transsexualferox:

I’ve always dreamt of working in visual mediums, particularly film. I did a little bit of it in high school and college, but growing up poor, I always had to borrow someone else’s equipment. For a while after college I looked at film schools, but eventually relinquished the idea in favor of a more mundane, “stable” career.

The problem with mundane and stable is that they sometimes don’t play well with trans people. So now, 14 years later, we’re back to “fuck it” and pipe dreams. As luck would have it, the local community college has a highly-regarded multiple Emmy-nominated digital video production program, and I have just about enough unsubsidized federal aid available to me to pursue it as a second undergrad degree. But, of course, the degree is just part of it.

This is the camera I’m going to be learning on (click through to check out the awesome specs). At some point I’m going to have to own one of these, or something very similar.

Also Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, After Effects, a better computer than my little MacBook Pro, and any number of other accoutrements.

And oh yeah, my unemployment benefit is either over, or will be within a few weeks, which means basic things like car insurance, cell phone, and prescriptions are going to become a worry again.

I’ve said before I don’t think people should feel bad about asking for help, and yet I always feel terribly awkward doing it myself. But there it is…if you can and you want to invest in my future, I have a donations page here. 

Reblogs are also very helpful and appreciated.

Best wishes,

Renee

thegang:

Each year, QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR MEDIA ARTS PROJECT offers 4 free Filmmaking Workshops through our award-winning Training Program. Our workshops serve teenagers to elders. 

To better serve our community, QWOCMAP has conducted Training Program workshops specifically for youth (ages 18 to 25), queer folks of color who are butch/genderqueer/transgender, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black/African descent, Chicanas/Latinas, and Native American/Indigenous/First Nations queer women. We also offered a workshop focused on queer immigration. We do this to deepen the dialogue and address issues specific to each community’s needs. 

Intermediate workshops (and soon, advanced workshops) are available to participants who have completed a film through our QWOCMAP introductory workshop. Information regarding intermediate workshops will be announced through our filmmaker listserve and on this page when available. Please contact TRAINING@qwocmap.org with questions or inquiries. 

Jump to QWOCMAP FREE Video WORKSHOP FOR YOUTH 2012 Jump to QWOCMAP FREE VIDEO WORKSHOP 2012

(via etiquette-etc)

melissa:

sippor:

Sarah Pinder and I are putting together a zine!

Call for Submissions:
Penpal Adventures! A Curated Zine on the Experiences of Girls as Penpals

Were you a pre-teen or teen girl in the late 80s and early 90s? Do you remember penpal ads and slambooks? Did you collect stationery, address labels and have a special pen? Did you spend hours writing pages and pages to people you had never met and would probably never meet?

We want to hear about it!

We are looking for personal essays, nonfiction prose, comics, letters/excerpts, photos and ephemera from your days of pre-internet correspondence. 

Possible topics include:

• Collecting penpals
• School penpals 
• Writing to strangers vs. writing to people you had met 
• Stationery and presentation 
• Your letter writing persona 
• The transition from letter writing to email, websites and social media 
• The privacy of pre-internet communication 
• Classified ads 
• How letter writing informed real life friendships and perceptions of how relationships should work

The zine will be half size and double page spreads are encouraged for visual work.

Deadline: February 1st 2012

Please send submissions to: penpal.zine@gmail.com

Pass it on.

Were you? I was. Let’s do this.

via karaj:

we want your art and/or design skills for a poster publicizing an upcoming conference hosted by the academic journal women & performance! 

the conference is a big deal for us and we will be putting posters up all over the place—at NYU and other nearby schools and at other feminist events. we don’t have a big budget, but we would be able to pay you something, and you would get lots of publicity. 

interested? please email me at managingeditor@womenandperformance.org with some links to your best work and we will take it from there. thank you!

tiaramerchgirl:

creatrixesofawesome:

Photo by TheGiantVermin on Flickr

The Creatrixes of Awesome are people from various fields and walks of life who have created something truly awesome. Whether it is a form of art they practice regularly, or a once-off event, or a little ditty on Youtube - all forms of creation are respected and welcomed.

Each creatrix is given the same set of questions to answer (coupled with some lovely photos, a short profile/bio, and relevant links):

What did/do you create?

Why did/do you decide to pursue this creative mode?

What did/do you do to get your creations made and out there?

When did/do you create? Is this something you do regularly?

What does being a Creatrix of Awesome mean to you?

Share with us some of what you feel is Awesome:

Recommend another Creatrix of Awesome to us:

And here’s the extra-fun part: each interview is accompanied with a step-by-step guide to creating something awesome, from the Creatrixes themselves! It can be directly related to their creation (such as a filmmaker’s guide to making short film) or totally offbeat (a porn star’s favourite recipe for chocolate cake). That way, you can join in on creating your own awesome too!

