abortion

Even though we're three feature films away from the conclusion of the Twilight film series (Eclipse premiers at the end of this month), there's already talk of what the adaptation of Breaking Dawn, the final book in the series that is being broken into two movies, is going to include...or more specifically leave out, namely Bella's bone-breaking, blood-soaked, and almost-lethal delivery of her vampire baby.

A bill has been passed by the Utah House and Senate that will criminalize pregnant women who engage in 'reckless' activity that causes a miscarriage or act to induce an abortion without a doctor's supervision.

"Rave On" is the Page Turner series that asks feminist writers, artists, musicians, activists, leaders, and scholars to talk about a book that completely rocked their world. Today we feature media activist and writer Anne Elizabeth Moore on the Dirty Plotte comic books by Julie Doucet.

I don’t spend a lot of time reading feminist theory, which speaks to an inherently limited audience. I study anti-oppression strategies in general, so most of what I’ve read that’s influenced my drive as a political person who identifies as female isn’t overtly feminist.

In fact, I find far more use in work that’s not usually discussed in a feminist context, like Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Or books that sort of rail against feminist projects or events and address its weak points, so I can sort out where those sit with me. Like Norma McCorvey’s I Am Roe.

But if I really think about something I read that made me gack with identification—that spoke to me in a pretty deep way about being a girl in the kind of world I was living in—it would have to be Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte comic books.

The following was apparently an ad that NBC refused to show during the Super Bowl. It is a commercial featuring an ultra sound of an unborn baby--which all wraps up into an image of Obama. The basic message being: if Obama's mother had aborted him because it was going to be "hard" to raise him, the U.S. never would have achieved the historic election of a black man."

Sweet.

It’s sad to remember how high my hopes were for CW’s 90210 last summer. I love Fox’s original series, Beverly Hills 90210 (though bad dialogue and one-dimensional characters make for a rocky relationship) and I love Rob Thomas (of Veronica Mars), who was supposed to be writing this thing and making it awesome. But he backed out at the last minute to work on stupid Cupid , leaving us with a badly acted, poorly lit, script-challenged mess.

I thought it’d at least be worthwhile to see Shannen Doherty reprise her role as Brenda Walsh, but not even one of my favorite characters ever could keep me watching for more than 3 episodes. I gave it another shot for the sake of research, and what I found out was…it’s still not good. But it had a good moment. You might even call it a feminist moment.