Tag: Julia Gillard

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The 62nd Down Under Feminists Carnival

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

In blue on a white background, the DUFC logo: in a square with rounded corners, there is the female/feminine symbol; with the Southern Cross inside, above which it says 'Down Under' and below 'Feminists Carnival'.

Welcome! This post is the 62nd monthly Down Under Feminists Carnival. This edition of the carnival gathers together June 2013 feminist posts from writers living in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to all the writers and submitters for making this carnival outstanding, amazing, sad, outraging and uplifting.

Highlighted new(er) Down Under voices

I’ve highlightede posts that come from people who began been blogging at their current home in June 2012 or later, such posts are marked with (new blog) after the link. I know this is a very imperfect guide to new writers, since some may have simply started new blogs or switched URLs, or be well-known as writers in other media, but hopefully this may be a quick guide to feeds you may not be following yet.

Also, this carnival observes the rule that each writer may feature at most twice. Apologies to the fine submissions that were dropped under this system.

Feminist theory

Cristy is kicking off a feminist book club, from historical feminism and first wave onwards.

Joanna Horton reviews Joan Smith’s Misogynies, twenty four years on.

Party politics and government

In late June, Julia Gillard was deposed as Australian Prime Minister. Feminist commentary on Gillard’s media portrayals, treatment in Parliament, and defeat in a leadership ballot included:

Orlando got in before the spill with the questions the governing Labor party ought to be asking itself (not about the leadership).

Julie found that potential women candidates for office can’t commit due to time constraints.

Orlando salutes Emily Wilding Davison and other radical activists for women’s right to vote.

Ethnicity, racism, colonisation

Utopiana discusses lateral violence in the wake of her critique of Indigenous beauty pageants. (new blog)

Kim Mcbreen recaps a talk she gave about understandings of gender and sexuality in Māori traditions.

LudditeJourno chronicles news stories about pressure on indigenous people to assimilate.

Barbara Shaw recounts more than five years on income management in the Northern Territory.

The Koori Woman blogs on hope after the apology and anger after the Intervention for Reconciliation Week 2013.

Celeste Liddle reflects on international gatherings for indigenous people.

Misogyny, sexism, harassment, assault

Hayleigh wants to go outside her house without being objectified (new blog).

AJ Fitzwater promises to ally herself with people who speak out or who can’t speak out about bad behaviour in the speculative fiction community or the SFWA.

Amy Gray argues that the treatment of Adrian Earnest Bayley, who murdered Jill Meagher, shows that the Australian legal system does not deal with rapists well.

tigtog explains that it is the very indifference of creeps to desire that makes them creepy.

newswithnipples takes the mainstream media to task for widespread fail of the highest order.

bluebec does not want to excuse the abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church on the grounds that they also do good works.

LudditeJourno reviews the many lessons about rape that the Steubenville rapes show aren’t being learned.

Scuba Nurse points out that a rape, abuse or victimisation narrative resulting in the eventual victory of the survivor isn’t miraculously unproblematic.

Bodies

Hayleigh is tired of being chased around Facebook by weight-loss ads (new blog).

Eliza Cussen lists five mistakes she’s constantly correcting about abortion, including the myth that it’s legal throughout Australia (new blog).

Genevieve writes about healing after post-abortion trauma (pro-choice perspective).

Fat Heffalump debunks fat-shaming as a pro-public health act.

Workplace, employment and education

Anjum Rahman writes about the right to work, in the context of people with disabilities, and ethnic minorities (new blog).

blue milk writes about the Australian Coalition’s parental leave scheme and adds a followup in response to critique.

Rachael Ward asks why so many of the testing materials in the General Achievement Test in Victoria related to men’s achievements.

Arts, music, crafts and media

Holly Kench writes that stories with diversity don’t need to be about being different; they may be about belonging with difference (new blog).

The results of the Triple J Hottest 100, 20 Year Edition music poll aired in early June, and as with the all-time edition in 2009, women musicians were very badly represented. Commentary:

Chally is reviewing LGBT young adult books, check out her reviews of Is He Or Isn’t He?, Beauty Queen and more.