Creatrixes of Awesome is committed to portraying diversity in all forms, and to prioritise people & voices that are often marginalised in society - across cultures, nationalities, genders, sexual orientations, class barriers, occupations, and so on. 

To join in the fun, submit an interview of yourself (or someone else) with the following:

• A short profile (who you are, where you’re from, anything else - it’s up to you)
• Links to you, your work, and anything else that seems relevant
• Photos - at least one of you or your work, but more’s good too!
• The answers to these interview questions
• Your own step-by-step guide to creating something awesome - it can be as (un)related to your work as you wish!

Be as verbose or concise as you wish! There are no wrong answers! Don’t worry if you don’t think you’re awesome enough or famous enough or “creatrix” enough - everyone’s welcome.

Feel free to send in questions or suggestions for who to interview, check out how else you can help this project, and share share share!

Thank you! <3

Ah yes, another midnight idea has stricken me. But come join me, it’s an idea I’ve been tossing about in my head for a little while, and I’m sure just you readers combined can come up with some awesome people :D

Another awesome project instigated by Tiara, share with your creator friends tumblr people, looks like an open call.

(via creatrixtiara)

tiaramerchgirl:

banQuet 2012: A feast of new writing and art by Australian Queer Women & banQuet 2012: A feast of new writing and art by Australian Queer Men

The anthologies showcase a broad range of innovative, engaging quality writings and art by emerging and established queer writers/artists about LGBTIQ sex and sexualities.

Challenge and surprise us. Introduce us to your complex and flawed queer protagonists and antagonists. Take us for a ride on the seamy side of LGBTIQ lives! We’d love to look at writings and art about queers falling in and out of bed or love!

banQuetpress supports community diversity.

More information on deadlines and guidelines right here.

(Source: creatrixtiara)

fuckyeahfemmes:

Attention all Femmes that are strapped/poor/broke ass/working class Artists! Performers! Writers! Activists! Wanderers! Seekers!

We are looking for submissions for our zine compilation of stories and art from the road that we are calling Bus Fare To Kentucky.

Show us how do you feed yourself artistically and otherwise. How you afford plane tickets, train tickets and gas money. How you make it all fit in your suitcase. Show us your tour romances, hook ups, art inspiration and friends you made along the way. We want your struggle and your triumph. We want to know your hilarious, raunchy, heartbreaking and fierce stories of touring and traveling with your art (whatever that looks like for you) and making it work while maintaining your standard of Femme in the process.

We accept all visual art, photography, stories as long as it can be emailed. Stories must be submitted in Times 12 point single spaced. Art must be a reasonably high DPI and viewable on a Mac.

Femmes of any gender and ability welcome and encouraged to submit. Tell your friends!

Deadline for this project is March 15th.

(Source: femmestyles, via fuckyeahfemmes)

QLit: Call for Queer Performance Art: This is What I Want 2011

We are looking for performance work in whatever form YOU make it, ie: dancing, reading, reciting, reporting, researching, laying down, crying, singing, etc.

This event exists within an implicit understanding that the s3xual is both constructed and essential; that the way we fukc or don’t fukc is based on how much money we have, who we are afraid of, which tab00s we hurl ourselves toward and why, what feels good, what makes us feel dead and like nothing, what our friends like, what our parents fear, what we want our children to become, what we need RIGHT NOW. In this discourse, we confront our contradictions and do whatever they demand that we do.

This years festival will be curated local queer literary queen Michelle Tea, porn trailblazer and political visionary Jiz Lee, choreographer and dance community teacher and guru Amara Tabor-Smith, and Bessie Award-winning dance and performance artist Keith Hennessy.

Submissions for THIS IS WHAT I WANT 2011 will be hungrily accepted Jan 17th through February 15th, and our decisions will be sent out by March 1st.

guerrillamamamedicine:

outlaw midwives vol 2!

so here is the draft of outlaw midwives vol 2.  uploaded onto scribd. 64 pages. 

click here for the zine. 

the upload to scribd was imperfect.  there are about two-three pages that for some reason didnt upload.  pretty random.  (i think it is because in general the internet has been running slower since the protests began in cairo.  the egyptian govt fucked with twitter as it is, since that and fb is where a lot of the organizing is happening for the protests)  so i am going to upload it again, but until then, enjoy this. 

