Can you imagine this wee thing asking you tough questions about your feminism? Disarming, indeed!

As Jessica Yee posted a few days back, the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre / Multicultural Women against Rape has been hosting a series of herstory (instead of history) events designed to recount our stories, remember our common purpose, embrace the activist in all of us, and to redefine feminism on our own terms. All of these reasons to get together sounded noble, so off I went.

Plus, it was just fun to see Thea Lim get interviewed by a lovely, well-worn pink plushy pig with pearls, who spoke from the comfortable position of Thea’s right hand. And this puppet piggy asked some tough questions! Only Thea Lim would dream up interviewing herself in such a way. I laughed so hard I almost dropped my Bundt cake. Here are a few highlights from Thea’s irreverent take on her developing years in feminism as a novelist, blogger, waitress, and cultural activist.

While I love Thea’s silly style, I really love how she connects her learning about feminism to everyday life. “I learned the most about feminism from working in a bar,” she explained, where she saw how women were treated, or ignored by customers, and was once told by someone that he and his friends had a bet going on her ethnicity. At her cocktail waitress job, she also spent a great deal of time watching television. Although Thea expressed some misgivings about the medium (“If TV is to be trusted, women would only be interested in rich hunks and clump-free mascara”), she also told of her love for pop culture as a way of connecting to feminism.

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Our friends at Worn Journal are launching their new issue #7 this Saturday November 29 in Toronto with style, as per usual!

The new issue includes articles on mannequin history, global fashion, luxury branding, and spandex!

You may remember Shameless reviewer Erin Elliott had this to say about Worn’s issue #5 in an older print issue of Shameless:

Discovering Montreal’s Worn Fashion Journal is as refreshing as trading in sweaty wool socks for liberating flip flops on the first day of spring. Worn aims to “discover what is of lasting value about clothing and style” by wandering through a walk-in closet’s worth of ideas about fashion and art. The history of Toile de Jouy - those 18th century scenes printed on your Grandma’s bedspread - reveals rich stories hidden in plain sight. Between Countess di Castiglione scandalous self-portraits in the 1800’s and Elsa Schiaparelli’s shoe-shaped hats that rocked the 1920’s, Worn writers showcase female fashion rebels that put L.A.M.B. to shame. In “The F Word” Emily Raine asks “If I’m a feminist, then why can’t I dress like a girl?” This inspiring magazine has a clear answer: You can.

The launch event is a winter formal slow dance which is all-ages and queer-friendly. It will take place at Dovercourt House (805 Dovercourt Rd, Toronto), a lovely dance studio decked with crepe paper streamers, balloons and mirror ball. You get a dancecard to reserve a special tune and Resident Dancers for any shy boys and girls. There is also a photographer to take date and non-date photos to remember the night (and outfits) by.

Doors open at 9:00pm. Entrance cost is $10 and includes a dancecard and Issue 7 of Worn Fashion Journal.

For more queer fashion inspiration, check out the photos after the jump!

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Have you heard of this amazing collective? Big up to the Medina Collective, an organization “dedicated to empowering young women of colour to challenge mass media messages by exploring hip hop, pop culture, media and education. Through activism, art, and access to the ivory tower, Medina provides young women with the tools they need to challenge the status quo.”

The group provides university-level courses (without the associated university-level cost!!) to young women aged 19-30 in the Toronto area.

Their most recent writing retreat (which just passed on November 29 and 30) is a build-up to their Philosophy of Love and Sex course in January 2009.

Legendary B-Girl Pioneers Asia One, Aruna, Lady Champ, Rockfella, Laneski and Aik at B-Girl Be Women’s Hip Hop Exhibit & Summit 2006. (Mural by Too Fly and Photo by Martha Cooper.)

The course will explore hip hop, sexuality and gender and will focus on why many women of colour do not, cannot and will not identify with many of the images associated with women in today’s hip hop culture.

The January course, offered in conjunction with Ryerson University, is “pay what you can” and is for university credit! For registration, contact Tonika at tonika.morgan@gmail.com.

If you have already had access to university education, there are still ways for you to be involved. Contact Tonika for details!

A few weeks ago I blogged about the horrific piece in the Globe and Mail by Margaret Wente. Squeezed in at the bottom was a quick reference and video link to what has been going on for the Algonquins of the northern Quebec community of Barriere Lake, following Jessica’s astute post on racism in that community. Please, I urge you to look at this video again.

After exhausting all political avenues, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake and many non-native supporters have blockaded Highway 117 twice. The video shows the first blockade, where the community, including Elders, youth and children, were met with a brutal police response. Riot cops used tear gas and pain compliance, instead of negotiators. The police response has drawn criticism from international human rights groups, the Chiefs of Ontario, and the Christian Peacemaker Team.

