self

Femme Collective presents
FEMME2010:
NO RESTRICTIONS
August 20th-22nd
Oakland, CA

Hello Fabulous Femmes and Allies!

The Femme Collective is proud to announce Femme2010: NO RESTRICTIONS.  Building off of Femme2006 and Femme2008, Femme2010: No Restrictions (August 20-22, 2010 in Oakland, CA) continues to explore, discuss, dissect, and support Queer Femme. 

The weekend will include workshops, panels, presentations, performances, film, and art.  We invite people of all genders who are interested in a deeper understanding of Femme, as well as all self-identified Femmes who want to learn, teach, connect, and build community geared towards social change.

In this newsletter meet our new steering committee members, check out our Call for Submissions, learn about our registration rates, check out our host hotel!

Join us this August in Oakland for this groundbreaking event.  Please forward to your personal networks and help us get the word out!

The Femme Collective

Read review and comments to this brave documentary about the importance of dissidence in the production of scientific knowledge.

I found this on STRASS and think it bears repeating.

-arvan

Whore Feminism is :

1. Dictate terms to men in the sexual contract before talking, either about the length, practices, prevention and rules of consent.

2. To work with other women and queer people and thus reduce the risk of suffering sexist and homophobic jokes from colleagues.

3. Being economically independent of a father, a boss or a darling.

4. Occupy public and night spaces traditionally reserved for men.

5. Combat whore stigma that hinders freedoms of all women, by reclaiming the insult in pride in order to break the original meaning.

6. Knowing, loving, being comfortable with our body and our sexuality and take care of it.

7. Defending the free disposal of our body and not only for abortion rights.

8. Knowing that sexuality and gender are defined by power relationships and that identities are neither natural nor immutable but socially constructed and as such we perform them like actresses.

9. Educating men and to change their behaviour because we have access to their privacy.

10. The right to say yes as much as to say no. Fighting for the recognition of rape as a crime, including those committed against us and which our complaints are rarely recorded.

11. Awareness of the intersection between different forms of discrimination and being in solidarity with other minority women.

12. Respecting all women voices. Refusing paternalism that infantilises women and judge them unable to express their own will under the false pretext that we are manipulated, yesterday by the priests to deny us the right to vote, or now by pimps to ban soliciting.

13. Making visible as work all services rendered for free or extracted within the family and demanding financial compensation for this, unless to refuse them.

14. Fighting for the unionization of sex workers and change the sex industry, including being aware that gendered asymmetry between men as clients and women&queers as whores is the result of a long tradition of patriarchal sexual division of labour .

15. Refusing to be a victim.

I recently finished reading The Edge of the Bed: How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life by Lisa Palac, which I highly recommend, because I agree with almost everything she writes.  The part especially sticking with me has been Chapter 6, in which she analyzes her kinky desires that don't just deny, but appropriate her anti-sex Catholic upbringing:

At its core, my Daddy fantasy isn't about my father but about Our Father Who Art in Heaven.  I'd taken the dynamic of love and punishment, which terrorized me as a child and made me feel helpless -- kneeling down and sticking out my tongue to receive his body, whispering my most sinful transgressions in a dark confessional, doing penance to show my love -- and turned it into a powerful source of erotic pleasure.  It wasn't a conscious decision, but then, sexual fantasies rarely are.

...Despite my fear that all of my intellectual processing would ruin by best sexual fantasy, it didn't.  It's still a turn-on because I'm still struggling with the after-effects of Catholicism and I always will be.

Personally, unlike Palac, I was never raised with the idea of God as an old man who would send me to hell for sexual adventurousness.  Instead, the messages that my sexual desires were wrong came from pop-psychology and a specific strain of feminism.  Without God or hell, wanting men to dominate me sexually was a sin against Women's Liberation and a transgression against my Mental Health.  My sex-negative clergy got most of its ideas from Andrea Dworkin.  And I consciously rejected it years ago.

Queering Sexual Violence

An LGBTQ Anthology Call For Submissions

Description:

An anthology of LGBTQ writers, survivors and activists confronting heterosexual privilege and the gender binary system while creating a dialog about the limitations of the anti-sexual violence movement in hopes of creating change.

Edited by Jennifer Patterson.

Queering Sexual Violence seeks 20-25 LGBTQ writers who are interested in submitting pieces that confront the current state of our anti-sexual violence climate. Part memoir / part criticism / part call to action, this anthology seeks to address the limitations of a society that is not only unequipped to deal with rape culture but also unable to look at it without the lens of heterosexual privilege and through the interests of a gender binary system.  The anthology seeks to destroy the image of the "perfect survivor" and motivate the anti-sexual violence community to embrace a more radical perspective in order to foster sustainable change.

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission's Activist Institutes are two-week-long training spaces and are each attended by 20-25 LGBTI activists. IGLHRC has held five international LGBTI activist institutes since 2005.

