Personal Positives

Presenting the 51st Down Under Feminists’ Carnival

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Welcome everyone to the 51st Down Under Feminists’ Carnival for the month of August. This month I undertook to highlight the theme ‘Personal Positives‘. I wanted to provide an array of posts that provide insight into our personal lives and stories as women.

To everyone who wrote for me for the theme, to everyone who wanted to or thought about it, thank you. Your stories and the difference you make is vital and important and this carnival is for all of you, and all of us. Because, we do make a difference just by being in the world doing our thing, the tiny ways we seek to make a difference… it all counts in critical and defining ways. Together, we wield our teaspoons, emptying our ocean of the ick and the muck. This month, I’m returning spoonfuls of positivity, visibility and perspective.

I’ve also collected with your assistance links on a range of other topics from various bloggers and I hope you’ll find something interesting, something thought provoking and something that moves you. Thank you to everyone who submitted, your investment in the carnival is what makes it thrive. I hope you enjoy this month’s carnival. 

First up, the collection of posts from bloggers who have all written about their Personal Positives, how they seek to make a difference in moving through their everyday lives. This is some personal and powerful writing and I hope it inspires you as it did me.

Chally from Zero at the Bone {archived} writes about Working Toward the Positive through support of bodily autonomy and boundaries. In Prime Number Modern Mama talks about being a parent, a wage-earner, and choices around maternity leave and bedtime rituals. Callistra discusses the evolution of self and choosing growth in her post Phoenix Arising: My Process of De-construction and Re-construction. Sky shares with us all the tiny ways she chooses her activism based on pragmatism and pleasure in her post My Trusty Teaspoon. Stephanie Gunn shares her experiences with depression and negativity and how she seeks to raise her son with a positive outlook in The Light in the Darkness is Always There: Personal Positives.

Flyingblogspot writes Swinging on the Spiral {broken link removed} and talks about her relationship with curiosity as her way of making a difference in the world. And related, my own offering, Personal Positives: Love as Activism, where I share how love is for me, the way in which I try to give back to the world. Sunili gives us The Vagina Manifesto: #cunts {link broken so removed} and discusses reclaiming of the word as a key to the shift in her understanding and appreciation of women and ladybits. In Personal Positives: Experiencing My Mistakes, Steph talks about her time away from Melbourne in Beijing and how it has taught her so much about the making of mistakes and the good that comes from those experiences. Guest posting here at  The Conversationalist, Marianne de Pierres talks about wrestling her demons in Personal Positives: Marianne de Pierres on Defeating the Ego and the Importance of Mentoring. Also guest posting here is Maia, in her post Personal Positives: @agrrud on Day One she shares the changes in her life, her experiences of community, learning and being grateful. 

Thank you again to all who wrote or considered writing on this topic for me, I think that it is vitally important that we keep telling our stories, and keep putting good stuff back into the ocean as we clean out the muck.

On to the rest of the carnival!

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Race and Racism

My Scarlett Heartt {link broken so removed} shares her thoughts on the judgement of being black ‘enough’, particularly considering the experiences of her daughter in her post Am I Black Enough For You? {link broken so removed}

In her post In Defence of Radicals, Utopiana of Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist shares her thoughts on radical feminism and its relationship to Indigenous politics stating “the radicals want to change stuff on a big scale. They believe that society, that structures, that laws etc have been built by those who have the power, to reinforce that power, and these need to be challenged and restructured.”  

Sarah at Brown to the Bone {link broken so removed} discusses that programs like Abstudy are not about creating further divisiveness in Australian society but instead providing opportunities to address inequality where it is vitally needed in her post Positive Discrimination Not Reverse Racisms Mmmkay. {link broken so removed}

 

Family and Women’s Work

Made In Melbourne of Maintaining the Rage Makes Me Tired talks about being a lactavist and breastfeeding and about seeking to affirm women’s choices for how they feed their children. In her post I’m Normal, she states that “There is no breast vs. bottle debate. There is just the fact that we need to feed our children. And that we do it as best as we can.”

