OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!

OTHER TONGUES: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out

Co-editors Adebe D.A. and Andrea Thompson are seeking submissions for an anthology of writing by and about mixed-race women, intended for publication in Fall 2010 by Inanna Publications.

The purpose of this anthology is to explore the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century. The anthology will also serve as a place to learn about the social experiences, attitudes, and feelings of others, and what racial identity has come to mean today. We are inviting previously unpublished submissions that engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis.
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AQSAzine, a grassroots zine for 16-35 year-old women and trans people who identify as Muslim, is launching its second issue at a free event hosted in partnership with The AGO Youth Council. The event is also a launch for Making Noise! Muslim women and trans people video project, and Jasmine Magazine, the first Palestinian Magazine in Toronto.

Making Noise! is an exciting hands-on media arts training that addresses the invisibility and negative portrayals of young Muslim women and trans people in the media, supported by the Urban Alliance on Race Relations.

The event will showcase videos, visual art, and readings by Azza Abbaro, Shadi Eskandani, Sidrah Ladin, Sara Mir, Samira Mohyeddin, Shara Mohammed, Golie Moulaie, and Sahar Rizi.

Musical performances by Farheen Beg & Arun Chaudhuri and Tanya Jacobs.

Dance performance by Raja Jalebi and Sheesha YaDil.

Plus: silk screening and zine-making workshops.

This event is part of the 16 Days to THRIVE! Challenging Violence Against Racialized Women and Our Communities.

Friday Dec. 4th, 6-8 p.m.
Art Gallery of Ontario
Anne Tannenbaum Gallery School
317 Dundas Street W., Toronto

Wow. I’m a big fan of Terry O’Reilly’s radio show The Age of Persuasion and I watch more Mad Men than I like to admit, but every time I think I’m a savvy mediaphile who’s completely immune to shock tactics in the world of advertising, those zany ad execs prove me wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Hit the Bitch is a Danish anti-violence-against-women campaign that works much like a video game where you’re supposed to, well, beat up a woman. Your mouse or webcam controls a big, hairy, manly arm that slaps and punches a very realistic avatar of a woman, complete with sound effects and bruises that appear on her face. Your “performance” is ranked on a scale that goes from PUSSY to GANGSTA (we’ll get to the racist implications in a second). I was not able to complete the game, because I must be a pussy (& proud to say it!) but according to the AdFreak researchers, who are more dedicated than me, when you’ve successfully reduced the woman to a tearful pulp the game calls you an idiot. Well, on behalf of all abused women worldwide, thanks a mill’.

Yeah, so I didn’t really want to include an image from the Hit the Bitch website, since I figure we see enough images of women being abused and victimized, so here instead are Thelma and Louise, who fought back. Enjoy!

The AdFreak piece already makes several strong points about the absurdity of the site (people who think it’s okay to commit violence against women will enjoy it, while people to whom it’s revolting won’t be able to look at it for more than a second; it makes violence against women into a game, which is not okay no matter what the message), and personally I tend to agree that doing something in the name of a cause I support doesn’t equal carte blanche. Plus and besides are there so few images of victimized and abused women in the world that we need to start making more of them? I’d be curious to know where other people stand on that, but before I open up the floor I want to comment on what to me is maybe the most disturbing aspect of this ad, which is the conflation of violence against women and what the makers seem to suggest is a “gangsta” or hip-hop lifestyle.

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One more thing to get excited about for the upcoming weekend: Angela Davis, activist, writer and professor, is speaking at McGill University this Thursday about the case of Oscar Grant, a young black man who was shot and killed by transit police in California on New Year’s Day 2009.

Aaaaand… Davis is going to be interviewed on my radio show earlier that day! Tune into Venus on CKUT 90.3 FM (you can listen online as well, just follow the directions on the website) around 1:30 this Thursday the 1st. This is a great opportunity to hear an activist icon being interviewed in a non-mainstream- media setting. You can bet you’ll hear questions and answers you wouldn’t get anywhere else.

An activist poster of Davis from the 1970s(?)

