person:susan

  • Paris streets, squares named in honour of LGBT+ figures

    Fifty years after New York City’s Stonewall riots laid the foundation for modern gay rights, Paris is carrying on that legacy by naming an array of streets and squares after historically important LGBT+ figures.

    New to the city map are Stonewall Riot and Harvey Milk squares – the first in recognition of the famous rebellion against Manhattan police in 1969; the latter in honour of the American civil rights leader and first openly gay politician to be elected in California.

    Other squares, gardens and passageways pay tribute to the likes of Irish gay rights activist Mark Ashton, French transsexual politician and poet Ovida-Delect and bisexual American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag.

    There’s also a commemorative plaque in honour of Gilbert Baker, the man who invented the rainbow flag. Add to that Pierre Seel Street, named for the openly gay Holocaust survivor, and Place Renée Vivien, in honour of the British poet known for her Sapphic verse and party days during the Belle Epoque.

    Increasing LGBT+ visibility

    The new unveilings bring to more than 40 the number of people immortalised through plaques erected around the city – with most of them smattered about the vibrant 4th arrondissement, home to Paris’s unofficial gay district.

    These sorts of gestures are an important way of increasingly the visibility of the gay community and cementing its place in history, says Fabien Jannic-Cherbonnel, a journalist with the French LGBT+ news site Komitid.

    “France is very keen on talking about its history and the great men who shaped the country – and these plaques show people that women and LGBT+ figures are a part of that history, and they also helped to make this country what it is today,” he says.

    Paris playing catch-up

    While other European cities such as Amsterdam and Berlin are perhaps a little further ahead in celebrating the LGBT+ legacy, with their so-called “homomonuments” drawing in tourists, Paris is steadily playing catch-up – so much so the Town Hall has dared to label it the “flagship city of inclusion and diversity”.

    The street-naming gesture comes just ahead of this weekend’s pride march. Like many cities across the world, Paris cranks up the colour in June to celebrate gay pride – and this Saturday the capital will look like the rainbow city that mayor Anne Hidalgo has been striving to deliver.

    Tempering the pride party, however, is last month’s report by the French not-for-profit organisation SOS Homophobie, which noted a 15 percent rise in the number of homophobic attacks reported in 2018, compared with the previous year.

    While the NGO described 2018 as a “black year”, Jannic-Cherbonnel says the numbers aren’t necessarily evidence that homophobic assaults are on the rise.

    “This is a reflection of the number of calls that SOS received – which means that people are talking about it,” he says. “They know when something is wrong and when something happens they will report it.

    “I’m not convinced there’s a huge increase in homophobia in French society, especially in Paris, but we are talking more about it – which is good because this is all about visibility, which in turn helps to fight homophobia.”


    http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190626-paris-streets-squares-named-honour-lgbt-figures?ref=tw
    #LGBT #homosexualité #Paris #France #toponymie #noms_de_rue #Harvey_Milk

  • Renaud Epstein & station urbaner kulturen

    (Feben Amara, Jochen Becker, Christian Hanussek, Eva Hertzsch, Adam Page) with Oliver Pohlisch and Birgit Schlieps

    One day, one ZUP, one postcard (2014-…), 2018

    Wallpaper / Display cabinet
    Collection station urbaner kulturen, Berlin-Hellersdorf

    The sociologist Renaud Epstein’s project has first and foremost been an online format since its initiation in 2014: he posts a new postcard of large housing estates (Zones à Urbaniser par Priorité / ZUP) on his Twitter account every day. From a time when France dreamed of being modern and urban and believed in its architectural utopias, the ZUP postcards evoke at best a golden era, at worst a contemporary delusion.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/vte4ejv9wsumzyh/ARLES%202019-PRESS%20KIT-kl.pdf?dl=0

    The Berlin collective station urbaner kulturen, based in the last big housing estate built in the GDR, has extracted sections from Epstein’s Twitter timeline in order to materialize the interaction between internet users and images. Their project «Going out of Circles / Kreise ziehen» presents a wider series of exhibitions that aims to create connections between the housing estates on the periphery of urban and economic centers, around Berlin and beyond.

    A display case with original postcards next to the Twitter wallpaper emphasises the different readings of formats of communication.

    Postcards – News from a Dream World
    Musée départemental Arles Antique

    1 July - 25 August / 10 - 18

    Exhibition curators: Magali Nachtergael and Anne Reverseau

    Eric Baudart & Thu-Van Tran (1972 et 1979), Fredi Casco (1967), Moyra Davey (1958), documentation céline duval (1974), Renaud Epstein & station urbane kulturen (1971 et créé en 2014), Jean Geiser (1848-1923), Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (1969), Roc Herms (1978), Susan Hiller (1940-2019), John Hinde (1916-1997), Katia Kameli (1973), Aglaia Konrad (1960), Valérie Mréjen (1969), Martin Parr (1952), Mathieu Pernot (1970), Brenda Lou Schaub (1993), Stephen Shore (1947), John Stezaker (1948), Oriol Vilanova (1980), William Wegman (1943)

    The postcard is the ultimate circulating picture, constantly subject to a sense of déjà-vu. Throughout the twentieth century, it went hand in hand with the bottling of the visible world, the rise of image globalization and mass tourism. Collectors, hoarders, retouchers and iconographers seize existing pictures to give them a new meaning, clarify their status or context.

    By comparing this artistic vision with the making of postcards, this exhibition questions what they show and tell of the world, like a visual anthropology. What did they convey throughout the twentieth century, during their hour of glory? What vision of the world did they plant in the minds of their recipients, who got them from relatives and friends?

    Both a symbol of our private and collective imagination, the postcard represents an illusion, always close to hand. It shows us a dream world in which can project ourselves, as in a desirable fiction story.

    www.rencontres-arles.com/en/expositions/view/779/cartes-postales

    https://archiv.ngbk.de/projekte/station-urbaner-kulturen-hellersdorf-seit-2014
    https://www.ngbk.de/en/program/initiative-urbane-kulturen

    #renaud_epstein #cartes_postales

  • YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says vetting videos before they go up isn’t the right answer
    https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/10/18656937/youtube-susan-wojcicki-code-conference

    YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is okay with taking content down, but she doesn’t think it’s a good idea to review it before it goes up on the massive video-sharing platform. That’s one big takeaway from her interview with Recode senior correspondent Peter Kafka at this year’s Code Conference. “I think we would lose a lot of voices,” Wojcicki said. “I don’t think that’s the right answer.” She also warned that it could be difficult to come up with criteria as to what could be uploaded in the first place (...)

    #YouTube #censure #discrimination #harcèlement #LGBT

  • #Géographie_féministe

    GeoAgenda 2019/1 est dédié à la géographie
    féministe. Les Guest Editors Sara Landolt
    et Marina Richter proposent en introduction
    un état de l’art de la géographie féministe
    en Suisse.

    Jasmine Truong et Carolin Schurr présentent ensuite le nouveau groupe de recherche « Geographies of the global intimate » de l’institut de géographie de l’Université de Berne. Isabella Stingl offre une contribution sur la production de connaissances scientifiques féministes au sein de la recherche sur les #migrations. Jennifer Steiner, Karin Schwiter et Anahi Villalba introduisent le projet de « Live-in care », liant le travail de #soins à domicile et la #migration_internationale. Susan Thieme et Marina Richter proposent, quant à elles, une analyse intersectionnelle des compétences du #personnel_médical dans les #hôpitaux au prisme du #genre et du #parcours_migratoire. Kathrin Naegeli et Marlene Kronenberger présentent le programme « #Girls_on_Ice ». Enfin, Karine Duplan et Elisabeth Militz font un résumé du workshop « Bodies, space and difference in the global intimate » qui s’est tenu lors du Swissgeosciences Meeting 2018.
    Dans la rubrique « Autres Contributions », Suzy Blondin nous emmène dans la vallée du #Bartang au #Tadjikistan. Juliane Krenz présente un guide pratique de l’étude du sol, en tant qu’expérience d’enseignement de la géographie. La contribution de Itta Bauer propose de penser au-delà des frontières disciplinaires de la géographie et de la didactique. Finalement, Stephanie Summermatter et Peter Stucki discutent des enjeux liés aux inondations en Suisse, à partir d’une perspective historique remontant à 1868.


    https://sciencesnaturelles.ch/uuid/dfabd5da-19c7-5496-b075-6a3cbad19e0c?r=20190205110021_1557134729_

  • ‘They Were Conned’: How Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Taxi Drivers - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medallions-suicides.html


    Mohammed Hoque with his three children in their studio apartment in Jamaica, Queens.

    May 19, 2019 - The phone call that ruined Mohammed Hoque’s life came in April 2014 as he began another long day driving a New York City taxi, a job he had held since emigrating from Bangladesh nine years earlier.

    The call came from a prominent businessman who was selling a medallion, the coveted city permit that allows a driver to own a yellow cab instead of working for someone else. If Mr. Hoque gave him $50,000 that day, he promised to arrange a loan for the purchase.

    After years chafing under bosses he hated, Mr. Hoque thought his dreams of wealth and independence were coming true. He emptied his bank account, borrowed from friends and hurried to the man’s office in Astoria, Queens. Mr. Hoque handed over a check and received a stack of papers. He signed his name and left, eager to tell his wife.

    Mr. Hoque made about $30,000 that year. He had no idea, he said later, that he had just signed a contract that required him to pay $1.7 million.

    Over the past year, a spate of suicides by taxi drivers in New York City has highlighted in brutal terms the overwhelming debt and financial plight of medallion owners. All along, officials have blamed the crisis on competition from ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft.

    But a New York Times investigation found much of the devastation can be traced to a handful of powerful industry leaders who steadily and artificially drove up the price of taxi medallions, creating a bubble that eventually burst. Over more than a decade, they channeled thousands of drivers into reckless loans and extracted hundreds of millions of dollars before the market collapsed.

    These business practices generated huge profits for bankers, brokers, lawyers, investors, fleet owners and debt collectors. The leaders of nonprofit credit unions became multimillionaires. Medallion brokers grew rich enough to buy yachts and waterfront properties. One of the most successful bankers hired the rap star Nicki Minaj to perform at a family party.

    But the methods stripped immigrant families of their life savings, crushed drivers under debt they could not repay and engulfed an industry that has long defined New York. More than 950 medallion owners have filed for bankruptcy, according to a Times analysis of court records. Thousands more are barely hanging on.

    The practices were strikingly similar to those behind the housing market crash that led to the 2008 global economic meltdown: Banks and loosely regulated private lenders wrote risky loans and encouraged frequent refinancing; drivers took on debt they could not afford, under terms they often did not understand.

    Some big banks even entered the taxi industry in the aftermath of the housing crash, seeking a new market, with new borrowers.

    The combination of easy money, eager borrowers and the lure of a rare asset helped prices soar far above what medallions were really worth. Some industry leaders fed the frenzy by purposefully overpaying for medallions in order to inflate prices, The Times found.

    Between 2002 and 2014, the price of a medallion rose to more than $1 million from $200,000, even though city records showed that driver incomes barely changed.

    About 4,000 drivers bought medallions in that period, records show. They were excited to buy, but they were enticed by a dubious premise.

    What Actually Happened to New York’s Taxi DriversMay 28, 2019

    After the medallion market collapsed, Mayor Bill de Blasio opted not to fund a bailout, and earlier this year, the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, shut down the committee overseeing the taxi industry, saying it had completed most of its work.

    Over 10 months, The Times interviewed 450 people, built a database of every medallion sale since 1995 and reviewed thousands of individual loans and other documents, including internal bank records and confidential profit-sharing agreements.

    The investigation found example after example of drivers trapped in exploitative loans, including hundreds who signed interest-only loans that required them to pay exorbitant fees, forfeit their legal rights and give up almost all their monthly income, indefinitely.

    A Pakistani immigrant who thought he was just buying a car ended up with a $780,000 medallion loan that left him unable to pay rent. A Bangladeshi immigrant said he was told to lie about his income on his loan application; he eventually lost his medallion. A Haitian immigrant who worked to exhaustion to make his monthly payments discovered he had been paying only interest and went bankrupt.

    Abdur Rahim, who is from Bangladesh, is one of several cab drivers who allege they were duped into signing exploitative loans. 
    It is unclear if the practices violated any laws. But after reviewing The Times’s findings, experts said the methods were among the worst that have been used since the housing crash.

    “I don’t think I could concoct a more predatory scheme if I tried,” said Roger Bertling, the senior instructor at Harvard Law School’s clinic on predatory lending and consumer protection. “This was modern-day indentured servitude.”

    Lenders developed their techniques in New York but spread them to Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and elsewhere, transforming taxi industries across the United States.

    In interviews, lenders denied wrongdoing. They noted that regulators approved their practices, and said some borrowers made poor decisions and assumed too much debt. They said some drivers were happy to use climbing medallion values as collateral to take out cash, and that those who sold their medallions at the height of the market made money.

    The lenders said they believed medallion values would keep increasing, as they almost always had. No one, they said, could have predicted Uber and Lyft would emerge to undercut the business.

    “People love to blame banks for things that happen because they’re big bad banks,” said Robert Familant, the former head of Progressive Credit Union, a small nonprofit that specialized in medallion loans. “We didn’t do anything, in my opinion, other than try to help small businesspeople become successful.”

    Mr. Familant made about $30 million in salary and deferred payouts during the bubble, including $4.8 million in bonuses and incentives in 2014, the year it burst, according to disclosure forms.

    Meera Joshi, who joined the Taxi and Limousine Commission in 2011 and became chairwoman in 2014, said it was not the city’s job to regulate lending. But she acknowledged that officials saw red flags and could have done something.

    “There were lots of players, and lots of people just watched it happen. So the T.L.C. watched it happen. The lenders watched it happen. The borrowers watched it happen as their investment went up, and it wasn’t until it started falling apart that people started taking action and pointing fingers,” said Ms. Joshi, who left the commission in March. “It was a party. Why stop it?”

    Every day, about 250,000 people hail a New York City yellow taxi. Most probably do not know they are participating in an unconventional economic system about as old as the Empire State Building.

    The city created taxi medallions in 1937. Unlicensed cabs crowded city streets, so officials designed about 12,000 specialized tin plates and made it illegal to operate a taxi without one bolted to the hood of the car. The city sold each medallion for $10.

    People who bought medallions could sell them, just like any other asset. The only restriction: Officials designated roughly half as “independent medallions” and eventually required that those always be owned by whoever was driving that cab.

    Over time, as yellow taxis became symbols of New York, a cutthroat industry grew around them. A few entrepreneurs obtained most of the nonindependent medallions and built fleets that controlled the market. They were family operations largely based in the industrial neighborhoods of Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan and Long Island City in Queens.

    Allegations of corruption, racism and exploitation dogged the industry. Some fleet bosses were accused of cheating drivers. Some drivers refused to go outside Manhattan or pick up black and Latino passengers. Fleet drivers typically worked 60 hours a week, made less than minimum wage and received no benefits, according to city studies.

    Still, driving could serve as a path to the middle class. Drivers could save to buy an independent medallion, which would increase their earnings and give them an asset they could someday sell for a retirement nest egg.

    Those who borrowed money to buy a medallion typically had to submit a large down payment and repay within five to 10 years.

    The conservative lending strategy produced modest returns. The city did not release new medallions for almost 60 years, and values slowly climbed, hitting $100,000 in 1985 and $200,000 in 1997.

    “It was a safe and stable asset, and it provided a good life for those of us who were lucky enough to buy them,” said Guy Roberts, who began driving in 1979 and eventually bought medallions and formed a fleet. “Not an easy life, but a good life.”

    “And then,” he said, “everything changed.”

    – Before coming to America, Mohammed Hoque lived comfortably in Chittagong, a city on Bangladesh’s southern coast. He was a serious student and a gifted runner, despite a small and stocky frame. His father and grandfather were teachers; he said he surpassed them, becoming an education official with a master’s degree in management. He supervised dozens of schools and traveled on a government-issued motorcycle. In 2004, when he was 33, he married Fouzia Mahabub. -

    That same year, several of his friends signed up for the green card lottery, and their thirst for opportunity was contagious. He applied, and won.

    His wife had an uncle in Jamaica, Queens, so they went there. They found a studio apartment. Mr. Hoque wanted to work in education, but he did not speak enough English. A friend recommended the taxi industry.

    It was an increasingly common move for South Asian immigrants. In 2005, about 40 percent of New York cabbies were born in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan, according to the United States Census Bureau. Over all, just 9 percent were born in the United States.

    Mr. Hoque and his wife emigrated from Bangladesh, and have rented the same apartment in Queens since 2005.

    Mr. Hoque joined Taxifleet Management, a large fleet run by the Weingartens, a Russian immigrant family whose patriarchs called themselves the “Three Wise Men.”

    He worked 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., six days a week. On a good day, he said, he brought home $100. He often felt lonely on the road, and he developed back pain from sitting all day and diabetes, medical records show.

    He could have worked fewer shifts. He also could have moved out of the studio. But he drove as much as feasible and spent as little as possible. He had heard the city would soon be auctioning off new medallions. He was saving to buy one.

    Andrew Murstein, left, with his father, Alvin.CreditChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
    In the early 2000s, a new generation took power in New York’s cab industry. They were the sons of longtime industry leaders, and they had new ideas for making money.

    Few people represented the shift better than Andrew Murstein.

    Mr. Murstein was the grandson of a Polish immigrant who bought one of the first medallions, built one of the city’s biggest fleets and began informally lending to other buyers in the 1970s. Mr. Murstein attended business school and started his career at Bear Stearns and Salomon Brothers, the investment banks.

    When he joined the taxi business, he has said, he pushed his family to sell off many medallions and to establish a bank to focus on lending. Medallion Financial went public in 1996. Its motto was, “In niches, there are riches.”

