kusama pyjamas
Titled for Yayoi Kusama, who is the cat's pyjamas.
definition: Aya de Leon looks at the process of Bay area spoken word artist Aya de Leon, whose work is at all times political and certainly fresh. Whether dissecting images of women in hip hop, or exposing the constructs of gender and beauty, Aya de Leon makes you think, makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you listen. To learn more about the phenom’s work, check out the docu-bio, which explores the writer/poet/activist’s artistic process, and the lives she touches as she moves through the world.
* definition: Aya de Leon is Directed by Jennifer Ongiri Produced by Marla Renee Leech and Shalonda Ingram. via Purchase definition: Aya de Leon | Nursha Project
Assume Nothing: MilDred Gerestant (by kmacdonald1963)
Short film “Blending the female and male through MilDred” featuring artist MilDred Gerestant from the “Assume Nothing” Exhibition. This exhibition exploring alternative gender identity toured New Zealand Art Galleries and Museums for 18 months and features the photographs of Rebecca Swan and the films of documentary director Kirsty MacDonald.
For more information about the films please visit www.girl-on-a-bike-films.com
For more information about MilDred Gerestant, the artist formerly known as DRED
Progressive Humanitarian/Actress/Model Citizen/Healer/Activist/Haitian-American/Educator…please visit www.DredLove.com
Hey D.C./VA/MD folks, Sister Spit is coming to UMD on April 9! Come hang out!
Kirya Traber is a nationally awarded spoken word artist, a two-time 4-H Club president, a biracial child of a Swiss-German single mother, a social misfit, a country girl in the big city, and one of the most compelling poetic voices of her generation. She feels strangely comfortable in front of crowds of thousands, loves teaching and mentoring, and carries a gallon jug of water wherever she goes. Her most recent work can be found in print in her self published chapbook, “black chick.” She is currently working as with Youth Speaks where she develops and facilitates spoken word workshops for Bay Area teens.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kirya-Traber/65403348038?v=info
(via loveandzombies)
Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue is in NINE DAYS. I am so unbelievably proud to have created this event, to co-curate & co-host with the phenomenally brilliant Julia Serano, and to perform again this year. Also, full disclosure? I am so bloody nervous about my performance. It was an amazing night last year, & of course being the perfectionist I am, I want to top what I did a year ago. Wish me luck, okay?
Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
7:30pm - 9:30pm
S.F. LGBT Community Center - Ceremonial Room
1800 Market Street
Tickets: $12-$20
Buy Tickets On-line!: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/111553
More info here: http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/QFest10/GirlTalk.html
Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Trans and cis women are allies to each other every day — from activism that includes everything from Take Back the Night to Camp Trans; to supporting each other in having “othered” bodies in a world that is obsessed with idealized body types; to loving, having sex, and building family with each other in a world that wants us to disappear. Girl Talk is a spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships. Trans and cis women will read about their relationships of all kinds – sexual and romantic, chosen and blood family, friendships, support networks, activist alliances. Join us for a night of stories about sex, bodies, feminism, activism, challenging exclusion in masculine-centric dyke spaces, dating and breaking up, finding each other, and finding love and family.
CAST BIOS:
D. Rita Alfonso teaches LGBT and Queer Studies at UC Berkeley, and offers LGBT seminars to the queer public under the rubric of www.LGBTStudies.ning.com. Photography is another of her passions, and you will often see her about town documenting queer and trans events and performers; her photography can be found at dralfonsophotography.com.
Ryka Aoki de la Cruz is a poet, performer, and composer who has been honored by the California State Senate for creating Trans/Giving, LA’s only art/performance series dedicated to trans, genderqueer, and intersex artists. Ryka’s long poem “Sometimes Too Hot the Eye of Heaven Shines” has won RADAR Productions’ first Eli Coppola Memorial Chapbook Contest, and is forthcoming from Inconvenient Press. Her current project is Trans Office Hours, which matches trans-identified professors with trans-identified students entering or re-entering college. Ryka has a third-degree black belt in Kodokan Judo and is a professor of English at Santa Monica College.
