Schooled by PopCul

Stories made me.

[joearlikelikescomics]

Black Canary and Oracle by Terry Moore

[australasianeducator]

Two of my favourite women :) by a favourite artist

[myszko]

What I didn’t know at the time was that this is what time is like for most women: fragmented, interrupted by child care and housework. Whatever leisure time they have is often devoted to what others want to do – particularly the kids – and making sure everyone else is happy doing it. Often women are so preoccupied by all the other stuff that needs doing – worrying about the carpool, whether there’s anything in the fridge to cook for dinner – that the time itself is what sociologists call “contaminated.” I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow.

Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue (via myszko)

“time confetti” is a good descriptor of how most women get a break - in tiny, unpredictable increments that may be interrupted at any moment. Which is not genuine “leisure” at all.

(via drst)

If a man ever hits me with that “women never invented anything great” bullshit again, I’m gonna remind him that men never gave us the free time to do it. And even under those conditions, some women still did it.

(via krismichelle429)

[australasianeducator]

bildungsroman(ing) myself

This wonderful tweet flew by in the stream. Reflecting on the passing of U.S.Supreme Court Justice Scalia, the writer gave a cheeky shrug and compared Scalia’s relationship with Justice Ginsburg to that of Londo and G’kar from the 1990s science-fiction series Babylon 5.

Despite knowing nothing about Scalia and barely a pinky fingernail about Ginsburg I totally got their relationship half a world away in Australia. (You see, I may not have had the most enriching of childhoods. I may not have studied. I may not have known HOW to study, really, until I became a teacher and learned the tactics of my upper-middle class students.)  But. I did watch a hell of a lot of TV as a kid. And Babylon 5 was there in those formative teen years when I was working out what was right and what was wrong; what was just and what was kicked in the teeth unfair. So while I don’t know much about US judicial politics, the B5 analogy deepened my understanding of current events.

Mayhap my small-l liberalism comes from the stories I read and watched and imagined myself into. Maybe story has more thoroughly shaped who I am and who I could be, more so than any other influence. With that hypothesis in mind I sat down to rewatch Babylon 5′s first episode, looking past the screen itself, to see what I was really seeing as a teen and again now, as a woman.

(Also - I really need to write more & get back in the habit. Here’s hoping this helps.)