Tamara guest posts at The Thesis Whisperer on The Foibles of Flexibility discussing the downsides of pursuing her PhD while being a parent to two small children. 

Jo at A Life Unexamined in her post Mothers and Whores: Women in Ancient Rome gives us rare insight into women from ancient Rome, “They are spoken for, but never speak; represented, but rarely for themselves.”

Deborah at A Bee of a Certain Age points out how citing childcare and family responsibilities as the reason women don’t advance in the police force necessarily draws attention to the fact that the same isn’t a problem for male officers. Her post Why Women Don’t Make it to the Top in the Police Force rightly asserts that “A woman shouldn’t have to be a superwoman to succeed” 

 

 

Life

Karen Healey makes a splash when she calls for the women around her to talk about why they’re awesome in her post I Mean You. This post is filled with brilliant and heartening comments from all kinds of women and it is well worth the read. Why are you awesome? Really… in a non self-deprecating way… go and share on Karen’s post. 

Bethwyn at Butterfly Elephant talks about Learning to Step Into Your Own Power in relation to dealing with chronic illness, needing to rest and wrestling with external demands and misunderstanding. 

Alisa of Champagne and Socks talks about learning to see the glass half full in her post The Halfway Mark is Still a Milestone. She shares about the goals she’s undertaken and the progress she’s made becomes clearer to her as she examines her thinking around success. (Note: discussion of weightloss.)

 

Social Justice

TigTog at Hoyden about Town makes an excellent point in her post Deleting Blog Comments: Exercise of Property Rights vs Free Speech. In reference to that tired defence against comment moderation, that “‘Free Speech’ does not oblige somebody who owns a press to give anybody else access to it. Just like one cannot force the owner of a house to let one come inside, one cannot force the owner of a press to publish one’s words”

Grans Lock On comes to us from Helen at Blogger On A Cast Iron Balcony sharing with us the activism by a group of grandmothers in Toolangi (Mt St Leonard) trying to prevent the logging of the rain forest in the Central Highlands of Victoria. 

In her post Trigger Warning: Trigger Warnings, LudditeJourno of The Hand Mirror talks about the cultural reasoning behind using trigger warnings in the feminist blogoshere. She states, “for me, oppression is trauma in millions of micro experiences, all the time.  Trigger warnings help me monitor on what level I’ll allow myself to be exposed to oppression today” (Note: Trigger warning for discussion of trigger warnings, racism, oppression and rape culture.)

Sarah at Brown to the Bone  {link broken so removed} blogs about Legitimating Oppression {link broken so removed}, how laws that allow police greater powers disproportionally affect marginalised groups, how crises like the GFC that affect groups of people are used to justify further marginalisation against certain groups of people.

 

LGBTQIAU

The idea that by not being out about your queerness is deceptive comes under scrutiny by Chally of Zero at the Bone{archived} in her post Queerness and Deception. Partly what she highlights is that focus in this way hides the underlying fallacy that being heterosexual is ‘normal’ (and thus everything else ‘abnormal’). 

From Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist, in her post Why I Support Marriage Equality, But Not Marriage, Utopiana advocates for equal access for all to marriage. However, she also examines the institution of marriage and discusses her concerns with marriage in a contemporary setting with all of the historical and traditional baggage. 

LudditeJourno of The Hand Mirror posted Marrying for Social Change, talking about why the debate for marriage equality is still dangerous and painful for people affected by it and that there is still work to be done. 

 

Feminism

Ideologically Impure critiques the National Council of Women in New Zealand’s campaign about why feminism is necessary in her post, National Council of Women Acknowledges its Need for Feminism. 

The News With Nipples discusses the policing of women’s behaviour in her post The Mirabella Story is About How We Expect Women to Act. She states, “if you think this isn’t about policing women’s behaviour, when’s the last time a male politician was criticised for not being warm or caring?”