Daughter and granddaughter of anarchist feminists, Danielle Askini is a feisty high femme hailing from all over. A queer activist since the womb, Danielle grew up doing battle with big boys—and winning. As a Trans activist Danielle has focused her work on creating safe schools, depathologizing trans and femme identities, and liberating health care for all people. Her writings have included “Social Work or Sex Work?” a critical examination of class inequality in social work education, and “Gender Refugee” a chapbook of poems and essays on gender transition and migration. She is fluent in Dutch and working hard on Swedish. Stockholm is her second home.
Meliza Bañales aka Missy Fuego writes books, sews clothes, and makes movies. She has toured with Sister Spit: The Next Generation and Body Heat: The Femme Porn Tour. She is currently working on a spoken-word album with Crunks Not Dead Records and another collection of short stories, Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific. She makes art in San Francisco.
Annie Danger is a fierce and fearsome performer. Raised in the desert by a pack of drag queen werewolves who were themselves a litter produced by Leigh Bowery, Marina Abramovic, and Andy Kaufman, Ms. Danger wants nothing more than your allegiance to the tenets of your own thoughtful ethics and a sturdy but flexible sense of humor. She is a transsexual woman who lives and loves in the San Francisco Bay area mostly. You can find out more at:www.anniedanger.webs.com
Gina de Vries is a queer cissexual femme woman, a Paisan pervert, and a writer, performer, and activist with a long history doing political organizing in and with queer and trans communities. As an activist, she is especially interested in the intersections of intersex, trans, reproductive justice, sex worker, multi-cultural, cross-class, and disability activism; and using art, writing, and performance as political tools. Gina’s writing has appeared dozens of places, from the academic to the pornographic – recent publications include Issue #4 of Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet, Girl Crush, and The Revolution Starts at Home. Gina has performed, taught, and lectured everywhere from chapels to leatherbar backrooms, and recent university appearances include Reed College, Yale University, and Harvard University. She is the founder and facilitator of Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop, a writing class for current and former sex workers at San Francisco’s Center for Sex & Culture (where she also serves on the Advisory Board). And, she’s currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction Writing at San Francisco State University. She likes glitter, the color fuchsia, leopard print, and political discussion as foreplay. Find out more at queershoulder.tumblr.com.
Zarah Ersoff is a queer musicologist, Southern dyke, teacher and activist. She divides her time in academia between exposing college students to the pleasures of camp, codes and concealment in LGBT popular music, and writing about the relationship between same-sex desire and colonialism in 19th-century French music. Originally from Winston-Salem, NC (illustrious home of Krispy Kreme donuts and Camel cigarettes), she now enjoys living richly without riches in Los Angeles with her lovely and talented partner Lauren Steely.
Julia Serano is an Oakland-based writer, performer and trans activist. She is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seal Press, 2007), a collection of personal essays that reveal how misogyny frames popular assumptions about femininity and shapes many of the myths and misconceptions people have about transsexual women. Julia’s other writings have appeared in anthologies (including BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, Word Warriors: 30 Leaders in the Women’s Spoken Word Movement, and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape), in feminist, queer, pop culture and literary magazines and websites (such as Bitch, AlterNet.org, Out, Feministing.com, Clamor, Kitchen Sink, make/shift, other, LiP and Transgender Tapestry), and have been used as teaching materials in gender studies, queer studies, psychology and human sexuality courses in colleges across North America. For more information about all of her creative endeavors, check out www.juliaserano.com.