    Dozens of industry veterans said Mr. Murstein and his father, Alvin, were among those who helped to move the industry to less conservative lending practices. The industry veterans said the Mursteins, as well as others, started saying medallion values would always rise and used that idea to focus on lending to lower-income drivers, which was riskier but more profitable.

    The strategy began to be used by the industry’s other major lenders — Progressive Credit Union, Melrose Credit Union and Lomto Credit Union, all family-run nonprofits that made essentially all their money from medallion loans, according to financial disclosures.

    “We didn’t want to be the one left behind,” said Monte Silberger, Lomto’s controller and then chief financial officer from 1999 to 2017.

    The lenders began accepting smaller down payments. By 2013, many medallion buyers were not handing over any down payment at all, according to an analysis of buyer applications submitted to the city.

    “It got to a point where we didn’t even check their income or credit score,” Mr. Silberger said. “It didn’t matter.”

    Lenders also encouraged existing borrowers to refinance and take out more money when medallion prices rose, according to interviews with dozens of borrowers and loan officers. There is no comprehensive data, but bank disclosures suggest that thousands of owners refinanced.

    Industry veterans said it became common for owners to refinance to buy a house or to put children through college. “You’d walk into the bank and walk out 30 minutes later with an extra $200,000,” said Lou Bakalar, a broker who arranged loans.

    Yvon Augustin has been living with help from his children ever since he declared bankruptcy and lost his taxi medallion.

    Some pointed to the refinancing to argue that irresponsible borrowers fueled the crisis. “Medallion owners were misusing it,” said Aleksey Medvedovskiy, a fleet owner who also worked as a broker. “They used it as an A.T.M.”

    As lenders loosened standards, they increased returns. Rather than raising interest rates, they made borrowers pay a mix of costs — origination fees, legal fees, financing fees, refinancing fees, filing fees, fees for paying too late and fees for paying too early, according to a Times review of more than 500 loans included in legal cases. Many lenders also made borrowers split their loan and pay a much higher rate on the second loan, documents show.

    Lenders also extended loan lengths. Instead of requiring repayment in five or 10 years, they developed deals that lasted as long as 50 years, locking in decades of interest payments. And some wrote interest-only loans that could continue forever.

    “We couldn’t figure out why the company was doing so many interest-only loans,” said Michelle Pirritano, a Medallion Financial loan analyst from 2007 to 2011. “It was a good revenue stream, but it didn’t really make sense as a loan. I mean, it wasn’t really a loan, because it wasn’t being repaid.”

    Almost every loan reviewed by The Times included a clause that spiked the interest rate to as high as 24 percent if it was not repaid in three years. Lenders included the clause — called a “balloon” — so that borrowers almost always had to extend the loan, possibly at a higher rate than in the original terms, and with additional fees.

    Yvon Augustin was caught in one of those loans. He bought a medallion in 2006, a decade after emigrating from Haiti. He said he paid $2,275 every month — more than half his income, he said — and thought he was paying off the loan. But last year, his bank used the balloon to demand that he repay everything. That is when he learned he had been paying only the interest, he said.

    Mr. Augustin, 69, declared bankruptcy and lost his medallion. He lives off assistance from his children.

    During the global financial crisis, Eugene Haber, a lawyer for the taxi industry, started getting calls from bankers he had never met.

    Mr. Haber had written a template for medallion loans in the 1970s. By 2008, his thick mustache had turned white, and he thought he knew everybody in the industry. Suddenly, new bankers began calling his suite in a Long Island office park. Capital One, Signature Bank, New York Commercial Bank and others wanted to issue medallion loans, he said.

    Some of the banks were looking for new borrowers after the housing market collapsed, Mr. Haber said. “They needed somewhere else to invest,” he said. He said he represented some banks at loan signings but eventually became embittered because he believed banks were knowingly lending to people who could not repay.

    Instead of lending directly, the big banks worked through powerful industry players. They enlisted large fleet owners and brokers — especially Neil Greenbaum, Richard Chipman, Savas Konstantinides, Roman Sapino and Basil Messados — to use the banks’ money to lend to medallion buyers. In return, the owners and brokers received a cut of the monthly payments and sometimes an additional fee.

    The fleet owners and brokers, who technically issued the loans, did not face the same scrutiny as banks.

    “They did loans that were frankly insane,” said Larry Fisher, who from 2003 to 2016 oversaw medallion lending at Melrose Credit Union, one of the biggest lenders originally in the industry. “It contributed to the price increases and put a lot of pressure on the rest of us to keep up.”

    Evgeny Freidman, a fleet owner, has said he purposely overbid for taxi medallions in order to drive up their value.CreditSasha Maslov
    Still, Mr. Fisher said, Melrose followed lending rules. “A lot of people tend to blame others for their own misfortune,” he said. “If they want to blame the lender for the medallion going down the tubes the way it has, I think they’re misplaced.”

    Mr. Konstantinides, a fleet owner and the broker and lender who arranged Mr. Hoque’s loans, said every loan issued by his company abided by federal and state banking guidelines. “I am very sympathetic to the plight of immigrant families who are seeking a better life in this country and in this city,” said Mr. Konstantinides, who added that he was also an immigrant.

    Walter Rabin, who led Capital One’s medallion lending division between 2007 and 2012 and has led Signature Bank’s medallion lending division since, said he was one of the industry’s most conservative lenders. He said he could not speak for the brokers and fleet owners with whom he worked.

    Mr. Rabin and other Signature executives denied fault for the market collapse and blamed the city for allowing ride-hail companies to enter with little regulation. “It’s the City of New York that took the biggest advantage of the drivers,” said Joseph J. DePaolo, the president and chief executive of Signature. “It’s not the banks.”

    New York Commercial Bank said in a statement that it began issuing medallion loans before the housing crisis and that they were a very small part of its business. The bank did not engage in risky lending practices, a spokesman said.

    Mr. Messados said in an interview that he disagreed with interest-only loans and other one-sided terms. But he said he was caught between banks developing the loans and drivers clamoring for them. “They were insisting on this,” he said. “What are you supposed to do? Say, ‘I’m not doing the sale?’”

    Several lenders challenged the idea that borrowers were unsophisticated. They said that some got better deals by negotiating with multiple lenders at once.

    Mr. Greenbaum, Mr. Chipman and Mr. Sapino declined to comment, as did Capital One.

    Some fleet owners worked to manipulate prices. In the most prominent example, Evgeny Freidman, a brash Russian immigrant who owned so many medallions that some called him “The Taxi King,” said he purposefully overpaid for medallions sold at city auctions. He reasoned that the higher prices would become the industry standard, making the medallions he already owned worth more. Mr. Freidman, who was partners with Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, disclosed the plan in a 2012 speech at Yeshiva University. He recently pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud. He declined to comment.

    As medallion prices kept increasing, the industry became strained. Drivers had to work longer hours to make monthly payments. Eventually, loan records show, many drivers had to use almost all their income on payments.

    “The prices got to be ridiculous,” said Vincent Sapone, the retired manager of the League of Mutual Taxi Owners, an owner association. “When it got close to $1 million, nobody was going to pay that amount of money, unless they came from another country. Nobody from Brooklyn was going to pay that.”

    Some drivers have alleged in court that lenders tricked them into signing loans.

    Muhammad Ashraf, who is not fluent in English, said he thought he was getting a loan to purchase a car but ended up in debt to buy a taxi medallion instead.

    Muhammad Ashraf, a Pakistani immigrant, alleged that a broker, Heath Candero, duped him into a $780,000 interest-only loan. He said in an interview in Urdu that he could not speak English fluently and thought he was just signing a loan to buy a car. He said he found out about the loan when his bank sued him for not fully repaying. The bank eventually decided not to pursue a case against Mr. Ashraf. He also filed a lawsuit against Mr. Candero. That case was dismissed. A lawyer for Mr. Candero declined to comment.

    Abdur Rahim, a Bangladeshi immigrant, alleged that his lender, Bay Ridge Credit Union, inserted hidden fees. In an interview, he added he was told to lie on his loan application. The application, reviewed by The Times, said he made $128,389, but he said his tax return showed he made about $25,000. In court, Bay Ridge has denied there were hidden fees and said Mr. Rahim was “confusing the predatory-lending statute with a mere bad investment.” The credit union declined to comment.

    Several employees of lenders said they were pushed to write loans, encouraged by bonuses and perks such as tickets to sporting events and free trips to the Bahamas.

    They also said drivers almost never had lawyers at loan closings. Borrowers instead trusted their broker to represent them, even though, unbeknown to them, the broker was often getting paid by the bank.

    Stan Zurbin, who between 2009 and 2012 did consulting work for a lender that issued medallion loans, said that as prices rose, lenders in the industry increasingly lent to immigrants.

    “They didn’t have 750 credit scores, let’s just say,” he said. “A lot of them had just come into the country. A lot of them just had no idea what they were signing.”

    The $1 million medallion
    Video
    Mrs. Hoque did not want her husband to buy a medallion. She wanted to use their savings to buy a house. They had their first child in 2008, and they planned to have more. They needed to leave the studio apartment, and she thought a home would be a safer investment.

    But Mr. Hoque could not shake the idea, especially after several friends bought medallions at the city’s February 2014 auction.

    One friend introduced him to a man called “Big Savas.” It was Mr. Konstantinides, a fleet owner who also had a brokerage and a lending company, Mega Funding.

    The call came a few weeks later. A medallion owner had died, and the family was selling for $1 million.

    Mr. Hoque said he later learned the $50,000 he paid up front was just for taxes. Mega eventually requested twice that amount for fees and a down payment, records show. Mr. Hoque said he maxed out credit cards and borrowed from a dozen friends and relatives.

    Fees and interest would bring the total repayment to more than $1.7 million, documents show. It was split into two loans, both issued by Mega with New York Commercial Bank. The loans made him pay $5,000 a month — most of the $6,400 he could earn as a medallion owner.

    Mohammed Hoque’s Medallion Loans Consumed Most of His Taxi Revenue
    After paying his two medallion loans and business costs, Mr. Hoque had about $1,400 left over each month to pay the rent on his studio apartment in Queens and cover his living expenses.

    Estimated monthly revenue $11,845

    Gas $1,500

    Income after expenses $1,400

    Vehicle maintenance $1,300

    Medallion loan 1 $4,114

    Insurance $1,200

    Car loan $650

    Credit card fees $400

    Medallion loan 2 $881

    Other work-related expenses $400

    By the time the deal closed in July 2014, Mr. Hoque had heard of a new company called Uber. He wondered if it would hurt the business, but nobody seemed to be worried.

    As Mr. Hoque drove to the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s downtown office for final approval of the purchase, he fantasized about becoming rich, buying a big house and bringing his siblings to America. After a commission official reviewed his application and loan records, he said he was ushered into the elegant “Taxi of Tomorrow” room. An official pointed a camera. Mr. Hoque smiled.

    “These are little cash cows running around the city spitting out money,” Mr. Murstein said, beaming in a navy suit and pink tie.

    He did not mention he was quietly leaving the business, a move that would benefit him when the market collapsed.

    By the time of the appearance, Medallion Financial had been cutting the number of medallion loans on its books for years, according to disclosures it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Murstein later said the company started exiting the business and focusing on other ventures before 2010.

    Mr. Murstein declined numerous interview requests. He also declined to answer some written questions, including why he promoted medallions while exiting the business. In emails and through a spokesman, he acknowledged that Medallion Financial reduced down payments but said it rarely issued interest-only loans or charged borrowers for repaying loans too early.

    “Many times, we did not match what our competitors were willing to do and in retrospect, thankfully, we lost the business,” he wrote to The Times.

    Interviews with three former staffers, and a Times review of loan documents that were filed as part of lawsuits brought by Medallion Financial against borrowers, indicate the company issued many interest-only loans and routinely included a provision allowing it to charge borrowers for repaying loans too early.

    Other lenders also left the taxi industry or took precautions long before the market collapsed.

    The credit unions specializing in the industry kept making new loans. But between 2010 and 2014, they sold the loans to other financial institutions more often than in the previous five years, disclosure forms show. Progressive Credit Union, run by Mr. Familant, sold loans off almost twice as often, the forms show. By 2012, that credit union was selling the majority of the loans it issued.

    In a statement, Mr. Familant said the selling of loans was a standard banking practice that did not indicate a lack of confidence in the market.

    Several banks used something called a confession of judgment. It was an obscure document in which the borrower admitted defaulting on the loan — even before taking out any money at all — and authorized the bank to do whatever it wanted to collect.

    Larry Fisher was the medallion lending supervisor at Melrose Credit Union, one of the biggest lenders originally in the industry, from 2003 to 2016.
    Congress has banned that practice in consumer loans, but not in business loans, which is how lenders classified medallion deals. Many states have barred it in business loans, too, but New York is not among them.

    Even as some lenders quietly braced for the market to fall, prices kept rising, and profits kept growing.

    By 2014, many of the people who helped create the bubble had made millions of dollars and invested it elsewhere.

    Medallion Financial started focusing on lending to R.V. buyers and bought a professional lacrosse team and a Nascar team, painting the car to look like a taxi. Mr. Murstein and his father made more than $42 million between 2002 and 2014, disclosures show. In 2015, Ms. Minaj, the rap star, performed at his son’s bar mitzvah.

    The Melrose C.E.O., Alan Kaufman, had the highest base salary of any large state-chartered credit union leader in America in 2013 and 2015, records show. His medallion lending supervisor, Mr. Fisher, also made millions.

    It is harder to tell how much fleet owners and brokers made, but in recent years news articles have featured some of them with new boats and houses.

    Mr. Messados’s bank records, filed in a legal case, show that by 2013, he had more than $50 million in non-taxi assets, including three homes and a yacht.

    The bubble bursts

    At least eight drivers have committed suicide, including three medallion owners with overwhelming loans.
    The medallion bubble burst in late 2014. Uber and Lyft may have hastened the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for this article, including many lenders, said inflated prices and risky lending practices would have caused a collapse even if ride-hailing had never been invented.

    At the market’s height, medallion buyers were typically earning about $5,000 a month and paying about $4,500 to their loans, according to an analysis by The Times of city data and loan documents. Many owners could make their payments only by refinancing when medallion values increased, which was unsustainable, some loan officers said.

    City data shows that since Uber entered New York in 2011, yellow cab revenue has decreased by about 10 percent per cab, a significant bite for low-earning drivers but a small drop compared with medallion values, which initially rose and then fell by 90 percent.

    As values fell, borrowers asked for breaks. But many lenders went the opposite direction. They decided to leave the business and called in their loans.

    They used the confessions to get hundreds of judgments that would allow them to take money from bank accounts, court records show. Some tried to get borrowers to give up homes or a relative’s assets. Others seized medallions and quickly resold them for profit, while still charging the original borrowers fees and extra interest. Several drivers have alleged in court that their lenders ordered them to buy life insurance.

    Many lenders hired a debt collector, Anthony Medina, to seize medallions from borrowers who missed payments.

    The scars left on cabs after medallions were removed.

    Mr. Medina left notes telling borrowers they had to give the lender “relief” to get their medallions back. The notes, which were reviewed by The Times, said the seizure was “authorized by vehicle apprehension unit.” Some drivers said Mr. Medina suggested he was a police officer and made them meet him at a park at night and pay $550 extra in cash.

    One man, Jean Demosthenes, a 64-year-old Haitian immigrant who could not speak English, said in an interview in Haitian Creole that Mr. Medina cornered him in Midtown, displayed a gun and took his car.

    In an interview, Mr. Medina denied threatening anyone with a gun. He said he requested cash because drivers who had defaulted could not be trusted to write good checks. He said he met drivers at parks and referred to himself as the vehicle apprehension unit because he wanted to hide his identity out of fear he could be targeted by borrowers.

    “You’re taking words from people that are deadbeats and delinquent people. Of course, they don’t want to see me,” he said. “I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the messenger from the bank.”

    Some lenders, especially Signature Bank, have let borrowers out of their loans for one-time payments of about $250,000. But to get that money, drivers have had to find new loans. Mr. Greenbaum, a fleet owner, has provided many of those loans, sometimes at interest rates of up to 15 percent, loan documents and interviews showed.

    New York Commercial Bank said in its statement it also had modified some loans.

    Other drivers lost everything. Most of the more than 950 owners who declared bankruptcy had to forfeit their medallions. Records indicate many were bought by hedge funds hoping for prices to rise. For now, cabs sit unused.

    Jean Demosthenes said his medallion was repossessed by a man with a gun. The man denied that he was armed.

    Bhairavi Desai, founder of the Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents drivers and independent owners, has asked the city to bail out owners or refund auction purchasers. Others have urged the city to pressure banks to forgive loans or soften terms.

    After reviewing The Times’s findings, Deepak Gupta, a former top official at the United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said the New York Attorney General’s Office should investigate lenders.

    Mr. Gupta also said the state should close the loophole that let lenders classify medallion deals as business loans, even though borrowers had to guarantee them with everything they owned. Consumer loans have far more disclosure rules and protections.

    “These practices were indisputably predatory and would be illegal if they were considered consumer loans, rather than business loans,” he said.

    Last year, amid eight known suicides of drivers, including three medallion owners with overwhelming loans, the city passed a temporary cap on ride-hailing cars, created a task force to study the industry and directed the city taxi commission to do its own analysis of the debt crisis.

    Earlier this year, the Council eliminated the committee overseeing the industry after its chairman, Councilman Rubén Díaz Sr. of the Bronx, said the Council was “controlled by the homosexual community.” The speaker, Mr. Johnson, said, “The vast majority of the legislative work that we have been looking at has already been completed.”

    In a statement, a council spokesman said the committee’s duties had been transferred to the Committee on Transportation. “The Council is working to do as much as it can legislatively to help all drivers,” the spokesman said.