Zoya at Lip Magazine writes about this bizarre notion that in identifying as feminist that we can in random acts or statements become ‘unfeminist’ in her article The Feminist Relationship. It is as though there is some sort of feminist police out to make sure we’re all following ‘the rules’. Missing one’s partner is as feminist as any other choices we may make about how to enact our desire for equality and to end oppression.

Nicole at Wom*news writes how The Second Wave Started in Brisbane, with Merle Thornton and Ro Bognor chained themselves to the bar in protest of women’s exclusion from public places in 1965. She talks about the impact of Thornton’s feminism on her life and about sharing a drink with her in the ‘Thornton Room’ at the Regatta Hotel. 

Tallulah Spankhead of The Lady Garden {link broken so removed} invited a guest poster to share about her experiences of domestic violence in a post bringing Women’s Refuge Week to our attention. In Guest Post: Women’s Refuge Week, {link broken so removed} the poster is candid and honest, her story is hard hitting. (Trigger Warning: discussion of domestic abuse and violence.)

 

Sex and Relationships

I continue my foray into blogging about relationships in my post Redefining Success and Failure in Relationships here at The Conversationalist.

Blue Milk posts about Altitude Sickness as a Metaphor for Relationships, talking about how having small children often necessitates closing parts of yourselves as parents down. She talks about how often the parts that get shut down are the parts that as partners fell in love with and that it is something of an endurance race to live on thin air. 

Ideologically Impure also critiques of John McCracken’s fear-mongering about the dangers posed by sex workers, in The Magical Sex Industry of South Auckland, with Your Host John McCracken. 

 

The Body 

Mindy at  Hoyden about Town draws our attention to the media sensationalism around the ‘obesity crisis’ that just won’t quit in her post OMG Zombesity Crisis, Again.

Chally of Zero at the Bone {archived} talks about the way in which privilege can be discerned through entitlement to touch and whose boundaries are respected in her post Which Kinds of Bodies Are Respected?

 

Media

Helen at Blogger On A Cast Iron Balcony critiques the mainstream media idea that blogs are all written by people writing trivial things about their lives and their opinions on the world in her post I Don’t Know Much About Blogs But I Know What I Like. It couldn’t possibly be the case that the stories people share and the things we learn from one another through blogs are valuable and different from what is served up by the media, could it?

Orlando at  Hoyden about Town  talks in Why I Would Rather Let My Son Watch X-Men than Bob the Builder about the importance of female character representation and that it was more important to be showing media that involved multiple women being involved, doing things in the story than to avoid media portraying violence and good vs evil. 

Blue Milk asks Are Princesses Bad For Girls? linking to an interview with Brenda Chapman as one of the main writers of the film ‘Brave’ after her daughter went to see the movie with her dad. With the overwhelming amount of princess influence out there, Brenda talks about wanting “to break the stereotype of the princess, as well as the princess plot.” (Brenda is quoted in Blue Milk’s post.)

 

Geekery and Creativity

Tara at Settle Petal {link broken so removed} talks with great excitement about the CERN discovery that could potentially be the Higgs bosun particle. Her post Particle This! The Discovery of the Higgs Bosun and Women In Science {link broken so removed} and particularly that Ms Fabiola Gianotti as lead physicist on the ATLAS project addressing the press conference and being recognised for her contribution to the discovery. 

 

Language and Literature

Charlotte of Wom*news writes about patriarchal language systems embedded in culture in Herstory in Language. She articulates how partriarchy in language becomes invisible in the “way that terms such as ‘chairman/policeman’ are the default while ‘female judge/ female engineer’ appear as necessary ‘extra’ distinctions could be examples of the way in which language transmits the endorsement of this system”

 

Where the Wonder Women Are

Finally, last but not least, a selection from Tansy Rayner Roberts, she’s been writing a blog series called ‘Where The Wonder Women Are’ about the female characters in comics. I’ve linked you to all her July posts, but she’s definitely still writing and the posts are definitely worth a look, even if you’ve only a passing familiarity with comics. 

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That’s it from me for the August Down Under Feminists’ Carnival here at The Conversationalist, I hope you’ve enjoyed the carnival and in particular the intimate and generous posts considering my theme Personal Positives.