E. Rose Sims, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, is a writer, religion scholar, medic, and survivor from rural Oregon. Dedicated to the projects of media justice, radical love, and community building, she writes online as “little light” at http://takingsteps.blogspot.com and elsewhere, serves on the advisory board of the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, and was a charter member of the Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Collective. She has recently performed with such diverse organizations as Detroit’s Allied Media Project, Seattle’s TumbleMe Productions, the National Queer Arts Festival, and the Bay’s own Mangos With Chili. Her writing has found its way everywhere from law school classrooms and academic conferences to bathroom mirrors and protest marches. Rose is currently busy being in good stories and getting preachy in Portland, Oregon, and is moving down to the East Bay this fall; she carries a pen, her ancestors, and the mismatched ID of a citizen of the borderlands with her at all times.
***This event received a Creating Queer Community Commission from Queer Cultural Center funded through the San Francisco Foundation.***
This looks truly amazing.
Yellow Rage “Listen Asshole”(S01 E02) (via kateJB2) 2008, via racialicious.Old but awesome!
Barbies in Saris - Ainee Fatima and Noor Hasan, Duo Slam Champions
Stayceyann Chin: Feminist or a Womanist
Jamaican Chinese American Lesbian Poet tears it up.
What Women Deserve - Sonya “The Drama” Boom Renee
Culturally-diversified bi-racial girl,
with a small diamond nose-ring
and a pretty smile
poses beside the words: “Women deserve better”.
And I almost let her non-threatening grin begin to
infiltrate my psyche-
till I read the unlikely small-print at the bottom of the ad.
‘Sponsored by the US Secretariate for Pro Life Activities
and the Knights of Columbus’
on a bus, in a city with a population of 563,000.
Four teenage mothers on the bus with me.
One latino woman with three children under three,
and no signs of a daddy.
One sixteen year old black girl,
standing in twenty two degree weather
with only a sweater,
and a bookbag,
and a bassinet, with an infant that ain’t even four weeks yet-
Tell me that yes: Women do deserve better.
Women deserve better
than public transportation rhetoric
from the same people who won’t give that teenage mother
a ride to the next transit.
Won’t let you talk to their kids about safer sex,
and never had to listen as the door slams
behind the man
who adamantly says “that SHIT ain’t his”-
leaving her to wonder how she’ll raise this kid.
Women deserve better than the three hundred dollars
TANF and AFDC will provide that family of three.
Or the six dollar an hour job at KFC
with no benefits for her new baby-
or the college degree she’ll never see,
because you can’t have infants at the university.
Women deserve better
than lip-service paid for by politicians
who have no alternatives to abortion.
Though I’m sure right now
one of their seventeen year old daughters
is sitting in a clinic lobby, sobbing quietly
and anonymously,
praying parents don’t find out-
Or is waiting for mom to pick her up because
research shows that out-of-wedlock childbirth
don’t look good on political polls.
And Sarah ain’t having that.
Women deserve better
than backward governmental policies
that don’t want to pay for welfare for kids,
or healthcare for kids,
or childcare for kids.
Don’t want to pay living wages to working mothers.
Don’t want to make men who only want to be
last night’s lovers
responsible for the semen they lay.
Just like [they] don’t want to pay for shit,
but want to control the woman who’s having it.
Acting outraged at abortion,
when I’m outraged that they want us to believe
that they believe
“Women deserve better”.
The Vatican won’t prosecute pedophile priests,
but I decide I’m not ready for motherhood
and it’s condemnation for me.
These are the same people
who won’t support national condom distribution
to prevent teenage pregnancy—
But women deserve better.
Women deserve better than back-alley surgeries
that leave our wombs barren and empty.
Deserve better than organizations bearing the name
of land-stealing, racist, rapists
funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains
with no money to give these women—
While balding, middle-aged white men
tell us what to do with our bodies,
while they wage wars and kill other people’s babies.
So maybe,
Women deserve better than propaganda and lies
to get into office.
Propaganda and lies
to get into panties,
to get out of court,
to get out of paying child-support.
Get the fuck out of our decisions
and give us back our VOICE.
Women do deserve better.
Women deserve choice.
Amazing.
