Collie's Bestiary

I love being able to stack up automatic posts ahead of time! :) Had a really fun time at the "Boogie on the Bayou" festival in Campbell: got a beautiful new Venetian-style mask (that's it to the immediate left); got to listen to some Cajun music; and got to eat crawfish etoufee, alligator kebab, and [...]

I have written previously (though not well) on Australian ecofeminist activist and intellectual Val Plumwood's 1994 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. She offers a theorizing historical examination on the subject of ecofeminism which exemplifies a startlingly brilliant feminist logic. Her brilliantly lucid critique of Western ethics is a consistently theorized and tightly-written examination of [...]

In 1993 a book emerges which provocatively probes ecofeminism's epistemology during its analysis of the historical roots of the oppressive conflation of women with nature. The collection of essays titled Ecofeminism, by Maria Mies & Vandana Shiva, is a biting critique of the colonization of nature, women, and the Third World by the white male [...]

In a brilliantly re-creative intellectual thread, in 1993 feminist lesbian poet Judy Grahn re-members and reclaims the sacrality of women and menstruation in her Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. She notes with startling clarity that, "All origin stories are true" (7), as she offers us a radical new origin myth for [...]

And now for something completely different… ! As you may not know, I am not much into housekeeping of any sort. Years ago, when I was a child, I always more enjoyed working with the animals and cleaning the barn, rather than cleaning house. Give me a muck-bucket, a pitchfork, and a tractor in the [...]

The first movements into spiritually inspired re-embodiment which I discovered came (unsurprisingly) from men, and originated outside the United States. Morihei Ueshiba, the now-deceased creator of aikido, envisioned his martial art through the process of several spiritual awakenings: as a spirit of loving protection which is to protect and cultivate all beings in nature. Ueshiba [...]

SQUEEEEEEE! Got good news on my Ecofeminism Comprehensive Exam results — woohooo! ;) This is such a relief, too. I know everyone tells me it's silly to worry, but nevertheless after turning in such a huge project there's always that little niggling doubt, that voice in the back of my head: did I use personal [...]

I have found the perfect infographic to express my feelings on research! :)

Yay! I've finished the ecofeminism comprehensives essay — it's coming in at 53 pages with cover page and bibliography included. Since the essay's parameters were 30 to 50 pages exclusive of the cover page and biblio, all is good. Hallelujah! Now all I have to do is the tidying stuff, which is easy: make sure [...]

This last Saturday my housemates & I celebrated a friend's birthday by attending the San Jose Dinner Detective at the Hilton — a personal first! :) To be honest, I was less than impressed with both the extra, unmentioned costs on the tickets, and the lack of phone call-back before the event. However, the event [...]