The Fifty-Second Edition of the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival is planned for 5 September, 2012 and will be hosted by the fabulous  Lip Magazine. Submissions for the carnival can be emailed to Dunja via dunja [at] lipmag [dot] com for those who can’t access blogcarnival. {link broken so removed}

 

Personal Positives: @agrrud on Day One

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I’d like to welcome Maia as a guest poster to The Conversationalist sharing her thoughts on this month’s Down Under Feminists’ Carnival theme, “Personal Positives‘. Maia is dear to me and it is truly a pleasure to host her candid and introspective post here as part of the carnival. 

Today was the first… 

Today is a lot of firsts. 

I left a relationship a couple of months ago, the weekend before I started my new job. Today my new job took me to another town. I have a serviced apartment in the city, an allowance, a flight home each weekend.  Inside my backpack – the largest I could sneak on the plane – lay a coiled string of fairy lights: a home making device. 

The company I work for prides itself on its culture. I chose it for that. When I came out of my my post-PhD stupor and actually paid some mind to my life again, I wanted three things in equal measures: highly technical work; among diverse, open-minded, fascinating, socially capable people; at an 0rganisation whose values I love and respect. 

I wanted to be part of a community. 

I am an engineer. A scientist. No, an engineer. All of the above. These are some of the things I am, certainly. Now I work in software. They’ve employed me, this organisation full of wonder and generosity, to break things. They trusted my sense in the world, though my software ability is rudimentary and out of date. 

Back home, where I’ll be spending weekends, I have a life so full I can barely devote the requisite 40 hours a week to work. Where did it go, the time? Me of the past slogged eighty-, hundred-hour weeks at a thesis. Past me drove into town at 10pm on Saturdays, struggling through post-football traffic, to run long, boring, finicky experiments, week after week. I still work that hard, but when the work itself dried up, I shoved things into its absence. Friends, lovers, committees, science talks, acrobalance classes. Being in this new place will be good; I want to devote more time to learning how to give in this field.

A car arrived at my door this morning, at an hour so early I can only assume it’s imaginary. I was driven to the office when I landed. Meetings. Coffee. Whiteboards. Access card forms. Do we know who the knowledge experts on this project are right now? How about the success criteria? Maybe tomorrow, when the vital person is back, we can run through a few scenarios.
We are consultants, here to test their systems. I am learning how the labyrinthine tools work, much less the client’s infrastructure. I have a mentor. I’ll figure it out. I’m smart and capable.
We traverse this world, my heartache and I, and learn. No day is a standalone. Day One is one of a continuum – a community of days, if you will.

My mentor and I will be working closely. We discussed our communication styles today, our strengths and weaknesses. We gave each other permission to be pulled up when we stray from the path of usefulness.

My life is…amazing. The opportunities I have are tremendous. I live in a bubble. My friends, my lovers, now my colleagues – all think big. All have at least some awareness of their own bigotry, and work to correct it. My life contains kindness, intelligence, challenge, generosity. I encourage it wherever I can. I have money and time and love and friends and things and access. I am spoilt.

I remind myself, and the world around me, that this is luxury.

Personal Positives: Marianne de Pierres on Defeating Ego and the Importance of Mentoring

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I’d like to welcome Marianne de Pierres as a guest poster to The Conversationalist with her thoughts on ‘Personal Positives’ as the theme for this month’s Down Under Feminist Carnival.  Marianne is a dear friend and I am thrilled to host her thoughtful post here as part of the carnival and also as my first ever guest!  

I’m often plagued be a sense of hopelessness. I’m not sure if that is something I learned, or it’s driven by my own biochemistry. Suffice to say that when I was old enough to realise that I had developed such a negative pattern of thinking, I set about changing it. To this day it’s a struggle, but I I’ve chipped away enough to see where I’ve been.

It’s my hope that by continuing to fight against it, I become a better person; one who makes the people around me happier, more secure, more empowered. A personal mission if you like, or perhaps, a crusade – to engender the warmth and comfort and confidence that proximity to another human can give, when the energies are right. Sounds kind of simple and silly really, but I find it profound.

