isolation, communities, and international womens day

1.  i am really excited about the fact that folks are interested in this lil blog dream.  i had kinda thought that no one be interested.  and people would be annoyed that i asked them in the first place.  and i put it out there because i had this dream and then another one and another one and it became obvious that the universe was not going  to let me get a good night sleep until i did.

2. i am hoping to have it up and basically running for international women’s day: march 8th.  but i may not reach that deadline.  there is alot going on in my world right now and i dont want to half-ass any of the projects i am working on.  including the whole being a mother-thing that i do.

3.  this morning i woke up with mary j blige’s version of ‘im going down’ running through my head…

a lil sisterist revelation

when i started reading midwife: sage femme, hebamme, comadrona, partera blog i thought she was of color.  thinking probably latina.  and then hours of reading later…6 or 7 pages into the blog, i found out that she was white.  i had to read the sentence 4 or 5 times to be sure…i am still in half-denial, like i really want to claim her as a radical woc.  but then i thought, no, it is awesome that she is white…frankly there arent that many white chicks that ‘get it’.  and when i meet (or read) one who does it gives me hope for sisterhood.  it reifies that ‘whiteness’ is not an adequate excuse to not struggle to be conscious in this world.  or for white folks to throw up their hands like: oh, there is no point in trying…

you know, sometimes life has a way of handing me some beauty.

and now…some articles/blog posts i am digging about birth.

after the birth what a family needs: this is for a friend who is looking at becoming a post-partum doula.  i think that she would be wonderful at it.

word magic: i have questions of anti-circumcision as a movement.  questions about respect for cultures and religions.  but i love this bit in this post:

She was shunned for many years for daring to speak up for the unassisted birth pioneers.  She loved being a midwife but didn’t do it with any compromise of her values.  She was fond of the idea that midwives should attend only one birth per month…She often said that “Every mother is a midwife” and then proceeded to further alienate herself from most other midwives by asking the rhetorical question “Why would I pay someone to be paranoid for me?”…Every profession needs someone to shoot straight from the hip and bring the profession back to a state of humility.

currently diggin

blogs and websites i am currently diggin.  check them out.

quirky black girls: i am one of the contributers for this blog.  and i am proud of it.  it is part of the quirky black girl movement taking over the internet.

birthing project usa: the underground railroad for new life: a friend just hipped me to this organization/movement and i am amazed that i had never heard of it before.  its been around since 1988 and is focused on improving birth outcomes in african american communities by pairing an expecting mother with a sister who is the mother’s friend and advocate until at least the child’s one year birthday.  they also have a parallel program for expecting fathers.  incredible.

muslimnista: blogging on islamic feminism.  superb analysis.  if for a second you think that being muslim and being feminist cannot occur in the same body, on the same blog, think again.  what i love about this blog, honestly, is that it reminds me of the muslim women i have hung out with around the world.

radical doula: radical doula just sent me some real love in terms of a recent post of hers and i have got to send it back.  frankly, when i began this blog a year and a half ago she was the only other doula blogging about issues like race, sexuality, class, etc. and especially about reproductive justice.  the ways that the pro-life movements rhetoric disempowers women who choose to give birth as well as those who dont.  super-inspiring.

black girl get free: iresha also blogs for quirky black girls and i love her writing.  in her latest post she says:

Not only should Black Women be enlighten, but in order for the survival of their existence, they must embrace all things that the dominant culture sees as inferior and reject societies imposed racial and gender formation of them. The Blackness of Black Women’s beauty, and the culture that is seen as deviant by others, can also be seen as resistance from Black Women….Black is always seem as something “bad”, BUT White is not complex enough to use for Black Women, because Black Women’s beings are too complicated. Darkness is where things cannot be seen and creation has been bought forth. Also, bringing forth a creation is not an independent action but one that is created communally, by Black Women coming together. Its always good to create new things and embrace what our ancestors have left for us to discover their creations. So whomever said that darkness is dull and murky must have never seen the light that Blackness creates.

plus she is also from the va (what! what!) so represent.

mamita mala: mamita is real.  a real poet.  which you know the moment you read her work.  and a real person who blogs about her life as if she has no other choice but to be concrete, passionate, detailed, and self-aware.

revolutionary motherhood: i wrote for this blog as well.  (i did not list every blog i write for…so there…) and i love the women who post here.  the work is diverse, surprising, mama supportive, self-contradictory and authentic.

kameelah writes: she is a photographer.  she loves lists.  she is a public school teacher.  and a hijabi.

so as i was finishing up this post, i realized, hey, there are four sites that are authored by black women, two by latinas, one that is racially diverse, and two that focus on muslim women (which is not a race or ethnicity but is treated as both in the states), and thought…you know what this is what new media is about.

revolutionary motherhood–the blog

so we have begun a new phase in the revolutionary motherhood project…

revolutionary motherhood–the blog!

check us out.  bookmark us.  keep coming back.  tell your friends…

looking at the intersections of motherhood and reproductive justice, nationalism, race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, socio-economic class,  health care, ability and other structures of violence and communities of resistance…