Algonquin children keeping watch over their community. This has been my desktop photo for a few weeks now to inspire me.

They will maintain the peaceful blockade until both the Canadian and Quebec governments honour their signed agreements that would allow co-management of their traditional territory and resource revenue sharing, and until Canada respects their leadership customs by appointing an observer to witness a leadership selection in accordance with their Customary Governance Code, and in good faith recognize the outcome.

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My awesome friend Sharon busts her butt every year organizing the Open Door Festival of Music. The festival has been running for eight years already! As usual, the festival has an amazing line-up of performers.

The 8th annual ‘OPEN DOOR’ Festival of Music BENEFIT!
Thursday, November 20, 2008 @ The MOD CLUB
722 College St. W. Toronto, Ontario
Doors at 6:30, Music at 7pm sharp!

The Ste Emilie Skillshare in Montreal has put out a call for their Queer and Trans People of Colour (Q/TPOC) Heroes Postcard series. Details below! What a cool project!

Hero Nina Simone, found on my blue t-shirt. Thank you to the creator of this image, but I don’t know who you are.

Calling all brown, black, mixed race, yellow, red, desi, African, Indigenous, First Nations, Inuit, Métis, Caribbean, Latin American, Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Aboriginal, non-white, non-European, (e)raced, (in)visible minority.

The Ste Emilie Skillshare is launching a postcard campaign to reclaim our colonized histories. Share your favorite q/tpoc heroes and we’ll print them on beautiful silkscreened postcards. Our goal is to flood the postal service with millions of inspiring q/tpoc heroes!

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I want to point your attention to Thea’s great post on racism at Hallowe’en over at Racialicious:

“Mainstream North American culture likes to define itself as cultureless, but Halloween is a very cultural practice. Not only is it a little weird (Just look at it from the point of view of an outsider. Send your kids out to strangers’ houses and tell them to ask for candy? Decorate your house like a graveyard? Dress up like a sexy version of a public health worker?) it is also based on difference - the point of Halloween is to dress up as “something different.” So how do people who are often made to feel visually different - you know, like people of colour - experience Halloween? The average Halloween costume tells us a lot about what we culturally consider to be abnormal.

It tells us that dressing up in an overtly sexy way is taboo - in other words, that we’re a pretty sex-negative people. It tells us that we are obsessed with strict gender categories - because most little boys and girls have to choose very gender-coded costumes, but also because for many young people Halloween is the one time they can experiment with gender in a socially sanctioned way.

And if dressing up as “something different” can typically involve wearing geisha make-up, a Native headdress, bling, or a turban, Halloween tells us that our cultural norm is a middle-class, North American, white person.”

Go over and read it. And Thea, where did you find that photo of the child dressed in terrorist costume? Unbelievable!(more inside…)

I have never liked Margaret Wente’s work in the Globe and Mail. In fact, I find her on her best days to be stridently conservative, and on her worst days, simply boring. But today, she wrote something completely unacceptable. I’m sitting here in shock, reading it over. Her opinion piece in the Globe and Mail describes how high-profile Olympics official Dick Pound, who called the Canada of 400 years ago “a country of savages”, said something “dumb, but true.”

Excuse me? Is it that the white settlers of this country need to continue to believe that they are the only anthropological experts able to claim what is true and historical and powerful? The piece is most definitely an indictment of native studies, traditional knowledge and elders finally working in systems of Canadian education and government: the halls of power in this country on native land.

The romanticization of Aborginal peoples that she describes is part and parcel of infantilizing them. This paternalistic approach capitalized on taking away Aboriginal rights to self-determination, culture, language, environment, dignity and hope for the future.

This approach was, and is, the chosen path of the Canadian government in resolving land claims and sovereignty rights.

That such a blatantly racist thing can be printed in Canada’s supposedly most progressive newspapers completely angers me. And she names the current reality of life for Aboriginal peoples in Canada merely a “cultural divide” not (my words) “Western colonialism based on total annihilation” ?

I’m seriously shaken. Tell me how this could be possible. Does this woman really believe that native culture is what kills Aboriginals in this country? You only need look at the recent video on what’s going on in Barriere Lake (Northern Quebec) to see who is attempting to kill who.

It’s true: we’re shameless about spreading the word of the amazing accomplishments of our team members.

Since our publisher and blogger Stacey May Fowles is probably all humble about it, I will do the honours of promoting her shamelessly!

She will be launching her new book, Fear of Fighting, illustrated by Marlena Zuber, at:

THIS IS NOT A READING SERIES
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen St. West (Queen just East of Dufferin)
Toronto
7:30PM-12AM

The two will compare notes with Mariko Tamaki on the creative process.

Since I’m all blocked and stuff, and considering the Artist’s Way (how 80s of me), I’m going to try and make it.

There will also be a live set by Tomboyfriend!