——

I love volume 2 of outlaw midwives.  I love it because it is full of personal stories from the frontlines of birth work and mothering.  As I printed out the articles and sat on the floor with glue stick and scissors, stapler and paper, I could hear the air crackle around me as the electric heater burnt slowly.  These pages are pointing to a path of liberation and magic.  To a place where justice = love. 

These stories run the gamut, from supporting women’s access to abortion to discovering that breastfeeding can be painful and exhausting.  From questioning who homebirth is really for, to mamas discussing marginal identities in the natural birth community.  There are visions for what midwifery could be, should be, and what it should never have become.  Stories about death.  And yes, stories about birth.  Most of all, these are stories, our stories, that we need. 

So please enjoy, pass along, and support outlaw midwives by any means necessary. 

——-

cover art –soraya jean louis

bird blues baby—soraya jean louis

love, sister—soraya jean louis

outlaw midiwives and outlaws—ash johnsdottir

black women birthing resistance—cara page and tamika middleton

evidence-based medicine—gloria lemay

my secondary post-partum hemorrhage experience—rebecca j. haines-saah phd

love and lost, for julie—brooke benoit

homebirth and no home—da midwife

on birth and choice—pamela hines powell

abortion in florida—randi james

i wonder what would happen if midwives…—carla hartley

what they don’t tell you about breastfeeding—aaminah al-naksibendi

stepping out—mai’a, aaminah al-naksibendi, amy gow, Patrice nichole byers, china

body pirate: how my body was taken hostage by a nursing toddler—laurel ripple carpenter

the c-section—alexis gumbs

a hard rains a-gonna fall—ash johnsdottir

——

also in this zine you will find call for submissions for the bridge called my baby anthology and for outlaw midwives vol 3. 

with love,

mai’a

Euphoric Femme is a series of audio-visual artworks inspired by sex-positive feminism, and which explore women’s sexual subjectivity through non-objective media art experiences. The artworks are created in artistic collaboration with people who identify as women and want to explore and reinvent sexual expression and representation.

[…]

Call for artistic collaboration:

If you identify as a woman and are interested in contributing to these artworks, and are of age of majority, please email me at euphoricfemme@gmail.com.  After we confirm your age of majority, I will email you the submission information and a consent form (confirming the use and protection of your contribution). Currently, there are two projects you can collaborate in as follows:

The first is an online artwork, an ever-expanding sound and image piece featuring up-to-date contributions from co-creators. While self-pleasuring, women take a photo of themselves or record their sound. Women then ornamentalize their photo into a mandala-like image (such as the one in the top right corner of the screen) using a simple special effect, or I edit their sound into a meditative and harmonic composition (resulting images & sounds are unrecognizable). The final result is an online slideshow with soundtrack, which you can experience here.

The second is a spring 2011 exhibition, an immersive audio-video installation whereby women create personal autoerotic image and sound recordings as source content for an audience-engaged interactive artwork. At the exhibition, visitors play with an interface to trigger kaleidoscope-like videos and meditative sounds (all unrecognizable) from the women’s recordings. 

Not sure what the timeline is for submitting..

(Source: creatrixtiara)

QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival. Call for Artists and Makers. Big Gay June Show in San Francisco. | The Gay Highwaymen

As a part of the 2011 National Queer Arts Festival, “A Sustainable Queer Planet,” the Visual Arts Committee of the Queer Cultural Center presents: QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival

Inspired by the late 1960s utopian builders’ guide A Whole Earth Catalog, QIY – Tools for Survival presents an exhibition of queer do-it-yourself culture and alternative world making.

QIY is envisioned as a laboratory for creating a sustainable queer culture and demonstrating the power of self and community organizing, re-creation, speculation, and transformation. As an antidote to anti-sociality theories of queerness (that suggest queerness can only be rendered as a negation of heteronormativity), Queer It Yourself invites artists to forge their own tools for surviving the everyday challenges of contemporary queer existence. ….

tiaramerchgirl:

We’d like to invite you and your friends to present at Brisbane’s first (in a while) Erotic Cabaret!

Mid-Feb 2011 (either 13th or 19th February), better name in the works.

The private intimate space of the Haus of Anubis in Spring Hill allows for edgier performances than most licensed venues…

(Source: facebook.com, via creatrixtiara)

transpride:

A community art project. Transsexual and transgendered people tend to get too caught up in things they don’t like about their body that I thought I’d encourage us to shift the focus. Submit a picture or statement explaining something you love about your body. It could be something you love that it can do physically, something intrinsic to it or something that you’ve changed (through hormones or surgery or not). Really anything is fair game if it gives you self-confidence. It can be something small and doesn’t have to be rooted in masculinity or femininity.

(Source: xxboy, via transpride)