Yvonne Aburrow's Blog, page 69

Statement on racism and bigotry

Dowsing for Divinity completely rejects racism, fascism, Nazism, white supremacism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, ageism, ableism, body-shaming, and all forms of bigotry.

Inclusive Pagans celebrate life and love in all its beauty and diversity, and seek to protect and preserve the Earth and Nature, and to cultivate virtues of compassion and respect for all life.

For this reason, following the recent events in Charlottesville, USA, we utterly condemn the ideol...

Folk heroes of the resistance

What do Anansi, Raven, Coyote, Pérák, Aradia, the Golem of Prague, Robin Hood, Wild Edric, and Ned Ludd have in common? They are all folk heroes of resistance to tyranny, oppression, slavery, and fascism.

It’s Folklore Thursday today on Twitter, and the thoughts of several contributors have turned to folk heroes who resisted tyranny and fascism. It started with Christian Read’s tweet about Pérák, and continued with contributions from me, Sarah Rance-Riley, Austin Hackney, Creative Histories,...

On being an “ally”

The concept of being an ally has become increasingly contested as everyone who is white, straight, and cisgender wants to opt out of the responsibility of complicity with oppression.

So here are a few rules for when you want to talk about working to end oppression.

Rule 1. Don’t wave your “ally” card as if it entitled you to something.
By all means deconstruct the concept of being an ally, and critique those who use it as some sort of entitlement card – but don’t claim to be an ally.

Rule 2....

The shifting nature of queer culture

So there’s yet another Generation X person holding forth about the “fragility” of millennials, specifically LGBTQIA millennials.

Argh. I wish my generation (and the Boomers) would stop with constructing millennials as fragile and having a victim mentality.

Yes, sure, college-age kids see everything as black and white. So did we when we were that age. They will grow up and learn some nuance. And as a university professor it’s her job to din some nuance into them, and an understanding of queer...

Cultural Appropriation and Intellectual Property

This excellent perspective on cultural appropriation was offered by David Policar in a public post on Facebook. I thought it was worth sharing.

I continue to be amazed that people who understand perfectly well the difference between voluntary exchanges of information between peers, on the one hand, and involuntary information transfers across power imbalances, on the other, when it comes to information produced by individuals (e.g., the difference between my quoting something you’ve published...

Of Wonder Woman, Goddesses, and humans

I went to see Wonder Woman at the weekend. I had been warned that there were issues around diversity and representation, but not enough to necessitate a boycott. (I did boycott Suffragette for airbrushing out Sophia Duleep Singh and other Black, Asian, and minority ethnic suffragettes.) However, Wonder Woman is fictional, so perhaps less problematic than attempts to airbrush PoC out of actual history. I generally prefer Marvel superhero films to DC ones, but I had been told that Wonder Woman...

Identity and politics

There has been a lot of talk recently about “identity politics”. This seems to be the new phrase with which to beat lefties over the head, now that “it’s political correctness gone mad” has been so thoroughly discredited, and “snowflake” seems to have waned in popularity.

I have even seen people saying that the Left is disintegrating because of identity politics. I beg to to differ. I would suggest that the Left has been floundering about looking for a sense of purpose and an economic model...

The Brussels sprouts controversy

Few people realise the intense, convoluted and internecine controversies that rage in the world of vegetable folklorists. These dour scholars generally gather in the darker corners of academe, preferring potting sheds and greenhouses to the more usual bars and senior common rooms frequented by their colleagues. They putter about in the basements of libraries where more mainstream scholars fear to tread, seeking out old manuscripts and botanical treatises. Some of them roam the highways and by...

Religious symbols in the workplace

Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association has written a helpful analysis of the latest European Court of Justice ruling on religious symbols in the workplace. It looks to me as though the new ruling does muddy the waters though.

A corrective for the ‘headscarf ban’ hysteria yesterday: https://t.co/gW6JRp1n6M @guardian @BBCNews

— Andrew Copson (@andrewcopson) March 15, 2017

In my opinion, it should only be possible for employers to ban the wearing of clothing or jewellery that is like...

British Suite, or Brexit Blues

There’s an account on Twitter called “British Suite” – no idea if it is pro-Brexit or anti-Brexit, as it seems to just retweet stuff, but the name “British Suite” sounds like an Elgar elegy mourning for the loss of decency and humanity in these islands.

An elegy for the NHS, the Welfare State, council houses, jobs, trade unions, solidarity, craft guilds, community, the eight-hour day, pensions, rights at work, sick pay, disability pay – all about to vanish before your eyes in Broken Brexit B...