What if a woman, 20 years old, had shot her father and six other men, and twenty children, with dozens of rounds of ammunition?
Would that change the rhetoric around gun control?
Gloria Steinem pointed out a long time ago that the unnoticed and
unmentioned feature of these mass killings is that the shooters are
always male.
Women are constructed by significant segments of our society as weak. Women are subject to male gaze, male desire, male appropriation, male violence. What if a middle-aged woman -- a mother, maybe, a wife, a daughter, an employee -- opened fire?
If guns were associated with out-of-control estrogen instead of
out-of-control testosterone, would lawmakers be scurrying to limit
access?
If mentally ill women were inclined to violence, would that change access to and treatment of mental illness?
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Last night I had the strangest dream I've ever had before: I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.
Heide Estes
When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.
Kimberlè Crenshaw
Professor of English at Monmouth University in New Jersey, environmental activist, disability blogger, parent. Find me @1greenblogger or on Facebook.
A List of Lists
On the Bedside Table
- Doug Tallamy, Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard
- Erving Goffman, Stigma
- Frank Herbert, Dune
- Melissa Terras, ed. Defining Digital Humanities
- Jeffrey J. Cohen, ed. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green
- David P. Clark, Germs, Genes, and Civilization
- Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
- François Grosjean, Bilingual: Life and Reality
- J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism
- Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
Posts
Dr. Estes-
ReplyDeleteMother Jones did an article on mass shootings, and they point out the the market share of the perpetrators were white males - and one such act of violence was a female. The author, Mark Follman expanded quite a bit on the issue of males perfuming this violence on an NPR interview. You do raise a very interesting question, indeed. Also to consider, what if the majority of the shooters were not white?
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
http://www.wnyc.org/npr_articles/2012/dec/14/us-has-had-seven-mass-killings-this-year/
Wow, my grammar and spelling was off there. It has been a long week.
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