Team Queer

Any regular follower of mine knows that I am the world's biggest fan girl for Salma Hayek. She is beautiful, she's a self-described feminist, she fights to make a place for women of color in general and Latinas specifically in the world of entertainment, AND she's an advocate of breast feeding!

The New York Times has a great article up about Cheryl Ziegler, an 18-year-old single mother from the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, who is also a boxer.

So the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue just hit my mailbox today. And as usual, I'm not really sure what I think about it.

I am not a biker by any stretch of the imagination, but I love biking anyway. You can find me and my family firmly in front of the television watching The Tour de France every July, and one of my big dreams to be able to someday follow the Tour in person.

But because biking is not a mainstream sport, whenever it is shown on television or broadcast anywhere, it's usually the men that are highlighted. Why further marginalize a sport by highlighting (gasp!) women?

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.

So, rather than watch the Super Bowl, I ate food and slept. In spite of my attempts to avoid the whole damn mess, however, I still wound up being forced to deal with the requisite oohs and aaaahs over the commercials. I'm not a big fan of commercials period--but Super Bowl ads are often especially problematic to me because they are well aware that they are appealing to the most base instinct of the macho drunk male getting it on with his macho drunk male friends (I read somewhere that more partner abuse happens during Super Bowl than any other time of the year).

From Frau Sally Benz comes the news of the latest "pedia" creation--Chickipedia!

What is Chickipedia you ask?

According to it's about page:

My really good friend and fellow Chicana blogger, brownfemipower, is hosting a collaboration at her blog, Flip Flopping Joy, with fellow amazing media maker, Jess Hoffman (of make/shift fame).

Their collaboration is called (Re)Thinking Walking and centers ways that we can build new worlds through the process of purposeful walking.

Some excerpts:

BFP:

While I identify as a sea creature ally more than a Femme Shark, the Femme Sharks are, nonetheless, one of my very very favorite organizations in the world. Created as a way to redefine and reclaim what 'femme' can mean especially as it pertains to and centers women of color, the Femme Sharks are fierce, in your face, and unapologetic in their love and their activism. If you are in the San Franscisco area, I highly encourage you to make it out to the rally and show some femme sharks some loving!

FEMME SHARKS VS. THE WALK FOR LIFE SAT 1/24/09 SF 10:30

It's so interesting to listen to this last speech of MLK's right now, while we're in the middle of the time we're in. It's interesting how similar the message MLK is giving to Obama's--and many people are making quite a show of connecting the two (ahem, mainstream media??). But what I find even more interesting is the differences. Both MLK and Obama talk about making the U.S. a better nation--but there are important differences that each man takes to get there.