Elizabeth Reid Boyd, author of “Lady: Still a Feminist Four-Letter Word?” in the Fall 2012 issue of Women & Language was recently interviewed about her article in The Critical Lede. The podcast of the interview is at http://thecriticallede.com/ and is also available through ITunes at http://podbay.fm/show/369560923

A growing number of feminist scholarship resources have become available on-line. What follows are a few that have recently come to the attention of W&L Editor Patty Sotirin

The Scholar & Feminist On-line: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/about/

The Fembot Collective: http://fembotcollective.org/

FemTechNet: https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/femtechnet

“We must stop being polite and behaved, and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority.” – Eve Ensler

This proposal is for a round table discussion on the growing backlash against women taking place in the United States. In 2012, an attack has been launched against the rights of women across the nation. From the pregnancy bill passed in Arizona to the personhood amendment on the docket in Mississippi, women’s reproductive freedoms have come under fire. The attacks don’t stop there. Legislatures passing invasive ultrasound measures; the U.S. Congress trying to redefine the definition of rape to protect the rapist; governors signing bills to criminalize miscarriage and birth control are just a few of the moves to reduce women’s rights back to pre-suffrage days. Since the midterm election of 2010, the status of women as second-class citizens has become, increasingly, more prominent.

Increasingly, women are being asked to embrace a “kinder, gentler” form of America where our voices are not as important as our husbands or our children’s (especially the unborn ones), where we accept unequal pay for the privilege of being allowed to go to work outside the home and where we are silent as men in power demean women in power for daring to call foul on this new contract. As women and men in the academy, what is our role in this new era? How do we shift the paradigm as Ensler says? Do we even want to and what happens if the status quo does not change? These are the question this discussion hopes to address. The outcome, hopefully, is not only fertile ideas for active research projects but, also, a network connection of people committed to reclaiming what many of us see as devastating losses.

Contact Panel Chair Sacheen Mobley-Welsh, Central Washington University for more information at Mobleys@cwu.edu

By Courtney C. Radsch

WeNews correspondent

Thursday, January 26, 2012

After a year of courageous digital leadership, female activists from the Middle East and North Africa–some of them Twitter superstars–met in Cairo last week. It was a chance to meet face-to-face, savor revolutionary success and weigh setbacks. Click here for the complete article

N. B. : Of the phrase chiennes de garde the standard translation is “women’s libbers” – lit. “female watch-dogs, bitches on the lookout”