The UK's health and social services have become tools of surveillance and control, with working class women the most vulnerable to state intervention. Madame Tlank reviews the State's policies, targets, and projects, and uncovers the warped logic and fragmenting effects of marketised welfare

Well Jeff, ... the fact is that you have the luxury of knowing that you will never ever ever ever EVER be faced with the government bossing you around like a child, simply because you have a parasite living in your body.

- The Law Fairy, Feministing.com

By now people have forgotten what history has proven: that ‘raising' a child is tantamount to retarding his development. The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF.

- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 1970

In what follows I wish to consider the effects of recent UK health and social policies on women and their children who are labeled ‘at risk'.[1]

Tijuana Organic – a show that profiles contemporary artists and media activists from the Mexican border town made notorious by its maquiladoras, immigration struggles and crime – steers a course between depicting Tijuana's harsh realities and avoiding a sensationalist treatment of its social complexities. Reviewed by Armin Medosch

In late April I went to Manchester to see the exhibition Tijuana Organic at the Cornerhouse gallery. The show presented work from 10 female artists from Tijuana, Mexico, accompanied by two special evenings with the Tijuana based independent media collective Bulbo-TV. Tijuana Organic was curated by Maria Montserrat Sanchez, a Tijuana based professor of Mexican Art, who was supported by Kathy Rae Huffman, curator of the Cornerhouse Gallery.

Yvonne Venegas, Debutantes, 2003

Shopping and Financing

Until quite recently, you didn't need to be a hardline feminist to testify to the mind-numbing boredom associated with the weekly supermarket shop. Now, however, things are changing: backed up by a plethora of TV shows and numerous restaurant spin-off recipe books dedicated to ever more exotic ingredients, food has become sexy. As a consequence, our shopping lists have become more adventurous and the supermarkets are proving quick to take advantage of our latest obsession.

At the same time, technological developments are enabling us to satisfy our gastronomic desires digitally. The recent launch of several on-line supermarkets, most notably Tesco [www.tesco.co.uk], along with the re-invention of food shopping as a lifestyle activity, are raising questions about the cultural perception of shopping.

Imogen O’Rorke on the latest large-scale attempt at understanding what women want from the Web

Its message is simple, direct: open up your handbag, girlfriend, and get that credit card out! handbag.com is the first of the much-flaunted UK women’s portals to have launched, a joint venture by Hollinger Digital (the Telegraph Group) and Boots, the chemist.

Based on American women’s networks like Village and Women’s Wire, it is intended to be some kind of “handbag of the future” with “compartments for all your health and beauty needs, your address book, personal mail, information on travel, family, advice” etcetera.

Josephine Berry reviews Domain Errors!

An insertion by Emma Hedditch as part of the Mary Kelly project

I have been working with an artist-led project called
Mary Kelly since May 2003. The first page of the
printed booklet for the project assembles the following
statements:

[…] attempts to articulate the politics of site and self
initially through a radical engagement with ‘cinema’.

Intimacy becomes revolutionary when it becomes a
desire to communicate. The lie of alienation scrambled
by a flurry of small, purposeful movements.

It seems incredibly important to recognise the strategies
of formation, the processes in which experience and
formal representation take place. The former not
distinct from the latter, but as a continuous grasping
on the surfaces of the other.

Drawn to an engagement in the interpersonal and organisational
and the consideration of other persons.

The Mary Kelly project

In 1985, Donna Haraway unveiled ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’, thrilling cultural studies bods, new agers, feminists, and cyberpunks alike with its mix of military, political, laboratory and hippy flavours. Consigning the boundaries between the born and the built to the rubbish dump of history, Haraway’s politics of the information age made waves. But ten years on, has the radical promise of her manifesto been borne out by history? Maria Fernandez and Suhail Malik think not – for completely opposing reasons.

>> Merlin Carpenter, A Colloquium of Traktors, 2000, ink on paper, 35x50cm, [http://www.merlincarpenter.com]

THE CYBORG - SWEET SIXTEEN (AND NEVER BEEN CLONED)