Queer, Trans, Feminist Projects to Watch in 2012

Happy New Year!

As we dig into 2012, I have several exciting things to announce.

First, a href=http://www.queerfeminism.comQueerFeminism.com/a has officially launched! Focusing on areas where the feminist movement could improve, including queer/trans inclusion, anti-racism, disability, and decolonization, this is a collaborative site that welcomes contributions from anyone who has thought I wish feminism would do better with me and my community.

Second, Ive been very pleased with participation in the Sunday Twitter chats I launched in the fall. #transchat and #queerchat take place alternating Sundays, 2-4 pm. Anyone can suggest a topic by contacting me on Twitter or just leaving a comment here.

Finally, I have several cool workshops and talks coming up. At Creating Change, the nations premiere LGBT organizing conference in Baltimore, Ill be leading a workshop Friday morning, January 27th, on incorporating ambiguous identities in queer organizing. At Lavender Languages (Saturday, February 11th) Ill be facilitating a lunchtime workshop on the words used to describe non-binary identities and populations. At Momentum (last weekend in March, workshop date TBA) Ill be leading Workshopping Your Sexual Orientation, a unique experience that will break your sexuality wide open. If youd like me to speak on your campus or at your organization, let me know. I still have spring dates available.

Also, no details yet, but look for more coming from me at Gender Across Borders.

White Feminists: It’s Time to Put Up Or Shut Up on Race

Listen up, white feminists.

We have a problem.  I’m including myself because none of us are immune from this problem.  We all fuck up.  And you can say “fucking up is natural,” and that’s true, but it’s time for us to start identifying our fuck ups, and not just learning from them, but acknowledging the hurt they cause other people.

We need to acknowledge that we cannot know what it’s like to be an oppressed racial minority.  Cannot.  The end.  Period.  We don’t know because we’re queer, because we’re disabled, because we’re Jewish, because we were the nerdy kid in school.  These things may have hurt us severely, but we need to stop playing Oppression Olympics and acknowledge that when we’re talking about race we Do.  Not.  Know.  No more metaphors.

Love Your Body Day: Complex Body Relationships

This post is part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival

As feminists share tips, stories, and body love today, I am pleased to see that some are also highlighting the negatives of the body-love imperative.  While fighting body-negative messages is crucial, it is important to recognize that the goal should be acceptance of others’ bodies, not unqualified love of one’s own.  For many people, including transgender, genderqueer, and intersect people, people with disabilities, people with a history of eating disorders, and those with a history of sexual assault, body love may not be a comfortable or appropriate goal.  It’s important to realize that for some of us, a body is an inconvenience or a hindrance, and that experience is just as valid as body-love.  

So what tips would I share on Love Your Body Day?

1.  Speak to others in a thoughtful, compassionate way about bodies.  Recognize that people’s relationships with their bodies vary widely and respect that.  Don’t speak in absolute terms or offer advice when it’s not wanted or needed.  For example, don’t sing the praises of exercise–many feel that while it’s wrong to criticize someone’s weight, exercise is right for everyone, and that simply isn’t true.

2.  Be gentle with yourself if you have difficulty with body-love.  Sometimes our bodies are disappointing.  They might not function how we’d like them to.  It might be hard to gain or lose weight.  We might have health problems we can’t control, or a body that doesn’t feel right for our gender.  If nurturing your body isn’t appropriate for you, try nurturing your mind or your spirit.  A lot of body issues are mental health issues, and it can help to have a safe space to talk those out, even if they aren’t “fixable.”

3) Look for and give support where you can.  It might be helpful to share experiences with others who have similar body issues.  This doesn’t have to be a formal support group–I’ve seen plenty of this on Twitter and Tumblr.

4) Think of ways to visualize yourself or express your creative spirit–this doesn’t necessarily have to involve your body.  For example, you might design an avatar or a work of art to represent you, make a spirit wall, practice creative visualization to envision yourself in some way other than the embodied, or use fashion to cover your body or make it less noticeable than what you’re displaying on it.

5) Assert your right (and others’) to take up space in a way that works for you.  It’s okay to say that your body fucking sucks.  You have a right to be sad, hurt, or angry.  Anyone who insists that you love your body, get over your issues, or make more of an effort to love yourself is practicing emotional abuse.  You have a right to inhabit physical space as well.  You have a right to accommodations that you need.  You have a right to say no to anything that makes you uncomfortable.  You have a right to tell others not to say things about your body that they think are positive, and not to touch your body.  These are all parts of bodily autonomy.

Progressive Women’s Voices

Just a note to let you know that I’ll be out and about for the weekend with the Progressive Women’s Voices program through the Women’s Media Center in New York.  This year’s class is a phenomenal bunch of activists, performers, and opinionmakers, and I’m happy to be a part of it.  I’ll be Tweeting when I can @queerscholar, but otherwise offline.  Have a great weekend!

