Gender Focus

The Round-Up: June 8, 2010 June 8, 2010

Extra, Extra! Read all about it! Here’s your round up of things we missed.

• The Glee season finale is tonight. Now I have a bit of a thing where I try to avoid pop-culture that everyone else seems to like, so the more popular Glee gets the more tempted I am to stop watching it. But gosh darn it, those peppy musical numbers, the message that people should sing out and be themselves, and the stellar weekly performances by Jane Lynch and Matthew Morrison – not to mention the reams of Broadway guest-stars like Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth – keep me coming back for more. Now Glee is certainly not perfect. Bitch Magazine has done a great job of in-depth analyzing this season’s episodes with reference to how they fail to fully challenge gender stereotypes, over-simply feminism, and tokenize people with disabilities. These are important things to watch out for, but you know the show’s doing something correctly when it’s succeeded in pissing off the religious right. Michael Jones at Change.org reports that Conservative blogger Brent Bozell is up in arms because he thinks Glee makes homosexuality normal and unfairly stereotypes homophobes by portraying them as bullies. It takes a big man to stand up for the rights of homophobes. Score 1 for Glee!

• With Stephen Harper continuing to embarass Canada with his backward foreign maternal health policy leading up to hosting the G8 summit, it’s a perfect time to tune into the happenings of the Women Deliver 2010 conference, currently being covered by the Ms. Magazine blog.

• The old “are men better at science” debate has been thrust back into the spotlight in both the US and Canada. It started when the Canadian government gave 19 out of 19 esearch chair positions to men. Women professors decried the lack of progress for women in science and the government’s lack of procedure to ensure a more equal nomination pool. Then UBC Professor Andrew Irvine charged that actually it’s men who are discriminated against due to affirmative action at universities, though he cited no concrete examples or proof of this. Now the Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason isn’t exactly what you’d call a feminist, but I’ll give him some props for taking on Dr. Irvine on this issue.

• In the States the same discussion has come to the fore because the House of Representatives recently passed legislation which would require the White House science adviser to oversee gender equity workshops. At this link, Jezebel takes on the New York Times’ John Tierney for arguing that this will impede the ability for researchers to argue that women are simply not as good at science than men. I’m currently reading Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Myths of Gender, which is slightly dated but still very relevant, so this is an issue we’ll be keeping our eye on.

• And to finish things off, here’s a random nerdy cartoon from Cyanide & Happiness for those of you who remember kids’ shows of the 90s:

-Jarrah