From World Socialist Web Site (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/guar-j09.shtml), a telling example of what 'the real world' means when invoked by government, unions and sympathetic media.  The story of a group of women care-workers employed by Cleveland and Redcar council who were forced to turn to 'no win no fee' lawyers after to obtain back-pay withheld through a council-Unison stitch-up.  Guess whose side the 'Guardian' was on...

The Guardian newspaper began the New Year by publishing two January 2 articles and an editorial on women workers employed by local authorities fighting for equal pay.

Its sympathies, however, were not with the poorly paid women in question but, as the headlines suggest—”Councils face £2.8bn bill for equal pay,” “Fight for equality that could put jobs at risk” and “A deal under siege”—with the local authorities themselves and the trade union bureaucracy.

URGENT BIOPOWER UPDATE, not in the dubious, never-defined sense of 'biopolitical struggle', but in its everyday, concrete meaning.  That is, institutions directly claiming administrative sovereignty over masses of human life-matter, with absolute priority over any subjective impulses from the flesh in question.  And of course it's not just any institutions or any flesh: US medical authorities are demanding that the medical system intervene to maintain ALL women's childbearing capacity regardless of those women's own wishes.  In the bluntest practical terms, this means enforcement action against behaviour deemed destructive of 'reproductive health'.  To see this as an anachronism or peculiarly American would be utter folly.  There may not be an all-conquering Christian anti-abortion lobby in the UK right now, but the themes of 'pro-active', 'pro-health' medical intervention (particularly targeting 'at-risk', i.e. working class, bodies) and motherhood as the 'objective' meaning of female life could not be more local or more contemporary.

http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor06072006.html

Venezuela's 'Bolivarian constitution' contains a unique article (Article 88) recognising women's unwaged work as economically productive. Wages For Housework (WFH) has been fighting for this recognition since 1972, and has participated in the annual Global Women's Strike (GWS) since its inception in 2000. GWS members attended Venezuela's international 'Solidarity Women's Encuentro' in July 2002, and saw women at the heart of the revolution and its social changes. Laura Sullivan spoke to Selma James and Nina Lopez of WFH and GWS

Venezuela's 'Bolivarian constitution' contains a unique article (Article 88) recognising women's unwaged work as economically productive. Wages For Housework (WFH) has been fighting for this recognition since 1972, and has participated in the annual Global Women's Strike (GWS) since its inception in 2000. GWS members attended Venezuela's international 'Solidarity Women's Encuentro' in July 2002, and saw women at the heart of the revolution and its social changes. Laura Sullivan spoke to Selma James and Nina Lopez of WFH and GWS

[prologue] is a mutating platform for the formulation of a feminist aesthetic politics which reacts to and acts upon the New Europe as it impacts on women’s lives. Artist and participant Emma Hedditch followed it from its planning symposium in Graz to its problematic culmination in an exhibition at the Cornerhouse, Manchester. [prologue] New Feminism/New Europe runs until 18 September 2005

Helen Chadwick’s interest in the flux of being and the blurring of multiple boundaries made her far more than a precursor to the yBa’s. Stella Santacatterina reviews her recent retrospective at the Barbican

Helen Chadwick sadly died very suddenly in 1996 at the young age of 43 and at the moment an artist usually enters their mature phase. The Barbican’s retrospective therefore is a homage to the work she achieved in her short lifetime, as well as a testament to the extent of her influence on the following generation of artists. The retrospective brings together some 70 of her most significant works, unfolding like a film of her artistic life as one moves from room to room, and in which the feminine aspect of her creativity emerges through an oscillation between a conceptual tightness and a softer, more erotic sensibility.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a central figure in the Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) and Wages For Housework campaigns in the 1970s, considers here, with Dario De Bortoli, the recent movement for alternative agriculture and food policy in Italy

> Critical Wine conference, Leoncavallo, December 2003

Lutham Blissett on gender, networks and the PGA conference in Serbia

"Strange En counter 2004"