The theme of each Institute is chosen by activists who have attended the trainings, focusing on particular groups or challenges and considering the needs of a community.

Below, find the Memoirs of the past three Institutes, detailing their programmes and methods. They also share activists' experiences and the information presented at each Institute, so that the Memoirs can be adapted or used by other activists and groups.

IGLHRC will soon make each of these reports available in Spanish, English and Portuguese.

Memoirs of Past Institutes:

Memoir of Training Institute for Trans and Intersex Activists
La Falda, Cordoba, Argentine – 2005
Spanish · English · Portuguese

Memoir of Training Institute for Lesbian and Bisexual Women from Central American and Caribbean

San Jose de Costa Rica – 2007
Spanish · English · Portuguese

Memoir of Training Institute "Strategies to Address Religious Fundamentalisms"

Guarulhos, Sao Paulo – 2008
Spanish · English · Portugese

This video contains images from IGLHRC's 2008 Latin American Advocacy Institute on combating religious fundamentalisms.

Photo by Eric Francis.

So there I was at this beyond-gay party in a high-rise apartment with Manhattan as the landscape, stalking her by scent. Watching her move around the room, tracking this succulent critter and enjoying the subtlest details of her existence.

I felt amazingly, solidly sexually centered in myself. I recognized the feeling, rooted in an orgasm a day before, seeing myself with Jane on the line. She was listening, holding open the space of absolute approval of my submission of self-to-self as I faced a mirror. We do this for one another. I dropped into place, then. My soul settled into my hearth. I took that feeling with me: my sense of self-approval.

I don’t remember how or when, but next I was leaning against the island kitchen counter, facing the city, while the waiters plied their trade: hand-manufactured those cute crab salad cones and so on, and bustled off into the giddy environment of the soiree and passed around the treats. You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties.

And then, though I don’t know how exactly, I was face to face with Maggie. That was her name.

• En Espanol
• На русском языке
• Українською мовою

The Disability Rights Fund (DRF) seeks to strengthen the participation of Disabled Persons’ Organizations (DPOs) in the advancement of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) at country level in the Global South and Eastern Europe/former Soviet Union.
The 2010 “Moving Rights Forward” grant cycle will consist of two grantmaking rounds:

1. The first grantmaking round (described below) is directed at DPOs in Indonesia, Mexico, Ukraine and eligible states and cities in India (Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Kerala, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and the National Capital Territory of Delhi). The deadline for Small Grants applications for this round is Monday, 29 March 2010 at 24:00 (midnight) your time. The deadline for National Coalition Grants applications for this round is Monday, 12 April 2010 at 24:00 (midnight) your time.
2. The RFP for the second grantmaking round will be publicized in July 2010.

FIRST ROUND
Applicants can apply as:
a) single organizations or partnerships for Small Grants; and/or
b) national DPO-led coalitions for National Coalition Grants.

Single organizations or partnerships can apply for 12-month grants ranging from USD 5,000 to 20,000 to:

Increase DPO skill in addressing the CRPD by
(a) building more inclusive organizations or partnerships; and/or
(b) internal capacity building; and

Do rights-based advocacy and monitoring through:
(a) increasing DPO participation in decision-making processes regarding the CRPD at state or local levels; and/or
(b) directly addressing implementation of CRPD Articles.

Download the details of the DRF Small Grants Request for Proposals (RFP) and the Grant Application Form here.
(MS Word Format)

Bita Haidarian, an Iranian American filmmakersets off on a journey around the world to find out where she is from and who she is.

Born in America to Baha’i refugee parents from Iran, Bita tells the tragic-comic story of her family coming to America, her childhood in Texas, trying to fit in, and competitive cheerleading – all part of the quest of a girl who knows more about MTV than Al Jazeera.

Bita wanders through the US, Europe, the Middle East and Pakistan examining the cultures at play on her life and the lives of women in these places.  It looks thoroughly engaging and we're lucky, I'll have an interview with Bita here in the near future for you all to read.

The overwhelming trailer response has inspired us to build an organization around the movie.  Our goal: to bridge the gap between east and west by sharing the compelling stories of women - some empowered, others seeking empowerment - from both hemispheres. (website)

And Bita’s plea to public – please watch my film!  If it doesn’t succeed, I’m going to have to get married.

They have a website, a facebook page and a twitter account.

-arvan

MIUSA is excited to offer a 16-day exchange program to Costa Rica with a focus on youth leadership and cultural perspectives on disability rights. Young adults with disabilities of diverse backgrounds from New York City, especially those who are first-time international travelers, are encouraged to apply.  

Where: San Jose, Costa Rica

Program Cost:   

Sliding scale $220 - $1,100, which includes all: round-trip international airfare from Newark International Airport (EWR) to San Jose, Costa Rica; one-day pre-departure orientation near EWR; accessible ground transportation, lodging, meals and activities in Costa Rica; disability related costs, including sign language interpreters, materials in alternative formats, and funding for personal assistants.