And it’s not to say that I don’t still lose battles. Ego is a great saboteur, usually lurking about in the guise of envy or righteousness. But I stand up to it by finding the pleasure and reward in mentoring. Mentoring is concept so overused and totally undervalued. It could be the single most important concept/deed that adds value to human existence. I treasure it and I’d be interested to know if anyone agrees with me.

Marianne x

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Marianne de Pierres is the author of the acclaimed Parrish Plessis and award-winning Sentients of Orion science fiction series. The Parrish Plessis series has been translated into eight languages and adapted into a roleplaying game. She’s also the author of a teen dark fantasy series and has published a highly regarded short collection, Glitter Rose through Indie publishing house Twelfth Planet Press.

Marianne is an active supporter of genre fiction and has mentored many writers. She  She lives in Brisbane, Austrlaia, with her husband, three sons and three galahs. Marianne writes award winning crime under the pseudonym Marianne Delacourt. Visit her websites at www.mariannedepierres.com and http://www.tarasharp.com.au and www.burnbright.com.au.  

Personal Positives: Love as Activism

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I’ve been asking people around me to write about personal positives in their life, the way they make a difference in their own way, as part of their daily experience of living in the world. Now it is my turn to share with you about my life and how I try to make a difference. Where I spend the most time, energy and effort in making a difference entirely revolves around love.

Image Copyright and Credit: IC1805 - The Heart Nebula Daniel Marqardt

Image Copyright and Credit: IC1805 – The Heart Nebula Daniel Marqardt

Love as an idea and as a practise is where I concentrate on growing, understanding, sharing, and practising amongst the people in my life and communities on a daily basis. Love is what I seek to put back into the ocean, as I’m emptying the ick and muck with my teaspoon. Not only do I seek to put love into the world myself, but I seek to inspire and empower others to do the same. I seek to invest them with the kind of understanding that has them understand and value love in ways that can be overlooked and misunderstood based on how we are conditioned to think about love by media and modern society.

I use conversation as my primary and most powerful mechanism for cutting through the cynicism and neatly boxed definitions of love projected from media and social structures. I tell the stories of myself and my life, I tell the stories of how love exists for me, how it works for me. I also listen to people tell their stories about their lives and how they conceive love. Most often my conversations on love revolve around creating more space, opening up little boxes that we’ve taken on that tell us love is a certain shape, means a certain thing, involves certain attributes over others, without much flexibility. I find that people already know the things that we talk about, but for several moments we’re discussing invisible elephants, until suddenly the elephants all appear. Immediately the tiny boxed definitions become inadequate, a guide if anything for what people can now see around them in their life and the ways love is present in unexpected ways.

There is a rightness in the telling and sharing of personal stories, doing so confirms our own existence but also allows others to connect. The sharing of experiences, challenges, and triumphs draws us together and creates solidarity. On the internet it can be difficult to create that sense of being ‘all in together’ and ‘for one another’. But it isn’t impossible, and I believe it to be a worthwhile practice. A practice based on love, where we seek that which connects us as individuals without erasure of our precious autonomy and individuality. I’m reminded of a Martin Luther King quote that I came across in another blog post in the past month, and I think it apt for describing how I think love can provide the ability for us to transcend our differences, without diminishing each other and instead allow us to be greater together.

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.” – Martin Luther King

Our personal stories are where we draw our collective power, our companionship, our solidarity and support for one another. This is not to suggest that we all agree or never clash in ideologies or practises… but underneath those things we are people, together trying to make a difference. Our collective identity is most powerful when we come from a foundation of love. In this way, love becomes a powerful activism and it is not the activism of one space of oppression, but all spaces of oppression. Through love, we all are people, living in the world, seeking to get through the day, to live our lives, to make a difference, to survive. We are richer for all of our experiences, from all places of marginalisation, and all places of privilege.

