I was supposed to blog yesterday for International Women’s Day, but I didn't get a chance to. I didn't want the moment to pass me by, though, so here you go! =)

Every year on March 8, various organizations, governments, and people around the world plan events, campaigns, days of action, and so forth to celebrate the advancement of women and to plan for the future. The United Nations chooses a theme each year, and this year’s theme was “Equal rights, equal opportunities: Progress for all.”

When I heard this year’s theme, I thought it was an interesting one. For those who don’t know, this year marks the 15th Anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing. This conference set up goals for countries around the world to improve women’s rights and this year various organizations have put out reports and documents tracking how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go. I’m pretty sure the U.N. had this somewhere in their minds when they came up with this year’s theme.

But we can also look at this theme in a different way. Rather than simply looking at it as a reflection on politics, we can make it personal: as a commitment to the future not only for the world but for ourselves. Last week, I attended Women Hold the Solutions, an event hosted by Global Fund for Women (I'm working on my post for this, so you'll read more about it later). One of the panelists spoke about how difficult it is to raise children to be equal. Because parents themselves are products of societies where not everything is equal, they pass those ideas on to their children without realizing it. Around the world, mothers might find themselves demanding more from their daughters in terms of housework and chores, or urging their sons to take on more wives. Similarly, most of us do the same thing when we’re around our friends and families. We don’t expect or demand equality in all areas, so progress will always be that much slower.

I plan on taking some more time this Women’s History Month to think about how we can advance equality on all fronts. Just because International Women’s Day is over doesn’t mean we can’t keep it in mind for longer.

Because of my schedule and the utter lack of time I have to do anything nowadays, I haven't been able to keep up with the news all that much. Unless it's a big story, chances are I'll miss it. This whole Governor Paterson scandal and not running for election thing... yeah, that's been huge. No matter how much I try to avoid it, there it is.

For those who don't pay attention to NY politics, I'll sum it up: Governor Paterson replaced Spitzer after the prostitution scandal. He's made news for being open about his extramarital affairs, not having Obama's support in his desire to run for office, insisting he'll run anyway, having a key aide accused of domestic violence, allegedly paying off the accuser, allegedly getting tickets to Yankees games, and announcing he won't run.

Now, I'm not here to defend any of Paterson's actions. If he did try to pay off a victim of domestic violence just to be able to run for governor, there really is no getting back to good from that. But I'm really annoyed (read: grossed out, disgusted) by how I've seen some of the media handle this. This morning, for example, Good Day New York was outside of his home all morning long, waiting for him to leave so they could bombard him with questions. Um, what?! Some people might want him to resign, but at the moment, he's still the governor!

It's bad enough when the media does this to celebrities, but it's a whole other level when you're harassing the people who are supposed to be making critical decisions about our government! Part of this whole saga is the fact that major budget issues need to be resolved and everyone's all "should he resign before then, after, or at all?" I'm no genius, but it seems to me that if he has to deal with people staking out his home 24/7 just to harass him, his attention isn't going to be focused on making those decisions. It seems to me that if you're going to debate and discuss this thing to death, you should at least give him the space and freedom to do his job while he's still there.

I don't know though, maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm too focused on the actual shit that needs to get done. Like the fact that the MTA budget cuts include taking away the free MetroCard program for students, so many students will be forced to go to their zone schools. Like the fact that school budgets are constantly strained and those zone schools can't advance because they have no resources.

Yeah, maybe that's just me. How silly of me to be concerned with these things instead of waiting around for the governor to leave his home.

In the spirit of Gloria Anzaldúa, Finding Gloria: Nos/otras is an independent zine featuring the words and art of various contributors. Anzaldúa was a writer, poet, and artist whose work focused mostly on her identities as a woman, Chicana, lesbian, feminist, etc. The title of the zine comes from Anzaldúa’s work, some of the contributors work directly in projects honoring her, and many of the pieces cite Anzaldúa or use her style of writing.

As Noemi “hermana, resist” Martinez explains in the very first page, this is a zine for those trying to create a space for themselves – a space that might be affected by the dominant culture, but that tries to break free from that dominant culture as much as possible. The basis of this is the term “Nos/otras” created by Anzaldúa herself: “nos” is the Spanish subject for “we” and “otras” is the Spanish word for “other.” Anzaldúa combined them to show that it’s impossible to view ourselves as separate from the other, or the other as separate from ourselves.

With these concepts in mind, the work included in this zine takes on a fresh perspective. The very first image you see (which happens to be one of my favorites in the zine) is the work of Celeste de Luna and it is that of two women standing on opposite sides of a river. The women appear to be similar in age and each is a mother with children who are also close in age, yet their differences shine through in their appearance, particularly their clothing, and in the way they carry themselves. They have things in common, yet they remain divided.

As a big fan of Anzaldúa’s work, it meant a lot to me to see her legacy live on in the works of these other women. The contributors are obviously inspired by her and continue to build on her work with their own poems, collages, drawings, etc.

It has been a few years since I got my hands on a homemade zine, and I think this style lends itself well to the content within those pages. Sometimes the page numbers or other text were cut off, some of the images were hard to make out because of the resolution of the print, and so forth, but I think the energy and emotion is still captured.

It occurs to me that I haven't told y'all about Thursday LOST Roundtable at Feministe! I should be ashamed of myself!

Well, the concept is fairly simple: each week Cara and I take turns moderating a roundtable discussion about the latest episode of LOST with other Feministe fans. Here are the links to our discussions for LA X, What Kate Does, and last night's episode The Substitute.

Here's something that might be of interest to some of you: Kathleen Hanna was on GRITtv recently. I didn't know her growing up (which I'm sure is the case for many Latinas growing up in Queens, regardless of how feminist-y you are), but her name has certainly become at the very least recognizable to me in recent years as part of the riot grrrl movement and Bikini Kill and all that. I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed watching this despite not knowing much about her, so I figured I'd pass it along.