From the Media@McGill press release:

“Oscar Grant was a young Black man returning home by way of the Fruitvale BART station after celebrating the New Year. This was the only excuse the cop needed to end Grant’s life execution-style. Maybe Oscar was too loud, too proud, too Black. Maybe he was too calm during the taunts of the police. Or maybe it was for nothing at all.”

Coming only days before the inauguration of Barack Obama – as the world’s media was proclaiming the dawn of a new “post-racial America” – the case of Oscar Grant demonstrated the depth and complexity of the relationship between media, race and power.

Renowned human rights activist Angela Davis will reflect on this issue in a Media@McGill / Beaverbrook public lecture entitled “Media, Race and Power: The Case of Oscar Grant”.

Angela Davis is an American political activist and university professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Today, Davis continues to work for racial and gender equality, gay rights, and prison abolition and is a popular public speaker, nationally and internationally.

Thursday, October 1, 2009 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Room 132, Leacock Building, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec

There are few jobs in North America where exploitation of gender, race, and class intersect so sharply as in domestic work, where immigrant women from around the world labour in the homes of wealthy families in what are often dismal conditions: low wages, no security, fear of violence and deportation, and overwork. The situation of live-in caregivers (as they’re officially called by the state, erasing the fact that these women work, hard) in Canada briefly made headlines when MP Ruby Dhalla was accused of mistreating Magdalene Gordo and Richelyn Tongso. There has been a lot of academic and activist attention to the struggles of domestic workers in Canada, with groups calling for the elimination of the government program that capitalizes on historically undervalued work and the desperate economic situations of women around the world.

And so it is inspiring to read Lizzy Ratner’s article “The New Domestic Order,” a piece that describes the courage domestic workers in New York City have mustered to fight back against abuses and call for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, which could be the first of its kind. Women are calling for “severance and overtime pay, advance notice of termination, one day off a week, holidays, healthcare and annual cost of living increases, among other fundamental rights.” Seems pretty basic, huh? Ratner’s article looks at the history of domestic workers’ struggles for rights in the US and outlines the global political economic conditions that compel so many women around the world to migrate to work in other women’s homes. The story is heartbreaking and exhilarating; well worth a read.

Here’s something you Toronto readers may want to check out. It’s an art opening and also a screening of a film made by Jessica Yee, activist, community organizer, and Shameless blogger and contributor.

The Centre for Women’s Studies in Education and The Native Youth Sexual Health Network present:

Youth Resisting Colonialism and Rebuilding Pathways to Hope - A Film Screening and Art Exhibition

Monday, September 21st, 2009
OISE Building, 252 Bloor St. W., Room 2-212
6 pm to 9 pm (film @ 7 pm)

This event exhibits the work of youth reflecting their resistance to violence and colonialism through artistic expression.

The exhibit will be followed by a screening of Building a Highway of Hope, a documentary filmed and directed by Indigenous feminist activist Jessica Yee about the numerous disappearances and murders of Aboriginal women along Highway 16 in British Columbia, followed by a panel discussion featuring Jessica Yee of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, Charlene Catchpole, Executive Director of the North York Women’s Shelter, and Tannis Nielsen, Artist and Youth Program Coordinator, Native Canadian Centre of Toronto.

The exhibition will continue until October 2, 2009.

Light refreshments will be served. Venue is wheelchair accessible.
For more information contact the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education at: 416-978-2080 or cwse@oise.utoronto.ca

Just read a great article over at Bully Bloggers about Caster Semenya, the South African runner who recently underwent gender testing after she won a gold medal in Berlin. Incidentally, she also recently underwent a makeover, presumably with the purpose of quelling the panic that ensued around having a gender-ambiguous athletic hero. It’s disturbing on many levels, and the article’s author, Tavia Nyong’o, does a great job of tying in historical ideas of race and gender and how they play into what seems to be a good old-fashioned gender panic in the media, both for those who accuse and mock the runner and those who defend her. “If ever a case called for an intersectional analysis that included queer and trans perspectives, as well as anti-racist and anti-imperialist ones, this is it,” she writes.