Will Blog for Money: Help Me Get a Copy of Feminism for Real

So, readers, I was having a little conundrum today.  I really would like to review the new anthology Feminism for Real, but I am in the middle of a strict austerity plan due to a soul-crushing dental bill.  I was agonizing over how to get together the $15 to buy the book when I had a thought: why not offer blog posts for money?  Here’s what you do: comment, Tweet @ queerscholar, or leave a message on the Radically Queer Facebook page with a topic, issue, etc. you’d like me to blog on.  The first three that I am able to do, I’ll let you know that your idea has been selected and give you instructions to Paypal me $5 towards the book.  Sound easy?  It is!  Can’t wait to hear your ideas.

How to Improve Feminist Blog Culture

I’ve been away from this blog for a couple of months, so I’ll start with an apology.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, a lot of adjusting, related to my participation in online communities and how I juggle self-care with all my different online pursuits.  I will try to keep posting regularly here, but I would encourage you to follow my Twitter feed and/or Facebook Page if you want very regular updates, as I’ve been updating those during breaks at work.

So now I’m back, and I want to talk a little bit about something that’s going around, namely a critical discussion of feminist blog culture and its participants.  I don’t want to call out any particular blogs here, but I do want to talk a little bit about my participation in this culture and how I’m changing it.  For a long time, I’ve followed a few big feminist group blogs, and just a couple of individual ones.  At times, I’ve noticed things I don’t like on these big blogs–for example, not enough participation from women of color, marginalization of commenters who try to bring up multiple oppressions, etc.  But my initial view of large feminist blogs has been that we’re all into intersectionality, diversity, and bringing together all sorts of activist issues under the umbrella of feminism.  I saw these missing pieces as an aberration and have felt like I “can’t” remove these big blogs from my Google Reader because that’s where I can get the best feminist content.

My views on this subject have been changing over the past couple of years.  I still enjoy some of the bigger blogs, and particular contributors and guest contributors to those blogs.  I do appreciate the focus on intersectionality that is often apparent in the selection of guests and in individual posts.  But I also see something lacking.  Lately, I’ve noticed a disturbing backlash and a tendency to get defensive when someone brings up inclusion issues in the feminist community.  It’s starting to look sadly like confrontations I’ve read about in the 1960s, where WOC were left out of both feminist and anti-racism circles, where queer women were shoved to the side.  When marginalized feminists want to be included in the conversation, those feminists are often bullied out by a majority of often-white, often-able-bodied, often-middle-class, often-cis-gendered people.

My solution is to expand the reach of my feminist reading, and to give support and my ear to blogs that focus on specific issues that intersect with gender–for example, race, disability, fat activism, class, and immigration.  By following a selection of interesting blogs and Twitter feeds that focus on these issues, and are written by feminists that are often marginalized in different ways, I’m getting a more complete picture when it comes to the issues that are important to me as a feminist.  I realize that not everyone has the time to do this, but I think the online feminist community could benefit from more of us reading and commenting on these solo blogs, and possibly taking some time off the bigger blogs to do it if that’s the only way we can make time.  Feminists can support each other while simultaneously using a critical lens to view each other’s posts, and I’m going to do my best to meet these goals in the years to come.

International Women’s Day Link Roundup

Of course, there’s a plethora of great content circulating the web for IWD today.  Here are a few hits that I enjoyed:

• A short piece by Nancy Pelosi on Huffington Post, Agents for Change
• Also on HuffPo, Queen Raina of Jordan writes on A Century of Giving Back, and Queen Noor highlights The Arab Women You Don’t See
• This one is also rather brief, but Annie Lennox is one of my personal heroes, and she writes on Reclaiming Feminism
• Getting more concrete, Sarah Brown writes on Meeting the Need for Health Workers and Christy Turlington covers maternal mortality
• Ursula Lindsey at the Daily Beast gives us an update on women in Egypt
• Newsweek and the Daily Beast list 150 Women Who Shake the World
• Ronnie Cho at the Daily Beast highlights some charities that you can get involved with to help women
• Democracy Now! interviews Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif

Also, just in general, Huffington Post has a number of interesting columns today (some more substantive than others) from some of the world’s female movers and shakers.  If you enjoy reading the editorial page, you’ll probably have fun with those.