    As of last week, no one had been appointed to the task force.

    On the last day of 2018, Mr. and Mrs. Hoque brought their third child home from the hospital.

    Mr. Hoque cleared space for the boy’s crib, pushing aside his plastic bags of T-shirts and the fan that cooled the studio. He looked around. He could not believe he was still living in the same room.

    His loan had quickly faltered. He could not make the payments and afford rent, and his medallion was seized. Records show he paid more than $12,000 to Mega, and he said he paid another $550 to Mr. Medina to get it back. He borrowed from friends, promising it would not happen again. Then it happened four more times, he said.

    Mr. Konstantinides, the broker, said in his statement that he met with Mr. Hoque many times and twice modified one of his loans in order to lower his monthly payments. He also said he gave Mr. Hoque extra time to make some payments.

    In all, between the initial fees, monthly payments and penalties after the seizures, Mr. Hoque had paid about $400,000 into the medallion by the beginning of this year.

    But he still owed $915,000 more, plus interest, and he did not know what to do. Bankruptcy would cost money, ruin his credit and remove his only income source. And it would mean a shameful end to years of hard work. He believed his only choice was to keep working and to keep paying.

    His cab was supposed to be his ticket to money and freedom, but instead it seemed like a prison cell. Every day, he got in before the sun rose and stayed until the sky began to darken. Mr. Hoque, now 48, tried not to think about home, about what he had given up and what he had dreamed about.

    “It’s an unhuman life,” he said. “I drive and drive and drive. But I don’t know what my destination is.”

    [Read Part 2 of The Times’s investigation: As Thousands of Taxi Drivers Were Trapped in Loans, Top Officials Counted the Money]

    Reporting was contributed by Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Suzanne Hillinger, Derek M. Norman, Elisha Brown, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Pierre-Antoine Louis and Sameen Amin. Doris Burke and Susan Beachy contributed research. Produced by Jeffrey Furticella and Meghan Louttit.

    Follow Brian M. Rosenthal on Twitter at @brianmrosenthal

    #USA #New_York #Taxi #Betrug #Ausbeutung

  • #Patrice_Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century | Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja | Global development | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination

    Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.

    #afrique #rdc #résistance

    • Thomas Giefer, le grand réalisateur de films documentaires sur le mouvement ’68 en Allemagne a retrouvé l’un des membres belges du commado qui a assassiné Patrice Lumumba. En 1999 peu de temps avant sa mort celui-ci donne sa version des événements dans un film qui retrace les développements qui ont mené à la mort du premier ministre congolais. Dan le film Thomas Giefer parle aussi avec l’assassin de la CIA chargé de l’exécution.

      Oui, il y a des sous-titres !

      Patrice Lumumba - Mord im Kolonialstil (2000)
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOwPERiRyOw

      AGDOK - Mitglieder | Thomas Giefer | Film / Funk, Journalist | Vita
      http://member.agdok.de/de_DE/members_detail/8097/vita

      Thomas Giefer | DFFB
      https://dffb-archiv.de/dffb/thomas-giefer

      Thomas Giefer
      https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Giefer

      Harun Farocki Institut » Thomas Giefer
      https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/en/tag/thomas-giefer-en

      Instructions on how to Pull off Police Helmets

      News from the archive : INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PULL OFF POLICE HELMETS and UNTITLED OR : NIXON COMES TO BERLIN, both made in 1969.
      https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/en/2017/11/30/november-2017-instructions-on-how-to-pull-off-police-helmets

      Farocki presumed the films to be lost. Surprisingly, they resurfaced just now, in November 2017. Thomas Giefer , dffb student of the year 1967 and one of the 18 students relegated in 1968, found them among the films he kept from the time.

      Here’s an image from INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PULL OFF POLICE HELMETS, filmed from the Steenbeck by Giefer.

      Farocki about the film: »According to Fritz J. Raddatz, Rosa Luxemburg cried when she read Marx’s concept of value. I was just as disappointed by the Cine-Tracts made in May 1968 in Paris and shown shortly afterwards in Berlin.

      I must have been expecting something more like television news coverage; in much the same way, each crowd which saw our handbill films during those years was similarly disappointed. Because we didn’t make ‘real’ films, as my mother called them, it seemed to them that their cause wasn’t being acknowledged in suitably official form, something which workers’ films and Fassbinder were later to achieve.

      We made this spot during one of the many breaks in filming a somewhat reckless film about playgroups by Susanne Beyeler. Wolfgang Gremm stripped naked on a flat roof and played a policeman. We played on the anti-humanist provocation of showing, purely technically, how to fight a policeman, but didn’t go so far as to use an androgynous, long-haired actor – something which Gremm, the fattest and shortest-haired of us all, accepted with a grin.«

      #Congo #Kongo #film #histoire #Berlin #1968

  • Susan Sontag, véritable auteure du livre phare de son mari
    https://www.actualitte.com/article/monde-edition/susan-sontag-veritable-auteure-du-livre-phare-de-son-mari/94876

    Benjamin Moser, l’auteur de cette nouvelle biographie, ne se contente pas de vagues suppositions. D’après le Guardian, il a mené une enquête très fouillée pour établir les faits avec certitude. En effet, il a obtenu un accès privilégié aux archives de l’auteure entreposées à UCLA, y compris des pièces qui ne seront pas accessibles au public avant plusieurs années. Par ailleurs, il s’est entretenu avec des personnes de l’entourage proche de Susan Sontag.

    Résultat des courses, Moser est certain que c’est Susan Sontag qui a rédigé le livre, en plus de l’important travail de recherche qu’elle a mené pour en constituer le contenu. « Susan passait toutes ses après-midi à tout écrire à partir de rien », explique Minda Rae Amiran, une amie de l’intellectuelle. Plusieurs éléments de sa correspondance permettent également d’affirmer qu’elle est l’auteure du livre de son mari.

    Un cas d’école d’effet Matilda (le fait de minimiser la contribution de femmes scientifiques à la recherche) appliqué à la littérature. L’auteur de la biographie lui-même reconnaît que s’il connaissait la rumeur qui faisait de Sontag la véritable auteure du livre, il avait quelques doutes, notamment étant donné l’âge de Sontag à l’époque. En effet, elle a épousé Rieff en 1950, à l’âge de 17 ans ; l’ouvrage sur Freud est quant à lui paru en 1959, quand elle n’avait donc que 26 ans.

    Et, lors de sa parution, le Guardian de l’époque parlait d’un « évènement à célébrer… un livre véritablement brillant sur l’importance culturelle de Freud… une contribution aux sciences humaines dont la valeur sera permanente » ! Clairement, on a vu critique plus acerbe…

    Étudiante brillante et précoce (elle termine le lycée à 15 ans avant d’intégrer les rangs de l’université), Susan Sontag a donc écrit le livre qui allait lancer la carrière de son mari… Pourquoi la vérité est-elle restée cachée ? C’est là que l’on bascule de l’injuste au tragique.

    Selon Moser, c’est au moment de son divorce que Susan Sontag a promis à Rieff d’abandonner ses droits légitimes à se revendiquer publiquement comme l’auteure de l’ouvrage. En échange de quoi, il aurait laissé la garde de leur fils à son ex-épouse.

    C’est à se demandé si un seul homme à écrit lui même l’œuvre qui lui est attribué.
    Benjamin Moser est-il marié ?

    #invisibilisation #femmes #hétérosexualité #couple #amour #haine #domination #spoliation #chantage #grand_homme

  • Who Was Shakespeare? Could the Author Have Been a Woman? - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076

    On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on my iPhone. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” I read, thrilled once again by the incantatory power of the verse. I remembered where I was when I first heard those lines: in my 10th-grade English class, startled out of my adolescent stupor by this woman rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status. “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.” Six months into the #MeToo movement, her fury and frustration felt newly resonant.

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    Pulled back into plays I’d studied in college and graduate school, I found myself mesmerized by Lady Macbeth and her sisters in the Shakespeare canon. Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing, raging at the limitations of her sex (“O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace”). Rosalind, in As You Like It, affecting the swagger of masculine confidence to escape those limitations (“We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances”). Isabella, in Measure for Measure, fearing no one will believe her word against Angelo’s, rapist though he is (“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”). Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew, refusing to be silenced by her husband (“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break”). Emilia, in one of her last speeches in Othello before Iago kills her, arguing for women’s equality (“Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them”).
    I was reminded of all the remarkable female friendships, too: Beatrice and Hero’s allegiance; Emilia’s devotion to her mistress, Desdemona; Paulina’s brave loyalty to Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; and plenty more. (“Let’s consult together against this greasy knight,” resolve the merry wives of Windsor, revenging themselves on Falstaff.) These intimate female alliances are fresh inventions—they don’t exist in the literary sources from which many of the plays are drawn. And when the plays lean on historical sources (Plutarch, for instance), they feminize them, portraying legendary male figures through the eyes of mothers, wives, and lovers. “Why was Shakespeare able to see the woman’s position, write entirely as if he were a woman, in a way that none of the other playwrights of the age were able to?” In her book about the plays’ female characters, Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, asked the question very much on my mind.

    Doubts about whether William Shakespeare (who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616) really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old as the writing itself. Alternative contenders—Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, prominent among them—continue to have champions, whose fervor can sometimes border on fanaticism. In response, orthodox Shakespeare scholars have settled into dogmatism of their own. Even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son. The time had come, I felt, to tug at the blinkers of both camps and reconsider the authorship debate: Had anyone ever proposed that the creator of those extraordinary women might be a woman? Each of the male possibilities requires an elaborate theory to explain his use of another’s name. None of the candidates has succeeded in dethroning the man from Stratford. Yet a simple reason would explain a playwright’s need for a pseudonym in Elizabethan England: being female.
    Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print?

    Long before Tina Packer marveled at the bard’s uncanny insight, others were no less awed by the empathy that pervades the work. “One would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century philosopher and playwright. The critic John Ruskin said, “Shakespeare has no heroes—he has only heroines.” A striking number of those heroines refuse to obey rules. At least 10 defy their fathers, bucking betrothals they don’t like to find their own paths to love. Eight disguise themselves as men, outwitting patriarchal controls—more gender-swapping than can be found in the work of any previous English playwright. Six lead armies.

    The prevailing view, however, has been that no women in Renaissance England wrote for the theater, because that was against the rules. Religious verse and translation were deemed suitable female literary pursuits; “closet dramas,” meant only for private reading, were acceptable. The stage was off-limits. Yet scholars have lately established that women were involved in the business of acting companies as patrons, shareholders, suppliers of costumes, and gatherers of entrance fees. What’s more, 80 percent of the plays printed in the 1580s were written anonymously, and that number didn’t fall below 50 percent until the early 1600s. At least one eminent Shakespeare scholar, Phyllis Rackin, of the University of Pennsylvania, challenges the blanket assumption that the commercial drama pouring forth in the period bore no trace of a female hand. So did Virginia Woolf, even as she sighed over the obstacles that would have confronted a female Shakespeare: “Undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.”

    A tantalizing nudge lies buried in the writings of Gabriel Harvey, a well-known Elizabethan literary critic. In 1593, he referred cryptically to an “excellent Gentlewoman” who had written three sonnets and a comedy. “I dare not Particularise her Description,” he wrote, even as he heaped praise on her.

    All her conceits are illuminate with the light of Reason; all her speeches beautified with the grace of Affability … In her mind there appeareth a certain heavenly Logic; in her tongue & pen a divine Rhetoric … I dare undertake with warrant, whatsoever she writeth must needs remain an immortal work, and will leave, in the activest world, an eternal memory of the silliest vermin that she should vouchsafe to grace with her beautiful and allective style, as ingenious as elegant.

    Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print, on the poem “Venus and Adonis,” a scandalous parody of masculine seduction tales (in which the woman forces herself on the man)? Harvey’s tribute is extraordinary, yet orthodox Shakespeareans and anti-Stratfordians alike have almost entirely ignored it.

    Until recently, that is, when a few bold outliers began to advance the case that Shakespeare might well have been a woman. One candidate is Mary Sidney, the countess of Pembroke (and beloved sister of the celebrated poet Philip Sidney)—one of the most educated women of her time, a translator and poet, and the doyenne of the Wilton Circle, a literary salon dedicated to galvanizing an English cultural renaissance. Clues beckon, not least that Sidney and her husband were the patrons of one of the first theater companies to perform Shakespeare’s plays. Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing her to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?
    Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer.

    But the candidate who intrigued me more was a woman as exotic and peripheral as Sidney was pedigreed and prominent. Not long after my Macbeth outing, I learned that Shakespeare’s Globe, in London, had set out to explore this figure’s input to the canon. The theater’s summer 2018 season concluded with a new play, Emilia, about a contemporary of Shakespeare’s named Emilia Bassano. Born in London in 1569 to a family of Venetian immigrants—musicians and instrument-makers who were likely Jewish—she was one of the first women in England to publish a volume of poetry (suitably religious yet startlingly feminist, arguing for women’s “Libertie” and against male oppression). Her existence was unearthed in 1973 by the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse, who speculated that she was Shakespeare’s mistress, the “dark lady” described in the sonnets. In Emilia, the playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm goes a step further: Her Shakespeare is a plagiarist who uses Bassano’s words for Emilia’s famous defense of women in Othello.

    Could Bassano have contributed even more widely and directly? The idea felt like a feminist fantasy about the past—but then, stories about women’s lost and obscured achievements so often have a dreamlike quality, unveiling a history different from the one we’ve learned. Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age? Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who—like Shakespeare’s heroines—had fashioned herself a clever disguise? Perhaps the time was finally ripe for us to see her.

    The ranks of Shakespeare skeptics comprise a kind of literary underworld—a cross-disciplinary array of academics, actors (Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance are perhaps the best known), writers, teachers, lawyers, a few Supreme Court justices (Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens). Look further back and you’ll find such illustrious names as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Charlie Chaplin. Their ideas about the authorship of the plays and poems differ, but they concur that Shakespeare is not the man who wrote them.

    Their doubt is rooted in an empirical conundrum. Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote.

    From January 1863: Nathaniel Hawthorne considers authorship while visiting Stratford-upon-Avon

    No such void exists for other major writers of the period, as a meticulous scholar named Diana Price has demonstrated. Many left fewer documents than Shakespeare did, but among them are manuscripts, letters, and payment records proving that writing was their profession. For example, court records show payment to Ben Jonson for “those services of his wit & pen.” Desperate to come up with comparable material to round out Shakespeare, scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries forged evidence—later debunked—of a writerly life.

    To be sure, Shakespeare’s name can be found linked, during his lifetime, to written works. With Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 1598, it started appearing on the title pages of one-play editions called “quartos.” (Several of the plays attributed to Shakespeare were first published anonymously.) Commentators at the time saluted him by name, praising “Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase” and “honey-tongued Shakespeare.” But such evidence proves attribution, not actual authorship—as even some orthodox Shakespeare scholars grant. “I would love to find a contemporary document that said William Shakespeare was the dramatist of Stratford-upon-Avon written during his lifetime,” Stanley Wells, a professor emeritus at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, has said. “That would shut the buggers up!”
    FROM THE ARCHIVES
    October 1991 Atlantic cover

    In 1991, The Atlantic commissioned two pieces from admittedly partisan authors, Irving Matus and Tom Bethell, to examine and debate the argument:
    In Defense of Shakespeare
    The Case for Oxford

    By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his. In 1591, the dramatist Robert Greene wrote of the practice of “underhand brokery”—of poets who “get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses.” (Batillus was a mediocre Roman poet who claimed some of Virgil’s verses as his own.) The following year, he warned fellow playwrights about an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” who thinks he is the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Most scholars agree that the “Crow” is Shakespeare, then an actor in his late 20s, and conclude that the new-hatched playwright was starting to irk established figures. Anti-Stratfordians see something else: In Aesop’s fables, the crow was a proud strutter who stole the feathers of others; Horace’s crow, in his epistles, was a plagiarist. Shakespeare was being attacked, they say, not as a budding dramatist, but as a paymaster taking credit for others’ work. “Seeke you better Maisters,” Greene advised, urging his colleagues to cease writing for the Crow.

    Ben Jonson, among others, got in his digs, too. Scholars agree that the character of Sogliardo in Every Man Out of His Humour—a country bumpkin “without brain, wit, anything, indeed, ramping to gentility”—is a parody of Shakespeare, a social climber whose pursuit of a coat of arms was common lore among his circle of actors. In a satirical poem called “On Poet-Ape,” Jonson was likely taking aim at Shakespeare the theater-world wheeler-dealer. This poet-ape, Jonson wrote, “from brokage is become so bold a thief,”

    At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
    Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
    To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
    He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own

    What to make of the fact that Jonson changed his tune in the prefatory material that he contributed to the First Folio of plays when it appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death? Jonson’s praise there did more than attribute the work to Shakespeare. It declared his art unmatched: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” The anti-Stratfordian response is to note the shameless hype at the heart of the Folio project. “Whatever you do, Buy,” the compilers urged in their dedication, intent on a hard sell for a dramatist who, doubters emphasize, was curiously unsung at his death. The Folio’s introductory effusions, they argue, contain double meanings. Jonson tells readers, for example, to find Shakespeare not in his portrait “but his Booke,” seeming to undercut the relation between the man and the work. And near the start of his over-the-top tribute, Jonson riffs on the unreliability of extravagant praise, “which doth ne’er advance / The truth.”

