentation is a response to the country’s secular-religious struggle. I wonder if female empowerment through the art of pole dancing is possible in a patriarchal society; as Andi Zeisler asks regarding do-me feminism, “If the standards and stereotypes by which girls and women are judged haven't changed, could it really be called empowerment at all?”

No doubt the Asian Pole Summit deserves kudos for its woman-centered approach and the apparent business savvy of its female leaders. The issue isn’t to pole dance or not to pole dance, but it’s a question of power and meaning. I'm not convinced that empowerment from sexy fitness will translate outside the studio's doors where a solitary woman, irregardless of race or class, is a target for robbery or abuse even in broad daylight (don’t be mislead by KL’s low statistics). Maybe the dance's power doesn't have to translate to be effective for an individual woman, but I think she might be best served learning a dance move that includes a few karate chops when she’s seduced a would-be attacker to his knees.