International Women’s Day: How to Support Women Activists

As a scholar in the field of international human rights, with a particular focus in gender and sexuality, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about legal reform and activism, and how activists working in one country can support those working in another.  Of course, social media and the Internet in general make international support much easier on a media/intellectual/writing level.  But there are still a lot of problematic stances that come up that are a disservice to women everywhere.  The following are a few tips I’ve picked up in my reading and activism that I’d like to share in celebration of International Women’s Day:

1. Take a back seat.  If you are foreign to a cause, don’t try to crowd the stage.  This is true not just in the sense of being from another country, but also applies to gender, race, ability, age… pretty much any identity marker that puts you outside of the issue at hand.  White people shouldn’t be leading POC movements.  Men shouldn’t be leading women’s movements.  So why do we find it acceptable for Americans and Europeans to “bring” education, democracy, etc. to women in the developing world?  Sit back, chill a little, listen and learn.  Be an ally or a participant, but don’t try to run the show.
2. Lend resources where resources are needed.  Instead of “helping” people in a way that seems to make sense, listen to what’s needed.  If you want to get involved with an issue in another country, research what’s going on.  Ask questions.  Learn from those directly involve.  Find out what’s needed–fundraising?  Legal support?  Support with infrastructure-building?  For example, think about what would be possible if US sources provided funding for women’s education, but asked what women wanted to learn and developed a book list based on extensive listening to a particular culture’s needs.
3. Apply lessons at home.  So many activists travel to another country to “help” the local population, only to learn how messed up their home situation is.  Women all over the world are struggling under the yoke of sexism, patriarchy, colonialism, and oppression.  Apply lessons learned abroad to local communities.  Listen to women in other countries and cultures, and also to women in different neighborhoods of your home community.  Grassroots activism, microenterprise, and phenomenal educational efforts often spring up out of communities where change is needed both at home and abroad, and these efforts can teach all of us a lot about the nature of our societies and our lives.

Alternatives to Strength and Anger

I hear a lot in feminist circles about strength.  Strength is a value that’s really embraced in feminism, along with independence and anger.  And of course, women do have a great big right to be angry.  The stereotype that women should be soft, weak, sweet, submissive, etc., does a great injustice to an entire gender.  But feminism is also, as I see it, about recognizing a wide range of possible behaviors that doesn’t depend on gender.  It’s about safe space.  And for me, it’s much more important to have a space in which it is safe to be soft, sweet, and react to negative events with sadness and a need for protection than it is to have the right to be angry.

The fact is, not everyone feels anger.  And no one has a responsibility to feel angry, to be strong, or to be independent.  You’re not a bad feminist if you just can’t react that way.  It’s okay to depend on other people for support, reassurance, and even protection.  If someone threatens you, gets in your personal space, or uses innuendos that make you feel uncomfortable, you’re not a bad person if you can’t “handle it” on your own.  My reaction in such a situation is to freeze, and to feel embarrassed and sad.  And that’s okay.  For a long time, I thought that I needed to work towards instead feeling angry, getting hostile, and yelling at the person in question.  But that communication style goes against my personal values.  I don’t really want to confront anyone.  I want the world to be a place that’s safe enough that I don’t have to.

Of course, the world isn’t that place now.  But I would honestly rather be harmed or attacked than I would go against my values and my personality in an attempt to defend myself.  My pacifism and my conviction that my communication style is 100% as valid as the alternatives are worth sticking up for.  In the mean time, I’m going to keep working to educate those who aren’t familiar with radical feminism about how to make the world a safer place, and I’m going to keep working with my own process of feeling proud of myself as a somewhat shy, anxious, sweet person who needs a little protecting from time to time.

Women’s Equality Day: What Is Suffrage, Anyway?

I think most of us who grew up in the United States in the late 20th century have a limited understanding of what the right to vote actually means.  As we celebrate 90 years of women’s suffrage this year, it’s interesting to look back to the founding of the US and consider what voting, and democracy, meant to early Americans.

I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States this week, and its chapters do a great job of putting democracy in perspective.  The Founders, lauded in our classrooms as almost omnipotent men, benevolent providers of justice and equality, were actually concerned at the founding of our country about making the Constitution too democratic.  The Founders didn’t want to risk the United States becoming a nation where rich and poor people alike had a share in the workings of state, and they certainly didn’t see blacks, women, Indians, or recent immigrants getting involved.  Property qualifications varied from state to state, but everywhere the voting population was a definite minority of the general populous.

Now, of course, people can vote without owning any property.  Blacks, women, naturalized citizens, American Indians, and the poor make up a large part of the total voting population.  But capitalism is still firmly entrenched in our ideas of government and society.  Children still sneer at “commies,” and those in power are ingenious at turning different groups against one another and stigmatizing any desire for socialism or communal living.  Our system of property ownership, our “rags to riches myth,” the institution of marriage–all these things perpetuate a capitalist ideal that focuses on the individual, not the group.  And who’s in power?  Well, the business interests still aren’t doing too badly.  Rich white men may be joined by women and people of color in the corridors of power, but classism in the United States is alive and well, along with racism and sexism.

So let’s continue fighting for equality, rather than resting on our laurels.  Let’s take this occasion to reflect on how we can use our activism, our writing, our entrepreneurship, our leadership, our coalitions, and yes, our vote, creatively to increase access to political life and economic well-being for more and more people in the United States.  And let’s think about how we define “well-being,” exactly, and consider how our hallowed institutions do and don’t meet our needs as individuals and a community.