Margaret Thatcher

Happy Tuesday! Here's some feminist news to start off your day.

• After her death yesterday, Margaret Thatcher’s life as a pop culture inspiration and feminist have been widely discussed and debated. [Salon]

• In case you missed it, last Friday a federal judge overturned a law that required those under the age of 16 to have a prescription in order to purchase the emergency contraceptive pill. [Mother Jones, Ms. Magazine]

• Brad Paisley might be an accidental racist, or he at least sings a song about being one. [Jezebel]

• A bill in Kansas that defines life as the "moment of fertilization" passed in both the state House and Senate and has been sent to the Governor of Kansas to be signed into law. [Ms. Magazine]

• This article from The Feminist Wire re-examines the subject of black women’s hair. [The Feminist Wire]

• JCPenney CEO and gay advocate Ron Johnson was fired and is to be replaced by his predecessor. Johnson supported Ellen DeGeneres as the spokesperson for the company and used gay couples in advertisements. [Advocate]

• Michigan Governor Rick Snyder refused to get involved when a member of the state’s Republican National Committee made offensive comments about gay people on Facebook. Instead, he made vague statements condemning discrimination and bullying. [Think Progress]

• Although more women may be entering the construction workforce, construction sites tend to be unpleasant work environments for this new population of employees. [Womanisms]  

• Today is Equal Pay Day—the day four months into the year when women have finally earned as much as men did in 2012. [Pay-Equity.org]

As per usual, add whatever you're reading in the comments!

Good morning! There's no better way to start Monday than reading all the feminist news from the weekend.

• The Iron Lady has died! Margaret Thatcher remade Britain during her time as prime minister, championing an austerity budget, free market politics, and war. She's remembered as a tough leader, but one who oversaw an increase in poverty. [New York Times, Guardian] 

• The tricky politics of achieving freedom with nudity: Feminist Wire has an op-ed on "how Femen went wrong." [Feminist Wire]

• How should we deal with politicians who have done a 180 on sames-sex marriage? Forgive and move on? [The Atlantic] 

• What's it like to be gay at perhaps the country's most conservative college? [Autostraddle]

• Singer India.Arie was accused of lightening her skin for her new album—which she and others say is absurd. [Colorlines] 

• The new lesbian dad: Queer parents continue to reinvent what parenting means. [Advocate] 

• More commentary on the world of impractically dressed female superheros: "Fully dressed superheroines." [Badass Digest]  

• Two sisters from Oregon's Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla reservation are making a big splash in the women's NCAA Final Four. [New York Times] 

What did I miss? Add what you're reading to the comments. 

We often hear people refer to entertainment as threat-less, as in "It's just a movie," or "It's only a story." The bullets shot in blockbuster action movies are blanks, falls from buildings are all staged, and White House-destroying explosions are created only with pixels. Fantasy, not reality. On the other side of fictional narrative is its credibility—stories are supposed to "suspend disbelief" so that audiences can journey along with the tale presented. When it comes to portraying real people, many directors and writers will give interviews in which they insist the historical characters were researched down to the last eye blink and pinky movement. But for a writer, director, and actor to carve out the personality in question, they make a series of choices: which scenes in this person's life to present? Which known statements to recreate? Which relationships to highlight and which to leave absent from the screen? Even if the people in question were consulted for a particular retelling—which is not usually the case—there must remain a gap between the whole of their lives and the film version. In this case then, these films may say something about the era in which they were produced, as well as our cultural need for a particular representation.