Transcendancing recaps Karen Pickering’s talk on the secret feminism of the Country Women’s Association (CWA).

Jo Qualmann analyses the disappearing women of Doctor Who in light of the season finale.

AlisonM observes how very different Facebook ads are, depending on your selected gender.

canbebitter analsyes Cee Lo Green’s Fuck You, concluding that Fuck You is misogynist. Later in the month canbebitter presents an alternative queer reading of Fuck You.

Scarlett Harris reviews Paper Giants 2: Magazine Wars in light of current developments in magazine wars.

bluebec criticises recent coverage of polyamory in the press.

QoT is unimpressed by “feminist” clickbait.

New blogs

Blogs started in or after June 2012 featured in this carnival were:

Next carnival

The 63rd carnival will follow at can be bitter in early August. Keep an eye on Down Under Feminists Carnival HQ for submission instructions.

Volunteers are needed to host carnivals from October onwards. Volunteer via the contact form.

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Ask Auntie Hoyden: get your dog outlines here, and other search engine queries

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

an on-set photo of Katharine Hepburn, with overlaid text reading "Ask A Hoyden?"auntie hoyden

Why, I enjoyed those posts (1, 2, 3) in which Lauredhel tried to answer search queries as questions too! So much so that I show up in this site’s logs looking for them. So today, I too become Auntie Hoyden.

Frankly, it appears to me that most people stop here on their way to I Can Haz Cheezburger (funny cat pictures, captioned cat pictures, supernatural macros funny, funny pics), but they also appear looking for soylent green simpsons, any medicine for truth speak and, in considerable numbers, anal sex diagram. (Which is a bit odd, Google finds plenty of considerably more helpful sites for me on that term.)

But let’s see what I can do for you all today, although my specialities are more in the computer line than the sexual health and breastfeeding line that is traditional for this.

pluralising names

Lauredhel observed in 2008 that there’s a construction in Australian English (among others) that allows you to use things like “the Marys of the world” to mean “people like one particular Mary” rather than necessary literally multiple people named Mary.

But if you’re simply interested in how to add a suffix to a proper noun in order to indicate multiple things with that name, here’s a style guide’s answer.

dog outline png

[Update 2019: freesvg.org or publicdomainvectors.org are currently more searchable than openclipart.org.]

I like openclipart.org for this sort of thing: it’s public domain clipart, take it, use it and modify it without credit. (Not that I don’t also love various Creative Commons licences that do require credit, but dropping that requirement makes using many pieces a lot easier. I’ve seen people who use CC images from Flickr need to put a credits roll at the end of slide presentations.)

Plus! openclipart.org provides SVG as well as PNG. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a free image format which allows pictures to be scaled up in size without loss of quality, as well as down in size. This is accomplished by describing an image in terms of lines or curves (hence, vectors) rather than in terms of individual coloured dots. It’s not very useful for photos, but it’s great for clipart (and fonts, which are generally described in vectors and thus can be scaled up).

openclipart.org has hundreds of drawings of dogs. I’m not sure if this person was looking for a silhouette of a dog, which I couldn’t find on a very brief look, or simply a line drawing of a dog, of which there are many. Here’s a cute one.

snuggle otter

Don’t. We love ’em but that doesn’t make them domesticated pets.

mother sprays milk

Does she ever. I breastfeed a ten month old baby. When he was little I had a supply suitable for twins, or perhaps sextuplets, and milk was everywhere. Then things balanced out and we had a nice interlude of not spraying. Then he got a bit more distractible, which resulted on the weekend in him getting a letdown, pulling off and slipping so that he headbutted me in the breast and milk shot out for the best part of a metre.

If anyone else wants to grace the Internet with a milk spray story, feel free.

australia’s prime minister 2010 smiling

On the 25th June 2010, one day after becoming leader of the government and being sworn in as Prime Minister, Julia Gillard smiled in the presence of the US ambassor to Australia, Jeff Bleich. This is important, because it was photographed by embassy staff, and as a work of the US Federal Government, it is thus in the public domain and you can get it from Wikimedia Commons.

anti filter

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