Interestingly, many forums seem to agree that Semenya must feel “humiliated” (see link above), as much as at the gender testing as at the makeover, which makes her look like a “normal” teenage girl (whatever that means). Although I absolutely agree that no one should be subjected to gender oppression in the form of forced or coerced adoption of gender norms, it strikes me as odd that these media outlets tie “feminine” to “humiliating” so easily, while simultaneously continuing to push the same old agenda of representing attractive femininity as slim, delicate, long-haired and white. And preferably in a bikini. The cries of “she’s beautiful just the way she is!” seem a weeeee bit forced. In any case, I do recommend Nyong’o’s article for an interesting and challenging (if somewhat gender-studies-lingo-heavy) read.

Semenya in action

Did someone say “gender is fluid”?

An eight year-old Liberian refugee girl was raped by a group of four boys in Arizona, just a little under two weeks ago. According to the Phoenix police, the four boys, ages nine to 14, lured the girl with chewing gum into a shed by a vacant apartment unit, where they restrained her and took turns sexually assaulting her. Charges have been filed against the boys, with the oldest boy being tried as an adult.

Oddly, the media and public outcry isn’t around the actual crime and the socio-economic factors that may have contributed to the horrific incident. Instead, what many are outraged about is how the girl’s family has disowned her for the shame she has brought onto the family. There is no doubt that the incident was awful and demands justice and healing for the girl, but what is going on here?! As expected, there are many racist comments on the “backwardness” of “these people” and how they need to be reminded that the United States is a “civilized” society. Let’s try to remember that cultivation of shame around rape also exists in our own backyards. How many times have girls and women been told that they shouldn’t have worn that outfit or that they shouldn’t have looked at that person that way? How many times have girls and women been told they were lying about their assaults? All of this suggest that rape is at the fault of the victims and they ought to be ashamed of themselves. Shame around rape is not specific to ethnicities. The end.

Media networks, the Phoenix police and child welfare organizations have received many phone calls and emails from concerned citizens who “want to help.” Many want to help by giving money and others…want to adopt. The idea of a young girl who has recently undergone serious trauma, coupled with the fact that she was forced out of her homeland due to violence, being snatched up by some good Samaritans is horrifying. Need I remind these do-gooders that adoption might not be in the best interest of the young refugee girl? Let us not forget the plethora of problems with adoption, specifically transnationally and transracially. Clearly, at this point, the girl needs to be temporarily looked after and cared for, but that’s a different story.

We know nothing about the relationships within the girl’s family. Neither do we know the factors that contributed to the family disowning her. What I do know is that the general public does not take into consideration the nuances behind such an incident and are very quick to jump to racist, “well-intentioned” conclusions.

Check out this rad retreat happening in Manitoba this summer!

The Youth Activist Retreat is a free, five-day overnight camp that brings together activists aged 16-20. YAR is a great place to meet other young folks who are interested in social change and to learn new skills and ideas.

YAR 2009 is being held August 10th to 14th in Clearwater, Manitoba.

During the week of the retreat, participants will take part in workshops and other events to learn from other experienced activists about different political struggles and issues.

The retreat offers a variety of workshops to accommodate all levels of experience. Whether you just want to sit back and listen, or work with others to develop strategies for organizing, YAR is a great place to meet other youth who care about similar issues.

Workshops are taught by people who have experience working for social change, including organizers, activists, and artists.

Some of this year’s workshops will include Worker’s Rights and Unions, Anti-Racism, Colonization in Canada, Ecological Justice, Gender Oppression and Heterosexism, Direct Action, and many others. There will also be creative workshops offered on silk-screening, radio, puppet-making, and zines!

The retreat is completely free; all that is asked for is your time and commitment. Some travel subsidies are available for people who live outside of Winnipeg.

YAR is an anti-racist, LGBT*-positive event, and is wheelchair accessible.

Register early, because spots are filling up fast!

VISIT YAR’S WEBSITE FOR MORE INFO: http://youthactivistretreat.ca