    From September 1904: Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrates Shakespeare

    The authorship puzzles don’t end there. How did the man born in Stratford acquire the wide-ranging knowledge on display in the plays—of the Elizabethan court, as well as of multiple languages, the law, astronomy, music, the military, and foreign lands, especially northern Italian cities? The author’s linguistic brilliance shines in words and sayings imported from foreign vocabularies, but Shakespeare wasn’t educated past the age of 13. Perhaps he traveled, joined the army, worked as a tutor, or all three, scholars have proposed. Yet no proof exists of any of those experiences, despite, as the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in an essay, “the greatest battery of organized research that has ever been directed upon a single person.”
    Emilia Bassano’s life encompassed the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its low-class references and knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and Jewish allusions; its music and feminism.

    In fact, a document that does exist—Shakespeare’s will—would seem to undercut such hypotheses. A wealthy man when he retired to Stratford, he was meticulous about bequeathing his properties and possessions (his silver, his second-best bed). Yet he left behind not a single book, though the plays draw on hundreds of texts, including some—in Italian and French—that hadn’t yet been translated into English. Nor did he leave any musical instruments, though the plays use at least 300 musical terms and refer to 26 instruments. He remembered three actor-owners in his company, but no one in the literary profession. Strangest of all, he made no mention of manuscripts or writing. Perhaps as startling as the gaps in his will, Shakespeare appears to have neglected his daughters’ education—an incongruity, given the erudition of so many of the playwright’s female characters. One signed with her mark, the other with a signature a scholar has called “painfully formed.”

    “Weak and unconvincing” was Trevor-Roper’s verdict on the case for Shakespeare. My delving left me in agreement, not that the briefs for the male alternatives struck me as compelling either. Steeped in the plays, I felt their author would surely join me in bridling at the Stratfordians’ unquestioning worship at the shrine—their arrogant dismissal of skeptics as mere deluded “buggers,” or worse. (“Is there any more fanatic zealot than the priest-like defender of a challenged creed?” asked Richmond Crinkley, a former director of programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library who was nonetheless sympathetic to the anti-Stratfordian view.) To appreciate how belief blossoms into fact—how readily myths about someone get disseminated as truth—one can’t do better than to read Shakespeare. Just think of how obsessed the work is with mistaken identities, concealed women, forged and anonymous documents—with the error of trusting in outward appearances. What if searchers for the real Shakespeare simply haven’t set their sights on the right pool of candidates?

    Read: An interview with the author of ‘The Shakespeare Wars’

    I met Emilia Bassano’s most ardent champion at Alice’s Tea Cup, which seemed unexpectedly apt: A teahouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it has quotes from Alice in Wonderland scrawled across the walls. (“off with their heads!”) John Hudson, an Englishman in his 60s who pursued a degree at the Shakespeare Institute in a mid-career swerve, had been on the Bassano case for years, he told me. In 2014, he published Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier, the Woman Behind Shakespeare’s Plays? His zeal can sometimes get the better of him, yet he emphasizes that his methods and findings are laid out “for anyone … to refute if they wish.” Like Alice’s rabbit hole, Bassano’s case opened up new and richly disorienting perspectives—on the plays, on the ways we think about genius and gender, and on a fascinating life.

    Hudson first learned of Bassano from A. L. Rowse, who discovered mention of her in the notebooks of an Elizabethan physician and astrologer named Simon Forman. In her teens, she became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the master of court entertainment and patron of Shakespeare’s acting company. And that is only the start. Whether or not Bassano was Shakespeare’s lover (scholars now dismiss Rowse’s claim), the discernible contours of her biography supply what the available material about Shakespeare’s life doesn’t: circumstantial evidence of opportunities to acquire an impressive expanse of knowledge.

    Bassano lived, Hudson points out, “an existence on the boundaries of many different social worlds,” encompassing the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its coarse, low-class references and its intimate knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and its Jewish allusions; its music and its feminism. And her imprint, as Hudson reads the plays, extends over a long period. He notes the many uses of her name, citing several early on—for instance, an Emilia in The Comedy of Errors. (Emilia, the most common female name in the plays alongside Katherine, wasn’t used in the 16th century by any other English playwright.) Titus Andronicus features a character named Bassianus, which was the original Roman name of Bassano del Grappa, her family’s hometown before their move to Venice. Later, in The Merchant of Venice, the romantic hero is a Venetian named Bassanio, an indication that the author perhaps knew of the Bassanos’ connection to Venice. (Bassanio is a spelling of their name in some records.)

    Further on, in Othello, another Emilia appears—Iago’s wife. Her famous speech against abusive husbands, Hudson notes, doesn’t show up until 1623, in the First Folio, included among lines that hadn’t appeared in an earlier version (lines that Stratfordians assume—without any proof—were written before Shakespeare’s death). Bassano was still alive, and by then had known her share of hardship at the hands of men. More to the point, she had already spoken out, in her 1611 book of poetry, against men who “do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred.”

    Prodded by Hudson, you can discern traces of Bassano’s own life trajectory in particular works across the canon. In All’s Well That Ends Well, a lowborn girl lives with a dowager countess and a general named Bertram. When Bassano’s father, Baptista, died in 1576, Emilia, then 7, was taken in by Susan Bertie, the dowager countess of Kent. The countess’s brother, Peregrine Bertie, was—like the fictional Bertram—a celebrated general. In the play, the countess tells how a father “famous … in his profession” left “his sole child … bequeathed to my overlooking. I have those hopes of her good that her education promises.” Bassano received a remarkable humanist education with the countess. In her book of poetry, she praised her guardian as “the Mistris of my youth, / The noble guide of my ungovern’d dayes.”
    Bassano’s life sheds possible light on the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages.

    As for the celebrated general, Hudson seizes on the possibility that Bassano’s ears, and perhaps eyes, were opened by Peregrine Bertie as well. In 1582, Bertie was named ambassador to Denmark by the queen and sent to the court at Elsinore—the setting of Hamlet. Records show that the trip included state dinners with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose names appear in the play. Because emissaries from the same two families later visited the English court, the trip isn’t decisive, but another encounter is telling: Bertie met with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose astronomical theories influenced the play. Was Bassano (then just entering her teens) on the trip? Bertie was accompanied by a “whole traine,” but only the names of important gentlemen are recorded. In any case, Hudson argues, she would have heard tales on his return.

    Later, as the mistress of Henry Carey (43 years her senior), Bassano gained access to more than the theater world. Carey, the queen’s cousin, held various legal and military positions. Bassano was “favoured much of her Majesty and of many noblemen,” the physician Forman noted, indicating the kind of extensive aristocratic associations that only vague guesswork can accord to Shakespeare. His company didn’t perform at court until Christmas of 1594, after several of the plays informed by courtly life had already been written. Shakespeare’s history plays, concerned as they are with the interactions of the governing class, presume an insider perspective on aristocratic life. Yet mere court performances wouldn’t have enabled such familiarity, and no trace exists of Shakespeare’s presence in any upper-class household.

    And then, in late 1592, Bassano (now 23) was expelled from court. She was pregnant. Carey gave her money and jewels and, for appearance’s sake, married her off to Alphonso Lanier, a court musician. A few months later, she had a son. Despite the glittering dowry, Lanier must not have been pleased. “Her husband hath dealt hardly with her,” Forman wrote, “and spent and consumed her goods.”

    Bassano was later employed in a noble household, probably as a music tutor, and roughly a decade after that opened a school. Whether she accompanied her male relatives—whose consort of recorder players at the English court lasted 90 years—on their trips back to northern Italy isn’t known. But the family link to the home country offers support for the fine-grained familiarity with the region that (along with in-depth musical knowledge) any plausible candidate for authorship would seem to need—just what scholars have had to strain to establish for Shakespeare. (Perhaps, theories go, he chatted with travelers or consulted books.) In Othello, for example, Iago gives a speech that precisely describes a fresco in Bassano del Grappa—also the location of a shop owned by Giovanni Otello, a likely source of the title character’s name.

    Her Bassano lineage—scholars suggest the family were conversos, converted or hidden Jews presenting as Christians—also helps account for the Jewish references that scholars of the plays have noted. The plea in The Merchant of Venice for the equality and humanity of Jews, a radical departure from typical anti-Semitic portrayals of the period, is well known. “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Shylock asks. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws from a passage in the Talmud about marriage vows; spoken Hebrew is mixed into the nonsense language of All’s Well That Ends Well.
    Stephen Doyle

    What’s more, the Bassano family’s background suggests a source close to home for the particular interest in dark figures in the sonnets, Othello, and elsewhere. A 1584 document about the arrest of two Bassano men records them as “black”—among Elizabethans, the term could apply to anyone darker than the fair-skinned English, including those with a Mediterranean complexion. (The fellows uttered lines that could come straight from a comic interlude in the plays: “We have as good friends in the court as thou hast and better too … Send us to ward? Thou wert as good kiss our arse.”) In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the noblemen derisively compare Rosaline, the princess’s attendant, to “chimney-sweepers” and “colliers” (coal miners). The king joins in, telling Berowne, who is infatuated with her, “Thy love is black as ebony,” to which the young lord responds, “O wood divine!”

    Bassano’s life sheds possible light, too, on another outsider theme: the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages. Hudson sees her misery reflected in the sonnets, thought to have been written from the early 1590s to the early 1600s. “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, /And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, /And look upon myself and curse my fate,” reads sonnet 29. (When Maya Angelou first encountered the poem as a child, she thought Shakespeare must have been a black girl who had been sexually abused: “How else could he know what I know?”) For Shakespeare, those years brought a rise in status: In 1596, he was granted a coat of arms, and by 1597, he was rich enough to buy the second-largest house in Stratford.

    Read: What Maya Angelou meant when she said ‘Shakespeare must be a black girl’

    In what is considered an early or muddled version of The Taming of the Shrew, a man named Alphonso (as was Bassano’s husband) tries to marry off his three daughters, Emilia, Kate, and Philema. Emilia drops out in the later version, and the father is now called Baptista (the name of Bassano’s father). As a portrait of a husband dealing “hardly” with a wife, the play is horrifying. Yet Kate’s speech of submission, with its allusions to the Letters of Paul, is slippery: Even as she exaggeratedly parrots the Christian doctrine of womanly subjection, she is anything but dutifully silent.

    Shakespeare’s women repeatedly subvert such teachings, perhaps most radically in The Winter’s Tale, another drama of male cruelty. There the noblewoman Paulina, scorned by King Leontes as “a most intelligencing bawd” with a “boundless tongue,” bears fierce witness against him (no man dares to) when he wrongly accuses Queen Hermione of adultery and imprisons her. As in so many of the comedies, a more enlightened society emerges in the end because the women’s values triumph.

    I was stunned to realize that the year The Winter’s Tale was likely completed, 1611, was the same year Bassano published her book of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. Her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s in his plays, though Hudson strains to suggest similarities. The overlap lies in the feminist content. Bassano’s poetry registers as more than conventional religious verse designed to win patronage (she dedicates it to nine women, Mary Sidney included, fashioning a female literary community). Scholars have observed that it reads as a “transgressive” defense of Eve and womankind. Like a cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine, Bassano refuses to play by the rules, heretically reinterpreting scripture. “If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake,” she writes. Arguing that the crucifixion, a crime committed by men, was a greater crime than Eve’s, she challenges the basis of men’s “tyranny” over women.

    “I always feel something Italian, something Jewish about Shakespeare,” Jorge Luis Borges told The Paris Review in 1966. “Perhaps Englishmen admire him because of that, because it’s so unlike them.” Borges didn’t mention feeling “something female” about the bard, yet that response has never ceased to be part of Shakespeare’s allure—embodiment though he is of the patriarchal authority of the Western canon. What would the revelation of a woman’s hand at work mean, aside from the loss of a prime tourist attraction in Stratford-upon-Avon? Would the effect be a blow to the cultural patriarchy, or the erosion of the canon’s status? Would (male) myths of inexplicable genius take a hit? Would women at last claim their rightful authority as historical and intellectual forces?

    I was curious to take the temperature of the combative authorship debate as women edge their way into it. Over more tea, I tested Hudson’s room for flexibility. Could the plays’ many connections to Bassano be explained by simply assuming the playwright knew her well? “Shakespeare would have had to run to her every few minutes for a musical reference or an Italian pun,” he said. I caught up with Mark Rylance, the actor and former artistic director of the Globe, in the midst of rehearsals for Othello (whose plot, he noted, comes from an Italian text that didn’t exist in English). A latitudinarian doubter—embracing the inquiry, not any single candidate—Rylance has lately observed that the once heretical notion of collaboration between Shakespeare and other writers “is now accepted, pursued and published by leading orthodox scholars.” He told me that “Emilia should be studied by anyone interested in the creation of the plays.” David Scott Kastan, a well-known Shakespeare scholar at Yale, urged further exploration too, though he wasn’t ready to anoint her bard. “What’s clear is that it’s important to know more about her,” he said, and even got playful with pronouns: “The more we know about her and the world she lived in, the more we’ll know about Shakespeare, whoever she was.”
    Related Stories

    Such Ado: The Fight for Shakespeare’s Puns
    Shakespeare in Love, or in Context

    In the fall, I joined the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust—a gathering of skeptics at the Globe—feeling excited that gender would be at the top of the agenda. Some eyebrows were raised even in this company, but enthusiasm ran high. “People have been totally frustrated with authorship debates that go nowhere, but that’s because there have been 200 years of bad candidates,” one participant from the University of Toronto exclaimed. “They didn’t want to see women in this,” he reflected. “It’s a tragedy of history.”

    He favored Sidney. Others were eager to learn about Bassano, and with collaboration in mind, I wondered whether the two women had perhaps worked together, or as part of a group. I thought of Bassano’s Salve Deus, in which she writes that men have wrongly taken credit for knowledge: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eve’s faire hand, as from a learned Booke.”

    The night after the meeting, I went to a performance of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. I sat enthralled, still listening for the poet in her words, trying to catch her reflection in some forgotten bit of verse. “Give me my robe, put on my crown,” cried the queen, “I have / Immortal longings in me.” There she was, kissing her ladies goodbye, raising the serpent to her breast. “I am fire and air.”

  • spring19
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/schattenjacht/spring19

    artist - song

    Khanh Ly - Goi Ten 4 Mua

    Gene Clark - No Other

    White Noise - Phase-In: Love Without Sound

    Psychic TV - The Orchids

    Serge Gainsbourg - Transit à Marilou

    Robert Rental - On Location

    Kurt Vile - Summer Demons

    John Lennon - Remember

    Nico - Purple Lips

    Sidney Owens & North, South Connection - Sputnik

    Shira Small - Eternal Life

    Taeko Ohnuki - Carnaval

    African Head Charge - Elastic Dance

    Susan Cadogan - lady lady

    Ted Lucas - Now That I know

    Simón Díaz - Tonada de luna llena

    Catherine Jauniaux With Tim Hodgkinson - Kebadaya

    Romie Singh - Dancing To Forget

    a springtime set composed with radiant clouds and sunbeams (and for some reason a lot of songs out of 1981)

    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/schattenjacht/spring19_06678__1.mp3

  • Votes for Women : A Portrait of Persistence | National Portrait Gallery

    https://npg.si.edu/exhibition/votes-for-women

    https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/2AKyZX3r7pZoJA

    Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence” will outline the more than 80-year movement for women to obtain the right to vote as part of the larger struggle for equality that continued through the 1965 Civil Rights Act and arguably lingers today. The presentation is divided chronologically and thematically to address “Radical Women: 1832–1869,” “Women Activists: 1870–1892,” “The New Woman: 1893–1912,” “Compelling Tactics: 1913–1916,” “Militancy in the American Suffragist Movement: 1917–1919” and “The Nineteenth Amendment and Its Legacy.” These thematic explorations are complemented by a chronological narrative of visual biographies of some of the movement’s most influential leaders.

    On view will be portraits of the movement’s pioneers, notably Susan B. Anthony and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, and 1848 Seneca Falls participants, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone. Other portraits of activists will represent such figures as Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President; Carrie Chapman Catt, who devised successful state-by-state persuasion efforts; Alice Paul, who organized the first-ever march on Washington’s National Mall; and Lucy Burns, who served six different prison sentences for picketing the White House.

    Avec trois documents très intéressants dans cette remarquable exposition :

    Et cette carte thématique commentée

    #droits_civiques #droits_humains #droit_de_vote #droit_des_femmes #féminisme #états-unis

  • Une roquette tirée depuis la bande de Gaza fait plusieurs blessés en Israël - moyen orient - RFI
    http://www.rfi.fr/moyen-orient/20190325-israel-roquette-tir-bande-gaza-maison-blesses

    Un tir de roquette en provenance de la bande de Gaza a fait cinq ou six blessés – selon les sources – au nord de Tel-Aviv, en Israël, ce lundi 25 mars. Le Premier ministre Benyamin Netanyahu a annoncé qu’il allait raccourcir sa visite aux Etats-Unis et a promis de riposter « avec force ». L’armée israélienne envoie des renforts autour de Gaza. (...)

    #GAZA

    • Rocket fired from Gaza hits Israeli House; Seven Wounded
      March 25, 2019 9:01 AM
      https://imemc.org/article/rocket-fired-from-gaza-hits-israeli-house-seven-wounded

      (...) The house that was hit by the rocket is located 100 km from the Gaza Strip, and the ‘Iron Dome’ system that the Israeli government has in place to intercept rockets fired from Gaza was not activated.

      No Palestinian armed resistance group claimed credit for the attack.

      When a rocket was fired from Gaza nearly two weeks ago, the Israeli airforce responded by dropping one hundred bombs in different parts of the Gaza Strip.

      Residents of Gaza report that they are fearful of what Israeli forces may be preparing to do, noting that drones and helicopters have been hovering over parts of Gaza all night.

      Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reportedly cut short his trip visiting Trump in Washington DC to return to Israel to “manage our operations up close”.