Standing for love in modern society sometimes feels futile, there is so much cynicism. Messages of love sound trite and we can so easily dismiss the idea as being too simple, without engaging or appreciating that love is one of many tools. Love is a meta tool that makes the other actions we take more effective by drawing us together and having us work for one another and not against each other. Love then, becomes activism.

Love as activism for me on an everyday level involves spacemaking for the people around me that they have what they need, and involves listening actively and avoiding judgement or advice giving in favour of support and encouragement. Love as activism involves a passionate commitment to self love and fulfilment of responsibilities toward oneself as the foundation for reaching out to others. Using love for activism for me is all of the tiny ways I constantly try and let the people in my life know how much they mean to me. It is the way I nurture the opportunities to spend time, to connect and be present and marvelling at the person or people in my life. Love for me involves constant amazement, abiding thankfulness and allowing myself to see each person as wondrous in themselves. Love as activism is allowing myself to love as completely, variously and fully as I am able.

My activism is about my commitment to greater learning and deeper insight into love and how it is thought about, used, referenced, defined, promoted, and idealised. My activism means that I am standing for love, it means that I am willing to have conversations to ground those things in a daily reality, for myself and as needed for others.  Love itself does not conquer all, but it is a powerful tool that allows us to build a movement for change, allows us to shift the status quo, and allows us to create space for each other without diminishing anyone. Love makes a difference to how we get to be in the world, ourselves and the people around us through our experience of them.

Personal Positives – Call for Submissions to the 51st Down Under Feminist Carnival

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In about two weeks I’ll be posting the August Down Under Feminists Carnival. In my original announce post, I talked in depth about the theme I wanted to focus on, ‘Personal Positives’. I’ve received some thought provoking entries on this topic and I’m hoping for a few more. In my real and online life I am surrounded by some amazing women and we all exist in the world, we breathe and move through our daily lives with all the joys and trials that involves.

 

These stories of our lives are important. Actually, I think they are critical because too often we wonder what we contribute, or wonder if we’ve made a difference. We wonder how other people live and go about their lives. And we do make a difference, we have stood upon this earth and breathed, thought, played, struggled, laughed, cried, reasoned and worked. I feel like we often have a false impression that our concerns and lives are too mundane to be ‘stories’ to be interesting, to inspire, to provoke thought, to offer insight. I seek to break that association, and l see the extraordinary in daily life all around me in all of you in my life. Who you are, how you live, and how you make a difference is of vital importance in the world.

 

Please consider sharing your story. Share your story either on your own blog, or make a guest post here on mine if you’d prefer.

 

We get endless repetition from media and society about how we supposedly ‘should’ live. We watch and read the complex stories about great and ordinary men’s lives through television, movies, books and other mediums. Using this carnival as one of many platforms and projects, we can shift this so that there is also a third option; how we actually live and move through the world as women.

  

By focusing on personal positives and the stories of our daily lives we emphasise our existence and the many ways we live. We also put something positive back into the ocean where we spend so much time addressing the ick and the muck of oppression. Removing the ick and the muck cannot make a lasting difference without something positive to replace it – and we get to choose that, we get to influence that and breathe life into it.

 

Aside from focusing on the theme for this coming month, I’m also interested in you sending me interesting blog posts you’ve come across in your travels across the internet. Anything by an Australian or New Zealand blogger on a topic relevant to feminism (and I tend to take a broad view of feminist relevance to be clear) is welcome. I’m particularly interested in featuring bloggers that don’t get featured often and from a range of intersectional viewpoints. If you’re unsure that something is relevant, send me an email – I’m always happy to discuss!

 

Submissions for the carnival should be submitted to me by the end of July. You can submit through the blogcarnival form, {link broken so removed} or email me through transcendancing at gmail dot com.

 

If you want to post on the theme and are struggling with it or wondering if your idea will work, I’m available to talk about it. Additionally, if you are worried about making the deadline, send me an email – there’s some room for flexibility, particularly around themed posts as I’m aiming for a strong showing on the theme for this carnival.

