Should International Refugee Law Accommodate Climate Change? allAfrica, July 3, 2014
Ioane Teitiota, a Kiribati national, lost his asylum appeal in New Zealand this past May in a case In the case of cross-border movement, we’re looking at a gaping legal hole that would have made him the world’s first-ever “climate change refugee.” Mr. Teitiota moved there in 2007 with his family, claiming his island home was sinking and becoming too dangerous to live on. His lawyers argued that Mr. Teitiota was being “persecuted passively by the circumstances in which he’s living, which the Kiribati Government has no ability to ameliorate.”
New Zealand’s Court of Appeal ruled that while climate change is a major and growing concern for the international community, the phenomenon “and its effect on countries like Kiribati is not appropriately addressed under the Refugee Convention.” That 1951 treaty defines a refugee as a person who “has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”
“We don’t have, in international law, or any kind of mechanisms to allow people to enter a State against the will of the State, unless they’re refugees. And even then, they don’t technically have the right to enter, but they cannot be punished for entering,” the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, François Crépeau, told the UN News Centre. His mandate has been awarded by the Human Rights Council and his work is supported by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
I’m sorry for coining the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, Nathan Rabin, Salon, July 15, 2014
The trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a fundamentally sexist one, since it makes women seem less like autonomous, independent entities than appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualize. Within that context, the phrase was useful precisely because, while still fairly flexible, it also benefited from a certain specificity. Claire was an unusually pure example of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl — a fancifully if thinly conceived flibbertigibbet who has no reason to exist except to cheer up one miserable guy.
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In the years since I wrote about the MPDG, I’ve been floored by how pervasive the trope has become. At first it was just a few scattered mentions in other critics’ reviews. Then Zooey Deschanel strummed a ukulele and became a Hollywood It girl and suddenly the MPDG was everywhere.
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As is often the case in conversations about gender, or race, or class, or sexuality, things get cloudy and murky really quickly. I coined the phrase to call out cultural sexism and to make it harder for male writers to posit reductive, condescending male fantasies of ideal women as realistic characters. But I looked on queasily as the phrase was increasingly accused of being sexist itself.
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I feel deeply weird, if not downright ashamed, at having created a cliché that has been trotted out again and again in an infinite Internet feedback loop. I understand how someone could read the A.V. Club list of Manic Pixie Dream Girls and be offended by the assertion that a character they deeply love and have an enduring affection for, whether it’s Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall or Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby,” is nothing more than a representation of a sexist trope or some sad dude’s regressive fantasy.”
The tyranny of ‘beautiful but doesn’t know it’, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, July 17, 2014
The idea that a beautiful woman’s best quality is her obliviousness to the fact that she is beautiful is pretty insulting. If anything, we should be cheering women who continue to believe that they are beautiful despite a long-running campaign to make us feel like we look like monsters in order to sell us more shit.
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Personally, I think this is more about male self-esteem than female self-esteem. When a man talks about wanting a woman who is “beautiful but doesn’t know it”–what they are saying, essentially, is that they want a woman who is really hot, but is so oblivious to this fact that she won’t consider herself out of his league, or cheat on him. It’s about him having possession over her. The only one who can see her as she wants to be seen, and for that, she will remain grateful.
If you’ve ever heard an exchange between some fellas along the lines of “She’s hot”…”Yeah, but she knows it.” You can see where I’m getting this from. Because not only are women supposed to drive themselves bonkers adhering to impossible beauty standards, they are supposed to make it look effortless. They are supposed to hide all these things away from you, and assure you that no matter how hard she tries, she never feels like she succeeds. She will be grateful, so grateful to you, for making her feel beautiful.