    • surtout quand :

      Trump Signs Order Recognizing Golan Heights as Israeli Territory

      With Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, Trump said the U.S. will always stand by Israel’s side
      Noa Landau and Reuters (Washington, D.C. )
      https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-trump-to-sign-executive-order-recognizing-golan-as-israeli-territo

      President Donald Trump holds up a signed proclamation recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks on, Washington, D.C., March 25, 2019.AP/Susan Walsh

      WASHINGTON - U.S. President Donald Trump met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday to sign a presidential proclamation officially recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory on Monday, thus formalizing a move announced with a tweet earlier on Thursday.

      In a joint press conference, Trump said: “We do not want to see another attack like the one suffered this morning north of Tel Aviv,” adding: “Our relationship is powerful.” Trump then said: “We will confront the poison of anti-Semitism.”

    • Israeli Airstrikes Injure 8 Palestinians, Including Two Children In Gaza
      March 26, 2019 12:28 AM
      https://imemc.org/article/israeli-airstrikes-injure-8-palestinians-including-two-children-in-gaza

      The Israeli Air Force carried out, on Monday at night, a series of air strikes targeting several areas, including homes, in many parts of the besieged Gaza Strip, wounding eight Palestinians, including two children.

      Media sources said the army fired two missiles into a commercial building, in the center of Gaza city, wounding two Palestinians, and causing excessive damage to the property and surrounding homes.

      The army also fired a missile at a residential building in the Rimal neighborhood, in Gaza city, wounding two children, and causing excessive damage to the building and some surrounding homes.

      At least one Palestinian was also injured when the army fired missiles into a building, east of the Sheja’eyya neighborhood, east of Gaza city.

      The army also fired two missiles into two sites, west of Gaza city, and in Beit Lahia, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, causing damage, in addition to several missiles striking Palestinian lands east of Khan Younis and Rafah, in the southern parts of the coastal region.

      Medical sources said four Palestinians were injured by Israeli missiles in Beit Lahia and Jabalia, in northern Gaza, and were rushed to the Indonesian Hospital

      The Maan News Agency has reported that the army fired more than 100 missiles into various areas in the Gaza Strip.

      It added that all schools, universities, banks and various institutions have decided to close their doors, to avoid civilian casualties should the situation witness a further deterioration.

      Among the targeted buildings are offices of Ismael Haniyya, the political leader of Hamas movement.

      Israeli daily Haaretz has reported that the army launched an offensive striking what it called “Hamas targets” in the Gaza Strip after a shell was reportedly fired from Gaza. (...)

    • L’armée israélienne d’occupation bombarde le ghetto de Gaza
      25 mars 2019 - Memo – Al Jazeera
      http://www.chroniquepalestine.com/armee-israelienne-occupation-bombarde-ghetto-gaza

      L’occupant israélien a lancé aujourd’hui des frappes aériennes sur la bande de Gaza, touchant des cibles à travers l’enclave assiégée depuis maintenant 12 années.

      Les frappes ont commencé ce soir vers 18h00 heure locale (16h00 GMT), après qu’Israël ait passé la journée à se préparer à l’assaut. Après avoir affirmé qu’une roquette a été tirée de Gaza sur une ville au nord de Tel-Aviv, l’armée israélienne a envoyé deux brigades de l’armée – totalisant plus de 1 000 soldats – le long de la clôture de Gaza et a appelé des réservistes des unités aériennes en vue des bombardements.

      Israël a également bloqué aujourd’hui toute la bande de Gaza, en fermant les points de passage de Kerem Shalom (Karm Abu Salem) et Erez (Beit Hanoun) qui permettent aux produits et fournitures médicales d’entrer dans l’enclave. Il a également réduit la zone de pêche qu’il impose au large de la côte méditerranéenne de Gaza, bloquant ainsi encore davantage le territoire. (...)

  • #Venezuela, effondrement proche ?
    2000 tonnes de viande auraient été perdues du fait de la panne électrique…

    Expertos advierten que servicios en Venezuela se acercan al colapso
    http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/politica/expertos-advierten-que-servicios-venezuela-acercan-colapso_275784


    Foto: Referencial

    El apagón que afectó el territorio nacional el pasado 7 de marzo y que dejó a varios estados del país sin servicio eléctrico, podría ser el preludio de un desastre nacional de mayor magnitud, según expertos.

    «No estamos regresando a la normalidad. Esto es el principio de una fase en la que veremos un colapso más profundo de los servicios del país», indicó Susana Rafalli, nutricionista y consultora de la organización Caritas Venezuela, así lo informó The Washington Post.

    Más de 4.4 millones de libras de carne se dañaron debido a la falta de refrigeración según las federaciones ganaderas del país, y especialistas del sector eléctrico indicaron que se pueden esperar apagones y racionamiento de la luz los próximos meses.

    «Estamos cerca del colapso total», dijo Julio Molina, jefe de la facultad de Ingeniería Eléctrica de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, quien advirtió que pese a que algunos equipos pueden ser reemplazados, el país es vulnerable de sufrir otro apagón en cualquier momento.

  • The Dinner Party (1974-79)
    Selected work #Judy_Chicago
    http://www.judychicago.com/gallery/the-dinner-party/dp-artwork/#39

    Judy Chicago’s original concept for The Dinner Party was multi-faceted in that her goal was to introduce the richness of women’s heritage into the culture in three ways; a monumental work of art, a book and a film because she had discovered so much unknown information. The work of art, that was eventually housed at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, consists of a series of Entryway Banners, the ceremonial table representing 39 important historical female figures, the Heritage Panels, which elucidate the contributions of the 999 women on the Heritage Floor, and the Acknowledgement Panels that identify Judy Chicago’s assistants and collaborators. Together, these components celebrate the many aspects of women’s history and contributions.

    Through an unprecedented worldwide grass-roots movement, The Dinner Party was exhibited in 16 venues in 6 countries on 3 continents to a viewing audience of over one million people. The Dinner Party – which has been the subject of countless books and articles – is now permanently housed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum where it draws thousands of visitors from all over the globe.

    The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago. Widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork, it functions as a symbolic history of women in civilization. There are 39 elaborate place settings arranged along a triangular table for 39 mythical and historical famous women. Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, and Georgia O’Keeffe are among the symbolic guests.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dinner_Party

    #art #féminisme #femmes #vulves #magnifique

  • Hollywood Froze Out the Founding Mother of Cinema | JSTOR Daily
    https://daily.jstor.org/hollywood-froze-out-the-founding-mother-of-cinema

    Alice Guy (1873-1968) was the first woman film director. She worked for French film pioneer Leon Gaumont as a secretary in 1896 before she moved into production. Guy was bored, however, by Gaumont’s films, essentially very short documentaries expressing the novelty of the moving image: street scenes, marching troops, trains arriving at stations.

    As historian Susan Hayward tells it, Gaumont was more interested in the technology than what it could produce. “Guy found the repetitiveness [of his films] irksome and decided she could do something better. She submitted a couple of short comedies to Gaumont and he gave her the go-ahead (almost absent-mindedly, according to Guy),” writes Hayward.

    Guy may very well have been the only female movie-maker for the next decade, during which she directed or produced hundreds of films ranging from one to thirty minutes in length. As “film-maker, artistic director and studio and location sets manager all rolled into one” in the days before the multi-reel feature length film, Guy was a key figure in the birth of the fiction film, the form that eventually trumped documentaries the world over. Hayward lists Guy’s innovations: using scripts; having rehearsals; stressing “natural” performances; deploying trick photography; shooting in studio and on location; and, beginning in 1900, experimenting with sound (Gaumont’s Chronophone synchronized phonograph and film).
    Lobby card for the silent film The Pit and the Pendulum directed by Alice Guy-Blaché, 1913
    Lobby card for the silent film The Pit and the Pendulum directed by Alice Guy-Blaché, 1913 via Wikimedia Commons

    In 1907, Guy resigned from Gaumont’s production company and married fellow Gaumont employee Herbert Blaché. Generally known afterwards as Alice Guy-Blaché, she journeyed with her husband to New York City. In 1910 the Blachés started their own company, Solax, with Alice as director general. They did well enough to have a new studio built in Fort Lee, New Jersey in 1911.

    Solax had two strong years, then both Blachés worked for hire into the teens. In 1914, Guy-Blaché wrote, “it has long been a source of wonder to me that many women have not seized upon the wonderful opportunity offered to them by the motion picture art… Of all the arts there is probably none in which they can make such splendid use of talents so much more natural to a woman than to a man and so necessary to its perfection.” And yet, when the couple arrived in Hollywood in 1918, they found few opportunities for women behind the camera.

    Karen Ward Mahar, in her analysis of the “rise and fall of the woman filmmaker” between 1896 and 1928, argues that the consolidating industry forced women out of behind-the-camera jobs because it gendered those occupations as male. Sex-typing of work in Hollywood would end up allowing for woman screenwriters and continuity workers (a.k.a. “script girls”), but little else—besides, obviously, the women on-screen.

    Understanding how filmmaking became masculinized is particularly important with regard to Hollywood, because those who create American movies wield immense cultural power. Once women were excluded from that power in the 1920s, they did not reappear in significant numbers until the 1970s.

    Mahar notes that Guy-Blaché had been “regularly singled out between 1910 and 1913 as one of the guiding lights of the industry.” Hollywood, however, was not interested in Madame Blaché’s light. Mahar also writes, “women needed male partners to gain access to all the necessary segments of the industry.” She notes that Guy-Blaché had experienced this while running Solax with her husband—despite being in a position of leadership, she was not welcome at distributor’s meetings, “because, as her husband alleged, her presence would embarrass the men.

    Alice Guy-Blaché split up with her husband in 1920 and returned to France in 1922. She never made another movie.

    #historicisation #cinéma #femmes

  • When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)

    I first saw the photograph some years ago, online. Later, I tracked it down to its original source: “In Afric’s Forest and Jungle: Or Six Years Among the Yorubans,” a memoir published in 1899 by the Rev. R.H. Stone. It shows a crowd in what is now Nigeria, but what was then Yorubaland under British colonial influence. The caption below the photograph reads: “A king of Ejayboo. Governor of Lagos on right. For years the rulers of this fierce tribe made the profession of Christianity a capital crime.” This description is familiar in tone from anthropological literature of the period, though the photograph is hard to date precisely. “Ejayboo” is what we would nowadays spell as “Ijebu,” a subgroup of Yoruba. That catches my attention: I am Yoruba and also Ijebu. This picture is a time capsule from a world to which I am connected but had not seen before, a world by colonial encounter.

    By the middle of the 19th century, through treaties and threats of force, the British had wrested control of the coastal city Lagos from its king. They then turned their efforts to improving access to the goods and services in the Yoruba hinterland. The Yoruba were already by that time a populous and diverse ethnic group, full of rivalrous kingdoms large and small, some friendly to the British, others less so.

    Stone, a Virginian sent by the Southern Baptist Convention, lived among them — lived among us — for two spells, in 1859-63 and 1867-69, before, during and after the American Civil War. He had this to say about Yoruba people: “They are reasonable, brave and patriotic, and are capable of a very high degree of intellectual culture.” It is praise, but must be understood in the context of a statement he makes earlier in his book about living “among the barbarous people” of that part of the world. In any case, the Ijebu in the mid-19th century were largely wealthy traders and farmers who did not want to give the British right of way to the interior of the country; only through diplomacy, subterfuge and violence were they finally overcome.

    This photograph was made in the aftermath. The white governor of Lagos — based on the plausible dates, it is probably John Hawley Glover — sits under an enormous umbrella. On one side of him is another high-ranking colonial officer. On the other side is the Ijebu king, or oba, probably the Awujale of the Ijebu kingdom, Oba Ademuyewo Fidipote.

    The oba wears a beaded crown, but the beads have been parted and his face is visible. This is unusual, for the oba is like a god and must be concealed when in public. The beads over his face, with their interplay of light and shadow, are meant to give him a divine aspect. Why is his face visible in this photograph? Some contravention of customary practice has taken place. The dozens of men seated on the ground in front of him are visibly alarmed. Many have turned their bodies away from the oba, and several are positioned toward the camera, not in order to look at the camera but in order to avoid looking at the exposed radiance of their king.

    The invention of the daguerreotype was announced in 1839. By the 1840s, photography had spread like wildfire and become a vital aspect of European colonialism. It played a role in administrative, missionary, scientific and commercial activities. As the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera put it: “The camera has often been a dire instrument. In Africa, as in most parts of the dispossessed, the camera arrives as part of the colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible. ...”

    Photography in colonialized societies was not only a dire instrument. Subject peoples often adopted photography for their own uses. There were, for instance, a number of studios in Lagos by the 1880s, where elites could go to pose for portraits. But such positive side effects aside, photography during colonial rule imaged the world in order to study, profit from and own it. The colonial gaze might describe as barbarous both the oba’s beaded crown and his regal right to conceal himself. This was one of the repeated interactions between imperial powers and the populations that they sought to control: The dominant power decided that everything had to be seen and cataloged, a task for which photography was perfectly suited. Under the giant umbrella of colonialism, nothing would be allowed to remain hidden from the imperial authorities.

    Imperialism and colonial photographic practices both flourished in the 19th century, and both extended themselves, with cosmetic adaptations, into the 20th. In 1960, during the horrific French war on Algeria, the French military assigned a young soldier, Marc Garanger, to photograph people in an internment camp in the Kabylia region of Northern Algeria. Thousands of people had been confined in the region under armed guard, and the French military commander had decreed that ID cards were mandatory. A picture of each prisoner was required. Many of the women were forced to remove their veils. These were women who did not wish to be seen, made to sit for photographs that were not for them. (Photography played a different military role in the numerous aerial reconnaissance missions by the French, which resulted in thousands of negatives mapping the region.)

    Garanger’s photographs both record an injustice and occasion it. His alternative, not an easy one, would have been to refuse the order and go to prison. His pictures show us what we ought not to see: Young and old women, their hair free flowing or plaited, one face after the other, in the hundreds. They collectively emanate refusal. The women of Kabylia look through the photographer, certainly not considering him an ally. Their gazes rise from the surface of the photograph, palpably furious.

    When we speak of “shooting” with a camera, we are acknowledging the kinship of photography and violence. The anthropological photographs made in the 19th century under the aegis of colonial powers are related to the images created by contemporary photojournalists, including those who embed with military forces. Embedding is sometimes the only way to get a direct record, no matter how limited, of what is happening in an armed conflict. On occasion such an arrangement leads to images whose directness displeases the authorities, but a more common outcome has been that proximity to an army helps bolster the narrative preferred by the army.

    Still, photographic reportage has the power to quicken the conscience and motivate political commitments. Examples abound of photographs acting as catalysts in the public’s understanding of vital issues, from the images of Bergen-Belsen in 1945 to the photograph of the Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi in 2015. And yet, perhaps even more insistently, on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis, photography implicitly serves the powers that be. To insist that contemporary photographic practice — and I mean to include a majority of the international news coverage in newspapers like this one — is generally made (and published) for the greater good is to misconstrue history, because it leaves out the question of “Good for whom?” Such pictures aren’t for their subjects any more than the photograph in Stone’s book was for the Ijebus and their king.

    Certain images underscore an unbridgeable gap and a never-to-be-toppled hierarchy. When a group of people is judged to be “foreign,” it becomes far more likely that news organizations will run, for the consumption of their audiences, explicit, disturbing photographs of members of that group: starving children or bullet-riddled bodies. Meanwhile, the injury and degradation of those with whom readers perceive a kinship — a judgment often based on racial sympathy and class loyalties — is routinely treated in more circumspect fashion. This has hardly changed since Susan Sontag made the same observation in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), and it has hardly changed because the underlying political relationships between dominant and subject societies have hardly changed.

    Without confronting this inequality, this misconstrual of history, photography will continue to describe itself as one thing (a force for liberation) while obdurately remaining another (an obedient appendage of state power). It will continue to be like the organs of the state that “spread democracy” and change regimes. Even when it appears to go against the state, it will only do so selectively, quaintly, beautifully, piteously, in terms that do not question the right of the state to assert power.

    For how long will these radically unequal societal realities endure? Many affecting photographs have been made during the huge waves of international migration of the past few years. These pictures issue, as usual, from the presumed rights of photographers to depict the suffering of people “out there” for the viewing of those “back home.” But in looking at these images — images of war, of starvation, of capsized boats and exhausted caravans — we must go beyond the usual frames of pity and abjection. Every picture of suffering should elicit a question stronger than “Why is this happening?” The question should be “Why have I allowed this to happen?”

    This is what the scholar Ariella Azoulay calls the “citizenship” of photography, its ability, when practiced thoughtfully, to remind us of our mutual responsibilities. When I look at the bewildering photographs of refugee camps in Richard Mosse’s recent book, “The Castle,” I feel indicted. The imperial underpinnings of Mosse’s project are inescapable: Using military-grade thermal cameras, he makes extremely complex panoramic images (stitched together from hundreds of shots) of landscapes in the Middle East and Europe in which refugees have gathered or have been confined. His pictures echo the surveillance to which these bodies are already subjected. But the thermal imaging renders the images very dark, with the humans showing up as white shapes (almost like a negative). The picture conceals what it reveals. We see people, but they remain hidden.

    This technique makes for uncanny images in which distressed people move about like the figures you see in dreams, indistinct but full of ghostly presence. At the Moria camp in Greece, it is snowing. We see a long snaking line of people, waiting. What are they waiting for? For some material handout, probably, for food or blankets or documents. But their waiting represents the deeper waiting of all those who have been confined in the antechamber of humanity. They are waiting to be allowed to be human.