51st Down Under Feminists Carnival – Personal Positives

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Greetings all, I’m Ju Transcendancing and will be hosting the upcoming Down Under Feminists Carnival – the fifty first! How did we manage so many?! If you’re interested in revisiting some of the marvellous carnivals that people have put together in past months, there is a conveniently compiled list. The upcoming 51st Down Under Feminists Carnival will focus on Personal Positives. That is, how we go about our daily lives and the little things we do to make a difference.

I’ve been thinking my theme for this carnival, because I really like themes as an opportunity to draw attention to specific areas of thinking around equality, feminism and intersectionality. I notice that for myself, what I write about is my life, myself in the world and negotiating that as best I can, getting tripped up and stumbling clumsy through situations, sometimes getting it right, more often learning more about how there’s always more growing and more thoughtfulness to apply. I try and write things that are about putting goodness and more of what I want to see in the world, out there for others. I appreciate the amazing work that people do in applying a critical lens to society and the way that it is constructed and reinforced in ways that both help and harm us individually and collectively. I’m a cultural theorists amongst other things and that kind of space is always interesting.

However, when I think of the metaphor used for performing the work of engendering equality in the world that is ‘emptying the ocean with a teaspoon’ I think it is worthwhile to consider some additional aspects to the metaphor. It can be disheartening, the ocean is awfully big, and a teaspoon is a tiny thing. It can be uplifting: there are many, many teaspoons doing the work of emptying. In focusing on the emptying, I think it is easy to neglect the fact that for all the ick and muck that we empty out, we’re still left only with the status quo unless we consciously add the positives we want to see more of in the world.

I realise that this is a very subjective experience, what is positive through my eyes is not necessarily positive in another’s experience. But I do believe in the value of doing the best we can at any given point. And, I recognise that what constitutes ‘best’ is a flexible changing thing depending on the surrounds. Intentionality is sometimes considered the largest of ways in which we cause inadvertent harm, and yet it is also powerful in it’s collective form where the intention to give back, to put goodness in the world can be shared and what difference it makes can be appreciated – even if there are aspects that we find difficult or problematic on an individual level. Therein is the space for healthy critique and debate and for growing as individuals in our own thinking and feeling spaces.

Feminist and equality based blogging can often seem to be simply an issues based space, where the individual paths we all walk are obscured by our focus on these issues. If we are all doing the best we can at any given point toward equality and recognition for each other as human beings, there are stories to be told there. Individual moments captured from everyday lives, going about the ordinary and how our intentions for making a difference are enacted in the tiny ways we go about our lives.

So the theme that I’d like to put forward for this upcoming carnival is simply: Personal Positives.

Share with me the moments of your lives and the way in which you put goodness, positivity, back into the world, even as you use your trusty teaspoon in the ocean of ick and muck. How do you move through the world? What are you most confronted by in your experience of the everyday – where do you find that you compromise and when are you or aren’t you comfortable with that? Is there a practice or something else you’ve enacted that is entirely for the benefit of contribution to the world becoming a (very gradually) better place for everyone?

My intention is to draw attention to daily living, to daily intentionality toward making a difference, and to make visible the invisible daily lives of Australian and New Zealand women and feminist bloggers. We often remark that the everyday from history is filled with the experiences, fears and concerns of men – as is not unexpected in a heavily patriarchal society. My intention is to contribute to shifting that visibility to make the experiences and concerns of women inside their everyday lives in a contemporary 2012 visible and valuable.

Feel free to comment and begin the discussion on the everyday and feminism, what the idea of personal positives can mean and the value of visibility. This theme is simple in its heart but the surrounding context is multi-layered and spending some time looking into those layers would be most welcome, and perhaps beneficial to people considering contributing to the carnival.

Please consider contributing, especially if you haven’t before. If you’re unsure about your contribution for whatever reason, please feel free to contact me – I’m a conversationalist at heart and I will welcome the contact.  Submissions can be made via blogcarnival {link broken so removed} or by emailing me: transcendancing at gmail dot com and should be in before the end of July. If you’re having issues with the deadline, contact me and I’ll see what I can do.