"It is often better to write your account of a conference before you go, then the facts don't get in the way of the truth", Lutham Blissett

Strange En counter 2004

Anja Kirschner reviews three films screened at London’s Lux Salon and laments the passage of radical women’s filmmaking into depoliticised, stylistic affectation

Capturing ‘underdogs’ on film is a famously sticky pursuit. In the context of radical women’s filmmaking, this problem was elucidated through the critique of the camera’s complicity with the ‘gun’ and the ‘phallus’ which privileged a ‘white, male, heterosexual’ mastery over the moving image. A critique which reached its climactic point in the ’60s and ’70s when wider struggles over production and representation were spilling onto the streets, contesting what and who made up the ‘real world’ on and beyond the TV and the movie screen.

II The revolution shall not be criticised?
In response to ISEA98 Micz Flor, organiser of Revolting temporary media laboratory, asks "why now, why revolution?" Is the current popularity of the term and its associated icons anything more than Middle Youth talking to itself in the latest of a long line of fashionable lingos?

IV Net.Politics Q&A
"What does the Net mean for politics?" Anarchists, nazis, extropians, pornographers, sex-crazed teenagers, book-worm teenagers, budgerigar fanatics, isolated octogenarians, hairdressers - you name it, the Net is home to them all. Or is it? Who gains ascendance within cyberspace? Who has the power in this, the latest technological utopia? Is the Net just a tool or is that popular description just another disingenuous trick - the powerful letting the powerless play with hand-me-down toys while they get on with more serious business. We asked a not-so-random selection of net users what they think.
With an introduction by McKenzie Wark

X The other Tony B.

Women, Art & Technology edited by Judy Malloy Reviewed by Vali Djordjevic and Diana McCarty

At a conference programmed to coincide with the exhibition Mons Veneris: Female Geographies at the Austrian Cultural Forum, female artists, curators and theorists gathered to discuss the role of feminist art. How, they asked, can it resist the culture industry and its seemingly universal ability to assimilate and neutralise? And, what is the significance of the waning interest in funding feminist practice?

Amongst the recent slew of oversized books on the philosophies of architectural and design practices, it is refreshing to find a user-friendly paperback pragmatically titled, THIS IS WHAT WE DO: A Muf Manual.

The simplicity of the book’s design (one column, black and white images, no trendy typefaces) reflects the attitude of this all-female multi-disciplinary collective of urban strategists who playfully call themselves MUF. However, MUF is no ordinary architectural practice. They have seen few of their designs actually built and have become a curiosity for the design press – for whom they refuse to highlight gender as an issue. Accordingly, over the course of their seven-year working life, MUF have become a myth.

How does open source software relate to paper dolls, dress making, libraries and dinner parties? Lina Dzuverovic-Russell talks to the De Geuzen art collective and discovers how the geek ethos overlaps with the practice of everyday life.

How did the three of you meet and start working together?

We started working together while studying at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht. Our collaborations began informally with one of us initiating this or that and the other two joining in. We enjoyed the social process of brainstorming and testing our ideas with each other. At a certain point it was clear our collaborations had become more than a habit, and in 1996, at the same time we moved into our studio in Amsterdam, we became known as De Geuzen.

Can you talk about what backgrounds each of you came from?

How does open source software relate to paper dolls, dress making, libraries and dinner parties? Lina Dzuverovic Russell talks to the De Geuzen art collective and discovers how the geek ethos overlaps with the practice of everyday life

‘When people walked into the Royal College they simply wiped their feet across democracy and entered the exhibition’, explains Renee Turner, one third of the Amsterdam-based art collective De Geuzen. Turner is referring to a custom made doormat with the word ‘Democracy’ printed on it, De Geuzen’s contribution to the eponymous exhibition at London’s Royal College of Art in 2000.

The male history of net.art?

I'm not sure what was more disturbing during this years' Venice Biennale opening week: the endless 'Luc Tuymans appreciation society' conversations at the Haig Bar or the notion that across town, net.art history was, yet again, being written by men - and hardly anything was being done about it.<*>