    Mosse’s images, formally striking as they are, are unquestionably part of the language of visual domination. With his political freedom of movement and his expensive technical equipment, he makes meticulous pictures of suffering that end up in exquisite books and in art galleries. He is not the first photographer to aestheticize suffering, nor will he be the last. And yet, by suppressing color, by overwhelming the viewer with detail, by evoking racial horror rather than prettily displaying it and by including in his work philosophical considerations of the scenes he shows — “The Castle” contains essays by Judith Butler, Paul K. Saint-Amour and Mosse himself and a poem by Behrouz Boochani — he does something quite different from most photojournalists. He unsettles the viewer.

    Photography’s future will be much like its past. It will largely continue to illustrate, without condemning, how the powerful dominate the less powerful. It will bring the “news” and continue to support the idea that doing so — collecting the lives of others for the consumption of “us” — is a natural right. But with a project like “The Castle,” I have a little bit of hope that an ethic of self-determination can be restored. I have hope that the refugees of Moria, Athens, Berlin and Belgrade will gain a measure of privacy. The women of Kabylia will cover their faces and return to themselves as they wish to be. The oba’s beaded crown will fall back into place, shadowing his face. Photography writes with light, but not everything wants to be seen. Among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen and dark.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/magazine/when-the-camera-was-a-weapon-of-imperialism-and-when-it-still-is.html

    #photographie #colonialisme #post-colonialisme #impérialisme
    ping @albertocampiphoto @philippe_de_jonckheere

    Reçu via la mailing-list Migreurop avec le commentaire suivant de Emmanuel Blanchard:

    L’auteur fait notamment référence au travail récent de #Richard_Mosse (exposition et ouvrage « The Castle ») dont il fait un compte rendu à la critique et laudatif. Un point de vue qui peut lui-même être critiqué... dans un sens plus critique.
    Pour accéder à quelques images de Richard Mosse :

    https://vimeo.com/302281332


    https://wsimag.com/art/33291-richard-mosse-the-castle
    https://bit.ly/2NglY08

    #réfugiés #asile #migrations #images #image

    The Castle

    Richard Mosse has spent the past few years documenting the ongoing refugee and migration crisis, repurposing military-grade camera technology to confront how governments and societies perceive refugees. His latest book The Castle is a meticulous record of refugee camps located across mass migration routes from the Middle East and Central Asia into the European Union via Turkey. Using a thermal video camera intended for long-range border enforcement, Mosse films the camps from high elevations to draw attention to the ways in which each interrelates with, or is divorced from, adjacent citizen infrastructure. His source footage is then broken down into hundreds of individual frames, which are digitally overlapped in a grid formation to create composite heat maps.

    Truncating time and space, Mosse’s images speak to the lived experience of refugees indefinitely awaiting asylum and trapped in a Byzantine state of limbo. The book is divided into 28 sites, each presenting an annotated sequence of close-up images that fold out into a panoramic heat map. Within this format, Mosse underscores the provisional architecture of the camps and the ways in which each camp is variously marginalised, concealed, regulated, militarized, integrated, and/or dispersed. His images point to the glaring disconnect between the brisk free trade of globalized capitalism and the dehumanizing erosion of international refugee law in European nation-states. Named after Kafka’s 1926 novel, The Castle prompts questions about the ‘visibility’ of refugees and the erosion of their human rights.

    The book comes with a separate book of texts, including a poem by Behrouz Boochani, the journalist, novelist and Iranian refugee currently held by the Australian government in confinement on Manus island, an essay by Paul K. Saint-Amour, associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, an essay by philosopher Judith Butler, and a text by Richard Mosse.


    #livre

  • Beauté des femmes, normes, sacrifices
    Femmes à travers l’Histoire : « sois laide et tais-toi ! »

    https://information.tv5monde.com/terriennes/femmes-travers-l-histoire-sois-laide-et-tais-toi-278816

    Dès le début, cela commence mal, très mal, pour les femmes.

    Dans Hippolyte, la pièce d’Euripide, ce contemporain de Socrate écrit sans ciller : "La femme est un mal. Le père qui l’a engendrée et nourrie lui adjoint une dot. L’époux qui prend dans sa maison ce parasite s’amuse à parer la méchante idole et se ruine aux belles toilettes, le malheureux détruisant peu à peu le bien de sa famille (...) Soyez maudites. Jamais je ne pourrai rassasier ma haine contre les femmes (...) Elles ne cessent de faire le mal".

    Claudine Sagaert, sociologue et professeur de philosophie explique : "Dès la Grèce antique, ce n’est pas telle ou telle femme qui est jugée laide, c’est LA femme. On voit se mettre en place une conception de la femme laide qui va partir d’une dimension physiologique. De cette dimension physiologique, on va en déduire une dimension négative du point de vue intellectuel et du point de vue moral".

    Dans son ouvrage Histoire de la laideur féminine (Imago édition) l’auteure passe en revue, explique et décortique les anathèmes qui touchent les femmes laides. Claudine Sagaert s’est appuyée sur des textes philosophiques, médicaux et littéraires.
    Pour un résultat assez stupéfiant.
    Femmes, "Vomissures de la terre"
    Les siècles qui passent ne calment pas les choses. Bien au contraire.
    la sorcière est souvent assimilée à une femme hideuse, résultat d'un commerce avec le diable
    la sorcière est souvent assimilée à une femme hideuse, résultat d’un commerce avec le diable

    Jean Baptiste Louis de Thesacq, médecin français du XVIIIe siècle, affirme : "dire du mal des femmes a été, pour le Moyen Âge, comme pour l’Antiquité, un des lieux communs de la littérature".

    La toute puissante Eglise catholique fait mieux que cela : elle les condamne. Si Marie, mère de Jésus, représente pour les chrétiens la pureté absolue (la voici enceinte bien que n’ayant jamais eu de rapport sexuel avec Joseph, son mari), Eve, mère de l’humanité, incarne à jamais la tentation (elle a mordu, la fourbe, dans le fruit défendu au jardin d’Eden).

    Et surtout, gare aux femmes laides ! Bernardin de Sienne, franciscain prédicateur du XVème siècle, va jusqu’à les traiter de "vomissures de la terre" !
    La laideur au couvent
    Dans son ouvrage, Claudine Sagaert nous rappelle qu’au Moyen-Âge la jeune femme qui souffre d’une disgrâce est envoyée illico dans un couvent tant sa présence au sein
    Nonnes dînant en silence, tout en écoutant la lecture de la Bible (<em>Humilité</em>, <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Lorenzetti&quot ; title="Pietro Lorenzetti">Pietro Lorenzetti</a>, 1341
    Nonnes dînant en silence, tout en écoutant la lecture de la Bible (Humilité, Pietro Lorenzetti, 1341
    Wikipedia
    de la famille est perçue comme une insulte. Une femme laide "n’a pas sa place dans le monde, elle y est comme déplacée". Et même au couvent, à l’abri du monde, elle continue de déranger : "Les ecclésiastiques se plaignaient amèrement que les pères marient leurs filles les plus gâtées et abandonnent au Seigneur les plus laides". Pas très catholique pour des hommes d’Eglise...

    La femme laide suscite un rejet, parfois de la haine, jamais de l’indifférence. Elle est une tâche, un rebut, une erreur de casting dans la grande mise en scène de la société, le long métrage de l’existence.
    Forcément encombrante puisque non désirée, non charnelle, non "fécondable", elle doit vivre avec une honte originelle et, surtout, ne pas se faire remarquer, s’effacer autant que possible.

    L’intelligence lui est refusée, la sexualité défendue. Elle est une ennemie désagréable pour tous les hommes mais aussi, pour les femmes, la projection pénible d’un cauchemar vivant.

    Pourquoi ne t’achètes-tu donc pas une paire de lunettes, espèce de laide et vieille salope ?

    Des voyous insultant la chanteuse Susan Boyle
    "La vieille fille laide à sa fenêtre"

    Parmi ces bannies, citons encore "les vieilles filles", un terme qui, selon l’auteure, "indique déjà qu’elle n’est pas une femme. Genre hybride, elle est une fille déjà vieille. Elle n’a donc pas de réel statut". Et de citer plusieurs auteurs, et non des moindres, qui trempèrent leur plume dans la plus acide des encres pour évoquer leur existence.
    Alexandre Dumas : "A l’annonce de la vieille fille, il eût fallu voir les hochements de tête, les grimaces, les sourires de commisération ou de raillerie (..) tous enfin bâtissaient sur ce seul mot de vieille fille un échafaudage de conjectures fâcheuses".
    <em>"Quand il y a une vieille fille dans une maison, les chiens de garde sont inutiles : il ne s&#039;y passe pas le moindre événement qu&#039;elle ne le voie, ne le commente et n&#039;en tire toutes les conséquences" </em>écrit Balzac.
    "Quand il y a une vieille fille dans une maison, les chiens de garde sont inutiles : il ne s’y passe pas le moindre événement qu’elle ne le voie, ne le commente et n’en tire toutes les conséquences" écrit Balzac.
    Pixabay

    Octave Mirbeau :" Elle était fort laide, si laide que personne jamais ne l’avait demandée en mariage, malgré ses six mille livres de rente. (...) Elle avait, en m’embrassant furieusement, des gestes si durs, des mouvements si brusques, que je préférais encore qu’elle me pinçât le bras". Balzac : "Il n’y a rien de plus horrible à voir que la matinale apparition d’une vieille fille laide à sa fenêtre
    Zola et "les repoussoirs"
    Il y a aussi la redécouverte de cette étonnante nouvelle signée Zola, Les repoussoirs.
    Un industriel à l’idée un tantinet cruelle d’inventer un nouvel "article de toilette". Il charge plusieurs courtiers de "recruter" des femmes particulièrement laides dans Paris.
    L&#039;écrivain Emile Zola
    L’écrivain Emile Zola
    (Domaine public)

    L’industriel ne retient que "les faces décourageantes, celles qui glacent par leur épaisseur et leur bêtise". Il va louer leur laideur. Les bourgeoises se précipitent.

    Accompagnées de ces laiderons, elles voient leur beauté aussitôt rehaussée et cet étrange attelage dans les rues est censé séduire les hommes. L’affaire rencontre un grand succès.
    L’écrivain précise : "Le bureau était entouré de clientes qui choisissaient chacune son repoussoir et l’emportaient avec une joie féroce".

    Emile Zola, loin de jubiler sur le sort de ces "repoussoirs" dénonce là l’immense solitude de ces femmes laides. Il condamne cet argent qui peut tout acheter, jusqu’à la dignité des êtres. Lucide, l’écrivain conclut : "Qu’importe au progrès une femme qui souffre ! L’humanité marche en avant."

    Visionnaire Zola...

    Le combat des laides a été celui de toutes celles qui, par leur engagement, se sont autorisées à être fécondes autrement que par leur ventre.

    Claudine Sagaert
    "Le féminisme dénature la femme"
    La féministe occupe une place de choix dans cette farandole de l’exclusion. Ses activités, la défense de la femme et la légitime revendication de ses droits, ne peuvent que la rendre laide. L’auteure note : "Elle s’intéresse à autre chose qu’aux hommes et à leurs désirs. Ainsi, le féminisme dénature la femme, la précipite dans la laideur".

    Dès lors, il
    Le journal satirique <em>L&#039;assiette au beurre</em> du 18 septembre 1909, intitulée "Féminisme et féministes".
    Le journal satirique L’assiette au beurre du 18 septembre 1909, intitulée "Féminisme et féministes".
    s’agit de caricaturer les féministes avec une outrance souvent délirante.
    L’enjeu est de rire mais, surtout, ne pas leur permettre d’accéder au pouvoir politique. Lui seul autoriserait une amélioration du droit des femmes.
    Inadmissible.

    Les féministes sont donc osseuses, odieuses, grimaçantes, non désirables, mais aussi sans scrupule. Ces suffragettes obéissent, pour reprendre l’expression d’un propagandiste franquiste, à une "compensation de frustration hormonale".

    Délicat.

    On ne leur reconnaît à ces féministes (forcément hystériques) aucune intelligence particulière. Elles s’acharnent à vouloir braconner sur des terres interdites.
    Pour les femmes, de toutes les façons, il n’y a guère d’échappatoire. "Belle, la femme est idiote, intelligente, elle est laide", écrit Claudine Sagaert. En somme, le combat des laides a été celui de toutes celles qui, par leur engagement, se sont autorisées, au sens fort du terme, à être fécondes autrement que par leur ventre".


    Le cas Susan Boyle
    L’ouvrage balaie aussi notre époque. Il évoque brièvement le cas emblématique de Susan Boyle. Souvenons-nous. Cette artiste au physique hors norme participe en 2009 au télé-crochet anglais "Britain’s got talent". Lorsqu’elle se présente sur scène, quelques sifflets
    L&#039;actrice et chanteuse Rossy de Palma à Cannes en 2015. Elle est l&#039;une des artistes favorites du réalisateur Pédro Almodovar.
    L’actrice et chanteuse Rossy de Palma à Cannes en 2015. Elle est l’une des artistes favorites du réalisateur Pédro Almodovar.
    Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0 (commons.wikimedia.org)
    fusent et la caméra capte les regards dégoûtés parmi le public. Une cascade de rires accompagne l’aveu de son âge (47 ans). Tout cela s’éteint quelques minutes plus tard quand s’élève sa voix, pure, puissante, indiscutable. A la stupéfaction générale, Susan Boyle semble révéler au monde tout entier qu’on peut être laide et talentueuse.

    Elle accède au rang de star et ses albums, du jour au lendemain, se vendent par millions.
    Mais la célébrité planétaire n’immunise pas contre la bêtise.

    En juin 2017, des voyous s’en prennent à la chanteuse quand, un jour, elle est assise tranquillement dans un bus. Un témoin raconte au quotidien The Telegraph : “Une dizaine ou une quinzaine d’entre eux l’ont cernée et ont commencé à lui lancer des objets. Ils ont mis le feu à un morceau de papier et lui ont jeté au visage. Susan Boyle gagne la sortie sous les insultes qui continuent de pleuvoir : "Pourquoi ne t’achètes-tu donc pas une paire de lunettes, espèce de laide et vieille salope ?"

    Rossy de Palma, l’actrice révélée par le cinéaste espagnol Pedro Amodovar a eu, elle aussi, à souffrir des quolibets durant son enfance. Mais de son physique à nul autre pareil, elle a fait une force. Lors d’un entretien au magazine Paris-Match, elle confiait : "J’avais hâte de quitter l’école, je croyais ainsi pouvoir échapper à la bêtise. Malheureusement, ça ne s’est pas passé comme je le pensais. Je me suis rendu compte que la vie est une grande cour de récréation qu’on ne quitte jamais."

    <em>"La laideur physique n&#039;est pas signe de laideur morale" </em>rappelle Claudine Sagaert
    "La laideur physique n’est pas signe de laideur morale" rappelle Claudine Sagaert
    (Pixabay)
    Un narcissisme industriel
    Notre époque, avec cette mode hystérique des selfies, cette mise à disposition volontaire et à volonté de son image, ce narcissisme quasi industriel exclut, de facto, celles et ceux qui ne répondront jamais aux critères de beauté en vigueur (grands yeux, petit nez, petit menton, bouche charnue, pommettes larges et hautes etc.).
    Sans parler des personnes obèses, anorexiques. "Chacun dans la société contemporaine est ainsi reconnu responsable de son corps et de son visage", appuie Claudine Sagaert "La femme est restée femme grâce à son apparence. On l’appréhende toujours de ce point de vue". Bien entendu, aujourd’hui, personne n’impose à la femme d’être belle, il n’y a pas de dictateur mais disons que c’est un "dictateur intériorisé". La femme ne doit pas avoir de ride, être en surpoids, elle doit soigner son apparence, au risque d’être coupable. On va lui attribuer un certain nombre de défauts : elle manque de volonté, elle est irrespectueuse envers elle-même et envers les autres, etc. Il y a, à notre époque, une normalisation de l’apparence, qui est extrême, et cela dans le monde."
    (Pixabay)

    Dans le monde, vraiment ? " Ecoutez, j’ai vécu six ans au Brésil et ce qui m’a vraiment questionnée dans les pays d’Amérique Latine, c’est que toute la représentation dans la publicité, ce sont des femmes blanches, blondes et souvent très minces. Vous imaginez dans un pays comme le Mexique et le Pérou, où les gens sont typés ? Ca ne correspond pas du tout à leur physionomie ! Quelque part, cela provoque un déni d’identité. Il y a aussi les Asiatiques qui se font débrider les yeux, les Africains et Africaines qui se font blanchir la peau. On comprend que les normes sont extrêmement bien ancrées. Ce qui est plus grave, c’est que l’individu lui-même, dès lors, ne se sent pas à la hauteur. Il sait que dans le domaine de l’emploi, des rapports amoureux, si son apparence ne correspond pas à un certain type de diktat, eh bien il ne sera pas recruté, ou il aura moins de chance lors de relations amoureuses ".

    L’apparence obéit à une mécanique infernale. Et si une femme se trouve un jour frappée de disgrâce, il peut lui arriver d’endosser une sombre culpabilité. Parce que la société la juge responsable de son physique. La voici tout à coup honteuse d’elle-même. "Victime, elle considère paradoxalement ces critiques comme justifiées, elle les intègre au point d’oeuvrer à sa propre dévalorisation".
    Infernal.

