mercoledì 21 novembre 2007
martedì 20 novembre 2007
domenica 18 novembre 2007
STOP female genital mutilation!
What these eyes have seen....
Most families in Mali practice what is variously known as female genital mutilation (FGM), female genital cutting (FGC), female circumcision, or excision. FGM continues to devastate women and girls in Mali, in spite of efforts by many to convince parents to stop. The consequences include the unimaginable pain of the procedure, and many gynecological, urinary and obstetric problems, with all their ensuing psychological and marital anguish.
The socio-cultural aspects of FGM vary greatly; no homogeneous practice, types of surgeries and rationales behind them are as diverse as the people that practice them. FGM can clearly be defined as a patriarchal institution perpetuated to control women.
Most families in Mali practice what is variously known as female genital mutilation (FGM), female genital cutting (FGC), female circumcision, or excision. FGM continues to devastate women and girls in Mali, in spite of efforts by many to convince parents to stop. The consequences include the unimaginable pain of the procedure, and many gynecological, urinary and obstetric problems, with all their ensuing psychological and marital anguish.
The socio-cultural aspects of FGM vary greatly; no homogeneous practice, types of surgeries and rationales behind them are as diverse as the people that practice them. FGM can clearly be defined as a patriarchal institution perpetuated to control women.
martedì 6 novembre 2007
venerdì 2 novembre 2007
Nepal Women Festival (rural)
Teej (women festival)
It happen on beginning of Sept: A blissful conjugal life, progress and prosperity for her husband, good fortune for herself , and purification of her own body and soul: these are what an ideal Hindu woman is supposed to aspire for.
Teej, the lively festival exclusively for womenfolk, is a spiritual endeavor towards the realization of their aspirations. For an unmarried woman, compliance with the age - old tradition ensure a good loving and caring husband. The festival combines both sumptuous feasts and tormenting fasts. On the first day of the 3 days celebration, groups of women, both married and unmarried including male of the house, congregate at one place in their finest attires. Amidst laughter, songs and music, the grand feasts begin. The merry making goes on till midnight, from which time onwards the women undergo a 24 hour fast.
The next day sees these women in their crimson red saris, singing and dancing on the streets leading to Shiva shrines. The main activities revolve around the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu. On this special day the temple remains closed for all males except the Brahmin priests. Female devotees, as a mark of total devotion to Shiva the destroyer, circumambulate the lingam, the phallic symbol of the almighty, making offerings of flowers, sweets and coins and praying for their husband's longevity, progress and prosperity.
The third and last days of the festival is called Rishi Panchami, which is the fifth day of the waxing moon. On this day, women who have undergone the agonizing fast pay homage to various deities situated on the banks of sacred rivers. After a holy bath in the rivers, they use a piece of datiwan (a sacred plant with religious and medicinal significance), to sprinkle holy water all over their body 360 times. The ritual helps them secure exoneration for all sins they might have committed in the past year.
It happen on beginning of Sept: A blissful conjugal life, progress and prosperity for her husband, good fortune for herself , and purification of her own body and soul: these are what an ideal Hindu woman is supposed to aspire for.
Teej, the lively festival exclusively for womenfolk, is a spiritual endeavor towards the realization of their aspirations. For an unmarried woman, compliance with the age - old tradition ensure a good loving and caring husband. The festival combines both sumptuous feasts and tormenting fasts. On the first day of the 3 days celebration, groups of women, both married and unmarried including male of the house, congregate at one place in their finest attires. Amidst laughter, songs and music, the grand feasts begin. The merry making goes on till midnight, from which time onwards the women undergo a 24 hour fast.
The next day sees these women in their crimson red saris, singing and dancing on the streets leading to Shiva shrines. The main activities revolve around the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu. On this special day the temple remains closed for all males except the Brahmin priests. Female devotees, as a mark of total devotion to Shiva the destroyer, circumambulate the lingam, the phallic symbol of the almighty, making offerings of flowers, sweets and coins and praying for their husband's longevity, progress and prosperity.
The third and last days of the festival is called Rishi Panchami, which is the fifth day of the waxing moon. On this day, women who have undergone the agonizing fast pay homage to various deities situated on the banks of sacred rivers. After a holy bath in the rivers, they use a piece of datiwan (a sacred plant with religious and medicinal significance), to sprinkle holy water all over their body 360 times. The ritual helps them secure exoneration for all sins they might have committed in the past year.
lunedì 29 ottobre 2007
giovedì 25 ottobre 2007
mercoledì 24 ottobre 2007
venerdì 19 ottobre 2007
mercoledì 17 ottobre 2007
Horrors Mirror
From the "Mirror Stage" (Lacan) to the reconquer of Self. The Mirror is not You, but it can be your naricissism or your depression, the place where you are alienated from yourself.
Broke the Mirror!!
In Lacan's reformulation of Sigmund Freud's theories of mental life, the mirror stage constitutes a critical phase in the development of the ego. Drawing on work in physiology and animal psychology, Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant's emerging perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant's physical vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life.
For Lacan, the mirror stage establishes the ego as fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other. As the so-called "individual" matures and enters into social relations through language, this "other" will be elaborated within social and linguistic frameworks that will give each subject's personality (and his or her neuroses and other psychic disturbances) its particular characteristics.
Lacan’s ideas about the formation of the "I" developed over time in conjunction with his other elaborations of Freudian theory. He presented a paper on the mirror stage on August 3, 1936, at a conference of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad.(It is to this conference that Lacan is referring in the first sentence of the essay). Thirteen years later, on July 17, 1949, at a conference of the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Zurich, Lacan delivered another version of the mirror stage paper that later in the same year appeared in print in the Revue Francais de Psychanalyse. The essay was reprinted in the French publication of Ecrits in 1966. Jean Roussel prepared the first translation into English, which appeared in New Left Review 51 (September/October 1968): 63-77. This publication in English is significant, as it contributed to the introduction of Lacanian theory, and specifically the model of the mirror stage, into leftist intellectual circles in Britain at the time when cultural studies was emerging as a field. A new English translation by Alan Sheridan heads Ecrits: A Selection, which was published in 1977
mercoledì 26 settembre 2007
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