  • (13) Susanne Williams - YouTube
    https://www.youtube.com/user/susannewilliams/about

    Mountains, Lakes, Forests, Rivers. Bushcraft, Diving, Skiing, Ultrarunning Energy, Nature, Stillness, Beauty, Strong Peace, Jerven Bag

    jolie chaîne de bushcraft (ceux qui aiment dormir dans les bois de temps en temps en fabriquant des cuillères et des cabanes (elle joue de la flûte)), plein de matos intéressant, mais aussi d’astuces et d’expériences d’une meuf qui a visiblement de la bouteille. J’aime bien cette idée de Strong Peace.

    https://youtu.be/XtqQnsNxwQI

    • #Calle_13 (avec Totó la Momposina, Susana Baca et Maria Rita) - Latinoamérica (2010), déjà là :
      https://seenthis.net/messages/613166

      Soy
      Soy lo que dejaron
      Soy toda la sobra de lo que se robaron
      Un pueblo escondido en la cima
      Mi piel es de cuero por eso aguanta cualquier clima
      Soy una fábrica de humo
      Mano de obra campesina para tu consumo
      Frente de frío en el medio del verano
      El amor en los tiempos del cólera, mi hermano
      El sol que nace y el día que muere con los mejores
      atardeceres
      Soy el desarrollo en carne viva
      Un discurso político sin saliva
      Las caras más bonitas que he conocido
      Soy la fotografía de un desaparecido
      La sangre dentro de tus venas
      Soy un pedazo de tierra que vale la pena
      Una canasta con frijoles
      Soy Maradona contra Inglaterra anotándote dos goles
      Soy lo que sostiene mi bandera
      La espina dorsal del planeta es mi cordillera
      Soy lo que me enseñó mi padre
      El que no quiere a su patria no quiere a su madre
      Soy América Latina
      Un pueblo sin piernas, pero que camina
      Tú no puedes comprar al viento

      Tú no puedes comprar al sol
      Tú no puedes comprar la lluvia
      Tú no puedes comprar el calor
      Tú no puedes comprar las nubes
      Tú no puedes comprar los colores
      Tú no puedes comprar mi alegría
      Tú no puedes comprar mis dolores

      Tú no puedes comprar al viento

      Tú no puedes comprar al sol
      Tú no puedes comprar la lluvia
      Tú no puedes comprar el calor
      Tú no puedes comprar las nubes
      Tú no puedes comprar los colores
      Tú no puedes comprar mi alegría

      Tú no puedes comprar mis dolores
      Tengo los lagos, tengo los ríos

      Tengo mis dientes pa’ cuando me sonrío
      La nieve que maquilla mis montañas
      Tengo el sol que me seca y la lluvia que me baña
      Un desierto embriagado con peyote, un trago de pulque
      Para cantar con los coyotes, todo lo que necesito
      Tengo a mis pulmones respirando azul clarito
      La altura que sofoca
      Soy las muelas de mi boca mascando coca
      El otoño con sus hojas desmalladas
      Los versos escritos bajo la noche estrellada
      Una viña repleta de uvas
      Un cañaveral bajo el sol en Cuba
      Soy el mar Caribe que vigila las casitas
      Haciendo rituales de agua bendita
      El viento que peina mi cabello
      Soy todos los santos que cuelgan de mi cuello

      El jugo de mi lucha no es artificial
      Porque el abono de mi tierra es natural
      Tú no puedes comprar el viento

      Tú no puedes comprar el sol
      Tú no puedes comprar la lluvia
      Tú no puedes comprar el calor
      Tú no puedes comprar las nubes

      Tú no puedes comprar los colores
      Tú no puedes comprar mi alegría
      Tú no puedes comprar mis dolores
      Não se pode comprar o vento

      Não se pode comprar o sol
      Não se pode comprar a chuva
      Não se pode comprar o calor

      Não se pode comprar as nuvens
      Não se pode comprar as cores
      Não se pode comprar minha alegria
      Não se pode comprar minhas dores
      No puedes comprar el sol

      No puedes comprar la lluvia
      No puedes comprar mi vida

      Mi tierra no se vende
      Trabajo en bruto pero con orgullo
      Aquí se comparte, lo mío es tuyo
      Este pueblo no se ahoga con marullos
      Y si se derrumba yo lo reconstruyo
      Tampoco pestañeo cuando te miro
      Para que te acuerdes de mi apellido
      La operación cóndor invadiendo mi nido
      ¡Perdono pero nunca olvido!
      Aquí se respira lucha
      Yo canto porque se escucha
      Aquí estamos de pie
      ¡Que viva Latinoamérica!
      No puedes comprar mi vida

      #Musique #Musique_et_politique #Amérique_Latine

  • 116th Congress: #TweetYourThobe, Rashida Tlaib wears Palestinian thobe at swearing in - INSIDER
    https://www.thisisinsider.com/116th-congress-tweetyourthobe-rashida-tlaib-wears-palestinian-thobe-a

    Democratic members of the House of Representatives takes their oath on the opening day of the 116th Congress as the Democrats take the majority from the GOP, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019. On the top row are, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., left, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., middle row, Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., left, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and on the bottom row, Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., the first Native American woman elected to Congress. They are joined by children and family members, a tradition on the first day of the new session. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

    Women are tweeting images of their thobes — traditional Palestinian dresses adorned with elaborate embroidery — inspired by freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
    Rep. Tlaib, who was elected in November to represent the 13th District in Michigan, was sworn into the 116th Congress on Thursday.
    The congresswoman is one of the first two Muslim-American women elected to Congress, and during her swearing-in Rep. Tlaib wore a thobe.
    The #TweetYourThobe movement was started by Palestinian-American novelist Susan Muaddi Darraj, The New York Times reported, as a way to show support for Tlaib.

    #palestine

  • » Israeli Court Sentences Mother of A Palestinian, Killed By The Army, To Eleven Months, For “Incitement”
    IMEMC News - December 16, 2018 12:48 PM
    http://imemc.org/article/israeli-court-sentences-mother-of-a-palestinian-killed-by-the-army-to-eleven-

    An Israeli court sentenced, on Sunday morning, the mother of a Palestinian, who was killed by the army last year, to eleven months in prison for what the military prosecution described as “incitement on social media.”

    Attorney Mohammad Mahmoud of the Palestinian Detainees’ Committee, said the court sentenced Susan Abu Ghannam to eleven months in prison, for posting statements on Facebook, after the death of her son.

    The court deemed the posts as incitement, and passed its sentence on the woman, from at-Tur neighborhood, east of Jerusalem’s Old City.

    She was taken prisoner last August, after dozens of soldiers and officers invaded her home, and conducted violent searches, leading to damage. (...)

    https://seenthis.net/messages/616536

  • Et le « bloomer » libéra le corps des sportives - Libération
    https://www.liberation.fr/sports/2018/12/08/et-le-bloomer-libera-le-corps-des-sportives_1696434

    Au XIXe siècle, la militante féministe Amelia Bloomer affronte les moqueries lorsqu’elle encourage le port d’une tenue révolutionnaire : le « bloomer », une culotte bouffante qui deviendra un vêtement sportif accompagnant l’essor de la bicyclette.

    Chaque samedi avec RétroNews, le site de presse de la BNF, retour sur un épisode de l’histoire du sport tel que l’a raconté la presse française. Aujourd’hui, comment un vêtement a permis l’émancipation sportive des femmes.

    Au milieu du XIXe siècle, un nouveau vêtement féminin fait son apparition : le bloomer, un pantalon court surmonté d’une jupe, qui donnera les shorts-culottes aujourd’hui portés par diverses sportives, en athlétisme, au volley ou au tennis. Il tient son nom de la militante féministe Amelia Bloomer qui en fut la plus grande avocate, dès 1851. Mais faire accepter ce vêtement dans les sociétés corsetées du XIXe ne fut pas sans obstacles, comme le racontent les journaux de l’époque.

    Le Constitutionnel du 2 octobre 1851 fait ainsi état d’une soirée de présentation à Londres du « nouveau costume américain pour dames » plutôt mouvementée : « Jusqu’à l’arrivée des bloomers en costume, on ne saurait décrire le désordre ni rapporter le feu roulant des plaisanteries. » Organisée par une certaine Mme Dexter, la présentation de ces bloomers n’aura pas lieu face aux railleries du public pourtant venu en nombre.

    « Le tyran : c’est la mode »

    « Encore les bloomers ! », titre le Constitutionnel quelques jours plus tard. A l’occasion d’un nouveau défilé, « les dispositions avaient été prises pour que l’ordre ne fût point troublé », précise le journal. Une Américaine de 26 ans vient présenter ces tenues : « Huit dames accoutrées d’une manière assez bizarre entrent dans la salle. […] Il est impossible au public de garder plus longtemps son sérieux. » Une nouvelle fois, les bloomers ne sont pas pris au sérieux, alors que l’Américaine se lance dans une plaidoirie féministe pour ce nouveau vêtement : « Les dames américaines ont réfléchi qu’il y avait un autre esclavage à abolir, esclavage contre lequel la religion, la morale, la loi sont impuissantes. Vous avez déjà nommé le tyran : c’est la mode. […] La toilette actuelle des dames exerce sur elles une torture physique, spirituelle et morale. » Puis, l’oratrice fait applaudir Amelia Jenks Bloomer, « l’auteur de cette innovation ».

    A cette époque, l’idée du bloomer apparaît tellement saugrenue à certains qu’une pièce comique, les Blooméristes ou la Réforme des jupes*, est mise en scène au Théâtre du Vaudeville, comme le raconte le Siècle, le 2 février 1982. Pour le journaliste du Siècle, Amelia Bloomer est même une « excentrique insulaire qui a attaché son nom à l’idée la plus saugrenue qui ait pu poindre dans une cervelle humaine, celle de masculiniser les femmes par le costume d’abord, par les habitudes ensuite ». Dans les Blooméristes ou la Réforme des Jupes, l’héroïne, Mlle Césarine, « a été élevée à la façon bloomerienne ; elle fume comme un Turc, tire le pistolet comme Lepage, manie le fleuret comme le professeur italien Raimondi ».

    Répression du bloomer

    Finalement, c’est en Californie que le bloomer se démocratise d’abord, fin XIXe : dans le Petit Parisien du 24 janvier 1898, on raconte ainsi qu’il « s’est fondé à San Francisco un club de jeunes femmes et de jeunes filles qui ont décidé d’adopter d’une façon permanente le port de la culotte bouffante américaine ». Ces centaines de « miss appartenant aux meilleures familles » s’exercent par ailleurs « à tous les sports athlétiques généralement réservés au sexe fort. La course à pied, le canotage, le cricket, le football n’ont plus de secret pour elles. […] Ajouterons-nous que ces dames font beaucoup d’équitation et montent à cheval comme les hommes, – à califourchon… N’est-ce pas un peu cavalier tout de même ? »

    Le bloomer est adopté massivement par les femmes cyclistes. Le journal parisien Gil Blas relate un fait divers survenu à Washington et lié au port du bloomer, « objet de réprobation des puritains aux Etats-Unis ». « Une maîtresse correction infligée à deux dames de Washington par le mari de l’une d’elles, M. Redman » : aperçue à bicyclette vêtue d’un bloomer dans les rues de la capitale américaine, Mme Redman reçut des « coups de cravache » de son mari, tandis que son amie se voit administrer une paire de claques. L’auteur de ces violences fut exempté de l’amende de 50 francs qu’il encourait. Pire : « Il a été hautement félicité par le juge, comme ayant bien mérité de la société en s’élevant publiquement contre une coutume déplorable. Ce magistrat a même exprimé le regret de ne pouvoir appliquer l’amende à Mme Redman pour la corriger de la mauvaise habitude de s’habiller en homme. »

    A Chicago, la répression va loin également : le port du bloomer est interdit. La bicyclette est partout aux Etats-Unis, comme le relate la Petite Gironde du 16 juin 1895 : « Rien ne manque à la gloire de la bicyclette en Amérique, pas même la persécution ! […] Ce projet est ainsi rédigé : […] il sera illégal pour toute personne de sexe féminin […] de se promener ou d’essayer de se promener en bicycle ou de se montrer dans les rues, avenues ou voies publiques habillée ou déguisée en costume à jupe courte, vulgairement connu sous le nom de bloomers. » « Il est clair qu’interdire à une femme la culotte et le jupon court pour aller à bicyclette cela équivaut à lui interdire la bicyclette », conclut le journal : « On ne peut songer pédaler avec une robe à traîne. »

    « La femme nous a pris la culotte ! »

    Le débat sur les femmes cyclistes et leur accoutrement traversera l’Atlantique : en France, le docteur Léon Petit donne une conférence pour évoquer les bienfaits de la bicyclette pour les femmes. Elle est retranscrite dans la Presse du 19 janvier 1896 : « Mères, fillettes, grands-mères, enfants, petites bourgeoises, grandes dames, accourez au sport nouveau ! » Lui aussi voit dans le vêtement qui accompagne la pratique un mélange des genres, tout en s’en accommodant : « Le costume rationnel ? La culotte, emblème de l’égalité avec l’homme, la culotte ; symbole de la force et du pouvoir, la culotte depuis si longtemps désirée et enfin conquise ! Ah ! messieurs, c’est un coup terrible porté à notre prestige ! La femme nous a pris la culotte, et il faut bien reconnaître qu’elle la porte mieux que nous ! »

    Suite et fin de l’histoire. Un siècle et quelques plus tard, les débats sur le vêtement sportif féminin ne se sont pas arrêtés, bien au contraire. Pour preuve : la polémique, fin août, autour de la combinaison noire de Serena Williams lors du dernier Roland-Garros, jugée trop excentrique, et qui a entraîné la mise en place d’un « code vestimentaire », effectif à l’occasion des prochains Internationaux de France.

    https://www.liberation.fr/sports/2018/12/08/et-le-bloomer-libera-le-corps-des-sportives_1696434

    #femmes #sexisme #mode #culotte #misogynie #histoire

    * texte complet de la pièce : https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62636114.texteImage

    • Fiche Wikipédia sur Amélia Bloomer
      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bloomer

      Histoire du port du pantalon par les femmes
      https://lemundemfinue2013.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/le-port-du-pantalon

      C’est en Perse que l’on voit les premiers pantalons féminins. Jusqu’au XVIIIème siècle les femmes ont essayé de l’adopter mais sans succès. Souvent les gouvernements leur en ont interdit l’usage, surtout pour les femmes qui travaillent. Dans certaines entreprises, les employées en contact avec la clientèle n’ont pas le droit de porter le pantalon. Par exemple les hôtesses de l’air d’Air France devaient porter des jupes jusqu’en 2005, signe d’élégance.

      –-----
      Bloomers – A Fashion Revolution
      http://www.victoriana.com/bloomer-costume

      No description of 19th century women’s fashions would be complete without some mention of the notorious lady, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, who had the courage to attempt to introduce reform in the conventional dress for women. It is said that the first man who carried an umbrella was mobbed through the streets of London because of its oddity; therefore, it is not surprising that the first woman who took on “pantalettes” as part of her public dress became at once the object of vulgar curiosity and idle gossip.


      Hand-colored lithograph of the music cover for the “Bloomer Waltz, (costume for summer)” published in 1851 showing a woman in the notorious bloomer costume walking along a path in a wooded area.

      Amelia Bloomer was an American women’s rights advocate who proclaimed her strong views regarding reform in feminine attire in her publication The Lily. In 1849 she took up the idea, previously originated by Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller, of wearing a short skirt and loose trousers gathered round the ankles.


      A Currier & Ives rendition of the bloomer costume, c1851.

      Reportedly, Elizabeth Smith Miller began wearing the outfit of Turkish pantaloons and a knee length skirt after seeing this type of clothing on a trip to Europe. This design was an attempt to preserve a Victorian woman’s modesty while providing freedom of movement in household activities. The name of “bloomers” gradually became popularly attached to any divided skirt or knickerbocker dress for women because of Amelia Bloomer’s strong advocacy.

      Clipping of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) wearing the controversial bloomer costume in 1851. Stanton’s cousin Elizabeth Smith Miller introduced the outfit and editor Amelia Bloomer publicized its healthful and liberating benefits in her newspaper The Lily.

      The costume that Bloomer advocated was sometimes referred to as the Camilla, consisting of short skirts reaching just below the knees, and long pantalettes. The bloomer costume was popular for some time by most of the leaders in the women’s rights movement.


      Glass negative portrait photograph circa 1855-1865.


      bloomer costume

      The bloomer outfit was changed numerous times but eventually discarded because of the amount of attention given to its criticism in the press. Nevertheless, the name “bloomers” survived in women’s fashion as a generic term for Turkish-style pantaloons, divided skirts, and for the knickerbockers worn by women when riding bicycles in the 1890s.

      #pantalon #bloomer #femmes #mode #histoire #historicisation

      Amelia Bloomer
      https://lacasavictoriana.com/2010/08/12/amelia-bloomer

      Aunque hoy en día muchos sólo recuerdan a Amelia Bloomer como la creadora de una moda revolucionaria en su época, los bloomers – conocidos en español como pantalones bombachos -, Bloomer fue también una incansable defensora de los derechos de la mujer en una sociedad para la que una mujer era sólo el pilar de la familia, y trataba de dejar en un segundo plano sus facetas culturales, creativas, políticas o trabajadoras.

      Merece la pena conocer un poco más sobre esta sobresaliente mujer, que no sólo luchó por las mujeres desde un punto de vista social, sino que incluso intentó cambiar la rígida moda victoriana por prendas más cómodas y apropiadas para las diferentes actividades a las que la mujer se estaba incorporando.


      La activista por los derechos de las mujeres, Amelia Jenks Bloomer nació en Homer, New York en 1818. Cuando tenía 22 años se casó con el abogado norteamericano Dexter Bloomer, quien la animó a defender sus ideas a través de su periódico The Seneca Falls Courier y a colaborar activamente en la defensa del sufragio femenino y los derechos de las mujeres a través de oranizaciones femeninas del área de Seneca Falls, llegando a participar en la famosa Seneca Falls Convention en 1848 (esta convención paso a la posteridad por ser la primera en la que se defendieron los derechos de la mujer en todos los ámbitos sociales y de la que salió el documento Declaration of Sentiments, donde se recogían los puntos fundamentales acordados en esa reunión)

      En Enero de 1849, animada por Elizabeth Cady Stanton y Susan B. Anthony – otras defensores de los derechos de la mujer, comenzó a publicar su propio periódico The Lily, una publicación completamente dedicada a la mujer y a sus intereses y desde donde intentaba enfocar los temas femeninos – educación, disciplina, moda y sufragio – desde un punto de vista reformista, reclamando un papel más destacable e igualitario de la mujer en la sociedad.

      En 1850. a través de su periódico, presentó un nuevo estilo de vestuario para las mujeres “activas” inspirado en los trajes tradicionales turcos. La presentación de sus pantalones para mujeres provocaron una oleada de indignación entre la sociedad e insultos de la prensa – de hecho existe la expresión “making a bloomer “ que podría traducirse como meter la pata, cuyo origen fue la presentación de los citados pantalones y que toma el apellido de Amelia como parte de la expresión.

      Estos pantalones eran como unas enaguas largas, flojas y ligeramente hinchadas que se estrechaban en el tobillo; sobre ellas iba una falda más corta que las habituales faldas victorianas. Aunque el diseño desde el punto de vista estético puede resultar discutible, lo cierto es que resultaban cómodos y fueron la antesala de los pantalones para uso femenino.

      Fueron muchas las mujeres que se atrevieron a usarlos, a pesar de ser ridiculizadas y de las burlas que tuvieron que soportar; algunas los usaban por el convencimiento de que representaban un avance para la comodidad de las mujeres lejos del encorsetamiento que imponía la moda victoriana; otras lo hicieron por reivindicación, usando los “bloomers” como un símbolo de la igualdad de derechos de la mujer.

      Pero fueron las feministas las primeras en dejar de usarlos, ya que pensaron que los bloomers estaban desviando la atención de sus reivindicaciones y tenían miedo no ser tomadas en serio por sus ideas.


      Así, el bloomerismo – termino acuñado en la época para denominar esta moda – fue perdiendo adeptos, pero sorprendentemente volvió para convertirse en todo un fenómeno representante de lo moderno, en 1890, con la llegada de la “fiebre de la bicicleta”, ya que era mucho más cómodo montar en bici con bloomers y no con faldas. Eso sí, su renacer trajo consigo alguna variación estética, como un tejido más adecuado, como el tweed, y la supresión de la falda superpuesta.

      Después del revuelo causado por los revolucionarios pantalones, Amelia y su marido se mudaron a Ohio, donde él publicó Western Home Visitor y ella vendió su The Lily. Un par de años después se mudaron a Iowa; pero en ambos lugares y a pesar de no tener ya su propia publicación Amelia Bloomer siguió participando activamente a favor de los derechos de la mujer y colaborando con grupos y asociaciones sufragistas. Murió el 31 de Diciembre de 1894 en Council Bluffs, Iowa.

    • J’avais pas joint l’image d’illustration que fournis libé et qui contiens une autre manifestation de la continuité de la misogynie


      Sur la droite de l’image
      « Le trottin de modiste ne pourra plus se troussé hélas ! »
      qui rappel le « troussage de domestique » et « droit d’importuné » dans lequel nous croupissons toujours.
      #culture_du_viol #humour

      Ca rappel l’importance du pantalon pour les femmes, c’est pour elle une protection contre le viol et les agressions sexuelles et ceci interdit par les hommes et les femmes de droite.

    • Je note ce paragraphe sur le #vélo et l’entrave faite aux #femmes de pratiquer la #bicyclette.

      A Chicago, la répression va loin également : le port du bloomer est interdit. La bicyclette est partout aux Etats-Unis, comme le relate la Petite Gironde du 16 juin 1895 : « Rien ne manque à la gloire de la bicyclette en Amérique, pas même la persécution ! […] Ce projet est ainsi rédigé : […] il sera illégal pour toute personne de sexe féminin […] de se promener ou d’essayer de se promener en bicycle ou de se montrer dans les rues, avenues ou voies publiques habillée ou déguisée en costume à jupe courte, vulgairement connu sous le nom de bloomers. » « Il est clair qu’interdire à une femme la culotte et le jupon court pour aller à bicyclette cela équivaut à lui interdire la bicyclette », conclut le journal : « On ne peut songer pédaler avec une robe à traîne. »

  • Gender, Race and Power – AI Now Institute
    https://medium.com/@AINowInstitute/gender-race-and-power-5da81dc14b1b

    Over the past year, the AI Now Institute has been examining many of these political and historical intersections through our multi-year research program focused on gender, race, and power in AI. We will shortly publish a report and an academic paper with the first phase of research findings. In light of recent events, we wanted to provide a preview of some of our work as a contribution to the emerging movement and the discussion around it.

    (...)

    some of the things we’ve been reading of late:

    – Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.
    – Barriers to Equality in Academia: Women in Computer Science at MIT.
    – Joy Buolamwini, Amazon’s Symptoms of FML — Failed Machine Learning — Echo the Gender Pay Gap and Policing Concerns.
    – Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism.
    – Mar Hicks, How to Kill Your Tech Industry.
    – Os Keyes, The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition.
    – Susan Leavy, Gender Bias in Artificial Intelligence: The Need for Diversity and Gender Theory in Machine Learning.
    – Shaka McGlotten, Black Data, in No Tea No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.
    – Vidisha Mishra and Madhulika Srikumar, Predatory Data: Gender Bias in Artificial Intelligence, in Digital Debates — CyFy Journal 2017.
    – Joy Rankin, Tech-Bro Culture Was Written in the Code.
    – The Invisible Worker #1: The Platform Worker.

    (cf. l’article pour les liens)

    #data_feminism #AI #discrimination #sexisme #racism

    • Une amie me répond :

      Même si j’ai du mal à me sentir mal pour des cadres surpayés de chez Google, c’est vrai que les discriminations qu’il.elle.s subissent sont le reflet de celle dénoncées par #metoo, #BlackLivesMatter ... Je trouve juste dommage qu’il ne propose pas vraiment de solution et/ou de « way forward ».

      Parce que oui bien sur, qui est dans la pièce quand on design l’IA est important mais il a été prouvé de multiple fois que c’est loin d’être suffisant. Comme souvent, on dit qu’il y a un problème d’éthique et qu’il faut se poser les bonnes questions pour y répondre et on s’arrête là comme si ça suffisait. Comme si on avait le temps d’y réfléchir et que le problème ne se poserait que dans le futur alors qu’en fait ça fait déjà plusieurs années que des gens travaillent sans se poser les questions en se disant quelqu’un finira par y répondre.

  • Déclaration de Susan Abulhawa à l’intention du festival de littérature palestinienne Kalimat
    5 novembre | Susan Abulhawa |Traduction SF pour l’AURDIP
    https://www.aurdip.org/declaration-de-susan-abulhawa-a-l.html

    Déclaration au festival de littérature palestinienne Kalimat :

    Je voudrais exprimer ma profonde gratitude au Festival de littérature palestinienne Kalimat, à Mahmoud Muna en particulier, et à l’Institut Kenyon du British Council, pour m’avoir invitée et avoir assumé les frais de ma participation au festival de littérature de cette année en Palestine.

    Comme vous le savez tous maintenant, les autorités israéliennes m’ont refusé l’entrée dans mon pays et je ne suis pas, de ce fait, en mesure de participer au festival. Je suis très peinée de ne pas être avec mes amis et collègues écrivains pour me pencher sur et célébrer nos traditions littéraires avec des lecteurs et avec chacun de nous dans notre pays. Je suis très peinée que nous puissions nous rencontrer partout dans le monde sauf en Palestine, le lieu auquel nous appartenons, d’où nos histoires émergent et où tous nos parcours finissent par aboutir. Nous ne pouvons pas nous réunir sur le sol qui a été fertilisé par les corps de nos ancêtres et arrosé par les larmes et le sang des fils et filles de Palestine qui combattent chaque jour pour elle.

    Depuis mon expulsion, je lis que les autorités israéliennes ont indiqué que j’étais requise de « coordonner » mon voyage avec elles par avance. C’est un mensonge. En fait, à mon arrivée à l’aéroport on m’a dit que j’aurais dû demander un visa avec mon passeport américain et que cette demande ne serait pas satisfaite avant 2020, soit au moins cinq ans après la première fois qu’ils m’ont refusé l’entrée. Ils ont dit qu’il était de ma responsabilité de le savoir alors même que je n’ai jamais été informée que j’étais interdite d’entrée. Puis ils ont dit que ma première expulsion en 2015 était due à mon refus de leur donner les raisons de ma visite. Cela aussi est un mensonge. Voici les faits :(...)

    #frontières #expulsion #Susan_Abulhawa
    https://seenthis.net/messages/733214

  • Israël cherche à expulser l’auteure Susan Abulhawa
    Nicolas Gary - 02.11.2018
    https://www.actualitte.com/article/monde-edition/israel-cherche-a-expulser-l-auteure-susan-abulhawa/91690

    Susan Abulhawa a 48 ans : elle devrait intervenir au festival de littérature palestinienne qui se tient du 3 au 7 novembre, invitée par le British Council, sponsor de la manifestation. Mais outre son activité d’auteure, elle est également partisane de la campagne BDS, Boycott, Désinvestissement et Sanctions.
    (...)

    Les autorités israéliennes avaient surtout en mémoire qu’elle avait été expulsée d’Israël et qu’elle aurait, pour y revenir, dû demander l’octroi d’un visa. Un point légal que l’écrivaine ignorait totalement, assure son amie. C’est pourtant en mars 2017 que le Parlement a adopté une législation très controversée interdisant littéralement aux membres de BDS de séjourner sur le sol israélien.
    Elle devait comparaître devant le juge ce 2 novembre – avec une certaine clémence, toutefois, ayant appris que le festival dépendait en grande partie de sa présence.

    Expulsion actée, en attente de l’appel

    Pour autant, le juge a décidé de son expulsion, sans autre forme de procès. Susans Abulhawa a fait appel de la décision, mais personne ne sait quand ce dernier sera entendu. Un avocat du British Council ainsi que l’ambassade des États-Unis se sont rapprochés des organisateurs de la manifestation, mais n’ont pas pu prendre attache avec elle.

    Le problème vient également de ce que l’auteure est un best-seller parmi les plus importantes chez les écrivains arabes. Son livre Mornings in Jenin est devenu un succès mondial, traduit en 28 langues.

    #frontières #expulsion #Susan_Abulhawa

    • Susan Abulhawa’s statement to Kalimat Palestinian Literature Festival after the Israeli authorities have denied her entry into her country and she was therefore unable to attend the festival.
      https://www.facebook.com/susan.abulhawa/posts/10156481100262254

      I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Kalimat Palestinian Literature Festival, Mahmoud Muna in particular, and to the Kenyon Institute of the British Council for inviting me and undertaking the expense for me to participate in this year’s literature festival in Palestine.

      As you all know by now, Israeli authorities have denied me entry into my country and I am therefore unable to attend the festival. It pains me greatly not to be with my friends and fellow writers to explore and celebrate our literary traditions with readers and with each other in our homeland. It pains me that we can meet anywhere in the world except in Palestine, the place to which we belong, from whence our stories emerge and where all our turns eventually lead. We cannot meet on soil that has been fertilized for millennia by the bodies of our ancestors and watered by the tears and blood of Palestine’s sons and daughters who daily fight for her.

      Since my deportation, I read that Israeli authorities indicated that I was required to “coordinate” my travel with them in advance. This is a lie. In fact, I was told upon arrival at the airport that I had been required to apply for a visa to my US passport, and that this application would not be accepted until 2020, at least five years after the first time they denied me entry. They said it was my responsibility to know this even though I was never given any indication of being banned. Then they said my first deportation in 2015 was because I refused to give them the reason for my visit. This, too, is a lie. Here are the facts:

      In 2015, I traveled to Palestine to build playgrounds in several villages and to hold opening ceremonies at playgrounds we had already built in the months previous. Another member of our organization was traveling with me. She happened to be Jewish and they allowed her in. Several Israeli interrogators asked me the same questions in different ways over the course of approximately 7.5 hours. I answered them all, as Palestinians must if we are to stand a chance of going home, even as visitors. But I was not sufficiently deferential, nor was I capable of that in the moment. But I was certainly composed and – the requirement for all violated people – “civil.” Finally, I was accused of not cooperating because I did not know how many cousins I have and what are all their names and the names of their spouses. It was only after being told that I was denied entry that I raised my voice and refused to leave quietly. I did yell, and I stand by everything I yelled. According to Haaretz, Israel said I “behaved angrily, crudely and vulgarly” in 2015 at the Allenby Bridge.

      What I said in 2015 to my interrogators, and which was also reported in Haaretz at the time, is that they should be the ones to leave, not me; that I am a daughter of this land and nothing will change that; that my own direct history is steeped in the land and there’s no way they can extricate it; that as much as they invoke Zionist mythological fairy tales, they can never claim such personal familial lineage, much as they wish they could.

      I suppose that must sound vulgar to Zionist ears. To be confronted with authenticity of Palestinian indigeneity despite exile, and face their apocryphal, ever-shifting colonial narratives.

      My lack of deference in 2015 and choice not to quietly accept the arbitrary decision of an illegitimate gatekeeper to my country apparently got appended to my name and, upon my arrival this time on November 1st, signaled for my immediate deportation.

      The true vulgarity is that several million Europeans and other foreigners live in Palestine now while the indigenous population lives either in exile or under the cruel boots of Israeli occupation; the true vulgarity is in the rows of snipers surrounding Gaza, taking careful aim and shooting human beings with no real way to defend themselves, who dare to protest their collective imprisonment and imposed misery; the true vulgarity is in seeing our youth bleed on the ground, waste in Israeli jails, starve for an education, travel, learning, or some opportunity to fully be in the world; The true vulgarity is the way they have taken and continue to take everything from us, how they have carved out our hearts, stolen our everything, occupied our history, and tamp our voices and our art.

      In total, Israel detained me for approximately 36 hours. We were not allowed any electronics, pens or pencils in the jail cells, but I found a way to take both – because we Palestinians are resourceful, smart, and we find our way to freedom and dignity by any means we can. I have photos and video from inside that terrible detention center, which I took with a second phone hidden on my body, and I left for them a few messages on the walls by the dirty bed I had to lay on. I suppose they will find it vulgar to read: “Free Palestine,” “Israel is an Apartheid State,” or “susan abulhawa was here and smuggled this pencil into her prison cell”.

      But the most memorable part of this ordeal were the books. I had two books in my carry-on when I arrived at the jail and I was allowed to keep them. I alternated reading from each, sleeping, thinking.

      The first book was a highly researched text by historian Nur Masalha, “Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History.” I was scheduled to interview Nur on stage about his epic audit of Palestinian millennia-old history, told not from the politically motivated narratives, but from archeological and other forensic narratives. It is a people’s history, spanning the untidy and multilayered identities of Palestine’s indigenous populations from the Bronze Age until today. In an Israeli detention cell, with five other women – all of them Eastern European, and each of them in her own private pain, the chapters of Nur Masalha’s book took me through Palestine’s pluralistic, multicultural and multi-religious past, distorted and essentialized by modern inventions of an ancient past.

      The bitter irony of our condition was not lost on me. I, a daughter of the land, of a family rooted at least 900 years in the land, and who spent much of her childhood in Jerusalem, was being deported from her homeland by the sons and daughters of recent arrivals, who came to Palestine a mere decades ago with European-born ethos of racial Darwinism, invoking biblical fairy tales and divinely ordained entitlement..

      It occurred to me, too, that all Palestinians – regardless of our conditions, ideologies, or the places of our imprisonment or exile – are forever bound together in a common history that begins with us and travels to the ancient past to one place on earth, like the many leaves and branches of a tree that lead to one trunk. And we are also bound together by the collective pain of watching people from all over the world colonize not only the physical space of our existence, but the spiritual, familial, and cultural arenas of our existence. I think we also find power in this unending, unhealed wound. We write our stories from it. Sing our songs and dabke there, too. We make art from these aches. We pick up rifles and pens, cameras and paint brushes in this space, throw stones, fly kites and flash victory and power fists there.

      The other book I read was Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed, spellbinding novel, “The Underground Railroad.” It is the story of Cora, a girl born into slavery to Mabel, the first escaped slave from the Randal Plantation. In this fictional account, Cora escapes the plantation with her friend Ceasar their determined slave catcher, Ridgeway on their trail in the Underground Railroad – a real-life metaphor made into an actual railroad in the novel. The generational trauma of inconceivable bondage is all the more devastating in this novel because it is told matter-of-factly from the vantage of the enslaved. Another people’s collective unhealed wound laid bare, an excruciatingly powerful common past, a place of their power too, a source of their stories and their songs.

      I am back in my house now, with my daughter and our beloved dogs and cats, but my heart doesn’t ever leave Palestine. So, I am there, and we will continue to meet each other in the landscapes of our literature, art, cuisine and all the riches of our shared culture.

      After writing this statement, I learned that the press conference is being held at Dar el Tifl. I lived the best years of my childhood there, despite my separation from family and the sometimes difficult conditions we faced living under Israeli occupation. Dar el Tifl is the legacy of one of the most admirable women I have ever known – Sitt Hind el Husseini. She saved me in more ways than I suppose she knew, or that I understood at the time. She saved a lot of us girls. She gave gathered us from all the broken bits of Palestine. She gave us food and shelter, educated and believed in us, and in turn made us believe we were worthy. There is no more appropriate place than Dar el Tift to read this statement.

      I want to leave you with one more thought I had in that jail cell, and it is this: Israel is spiritually, emotionally, and culturally small despite the large guns they point at us – or perhaps precisely because of them. It is to their own detriment that they cannot accept our presence in our homeland, because our humanity remains intact and our art is beautiful and life-affirming, and we aren’t going anywhere but home.