dirtylibrarianthoughts:

Members of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, including Sylvia Rivera (seated in middle). (photo: Ellen Schumsky)

Queer Prehistory

In August 1966, there was a riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a 24-hour San Francisco eatery popular with drag queens and other gender-benders, hustlers, runaway teens and cruising gays. The Compton’s management had begun calling police to roust this nonconformist clientele, and one night a drag queen precipitated the riot by throwing a cup of coffee into the face of a cop who was trying to drag her away. 

Get it right, because the Stonewall Riots were not the first acts of queer rebellion against the State.

The Unspeakable Sex: Memoir of a Well-Hung Woman by Hida Viloria

“When I was about nine years old my mother said to me, ‘When you were born they didn’t know if you were a boy or a girl.”

The Unspeakable Sex: Memoir of a Well-Hung Woman is a memoir of sexual coming-of-age by Hida Viloria, who was born with ambiguous genitalia but, through a combination of luck, circumstance and parental concern, escaped infant surgery and subsequent hormone treatment and was allowed to grow up in the body she was born in. It spans the author’s life from ages twenty-six through thirty-three.

At twenty-six, Viloria discovers she is “intersex” from an article in a San Francisco newspaper, and is forced to face the question, Am I a boy or a girl? She soon decides to stop doing things she’s been doing all her life that women are supposed to do, like wearing makeup and women’s clothes. To her surprise, instead of being perceived as a lesbian, she is suddenly perceived to be male.

When she finally meets other intersex people, one year later, she is shocked and saddened to learn that most people like her have been brutally scarred, physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to “correct’” their bodies. She realizes that she must tell doctors, and the world, that she is happy she was allowed to keep her unique body parts.

via Hida Viloria

The importance of the body in this equation cannot be overlooked. The body shows me decay (or growth) where I most fear it. Ultimately, my body is simply a map of where I’ve come from. Quite literally, it is the trail of my electrons coursing, racing, and whirling through space - what my eyes see is the trace of where they’ve been. I ran ten miles; I ate wheat; I skinned my knees, and experienced pleasure, pain, love, and birth. My body remembers all of these things, even when I am not reflecting on them.  The body remembers experiences once endured and actions once taken, things I am capable of because I have once done them.

This is why recognizing ourselves as beautiful is in some ways more powerful than recognizing that we can be “good”. To love my body is to reconcile with where I have been and thus what I am capable of. By appreciating myself, and what I capable of, and hence knowing the roads I don’t take in spite of that capability, only then does my current action became a choice. Only then may it be called good or bad. Without choice, judgement has no value. It is meaningless to call something “good” or “bad” that simply is. Only that which is chosen can be said to be chosen out of compassion or cruelty.

Thus,recognizing that our bodies are beautiful becomes a powerfully political act, a celebration of compassion directed toward the self. And this is what is behind the Black woman’s love of her body, which is so present in the ethos of contemporary Black culture. It is imperative that we love our own bodies *and* that we love other’s bodies in their diversity. Ultimately, loving people for who they are should never be about disregarding the body - but about embracing it.

Journey Toward Compassionate Choice: Intergrating Vegan and Sistah Experience.
By Tara Sophia Bahna-James in the Sistah Vegan anthology by Breeze Harper. 

(via Welcome To Duke University Press)

Randall’s account of her therapuetic process, which is significantly recorded not just in words but in images, serves as a reminder that the memories retrieved in oder to heal from trauma are not just memories of what happened in any simple sense. For “what happened” includes the mental, physical and emotional responses of the person who experiences trauma, which is thus located inside, as well as outside, the self.

A growing body of research on trauma, reveals traumatic response to be a complex and paradoxical process because it includes not only “hyperarousal” or states of heightened sensitivity, but states “numbness” or states of imperviousness to sensitivity,  such as “disassociation”. Cathy Caruth observes that the trauma challenges conventional understanding of experience because “the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur with an absolute numbing to it” and “immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness.”

The obstacle to retrieving the memory of the trauma is not necessarily that it has been repressed but that due to dissacociation, it was never experienced in the first place.”

From An Archive of Feelings:Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures, by Ann Cvetkovich. This excerpt’s about Margaret Randall’s ‘This is about incest’ - using words and photography to creatively address her experiences and legacy of abuse, when confronted with knowing that abuse took place, but lacking the clear memories, articulacy, cultural affirmation, morally simple survivor narrative etc. that would have made recovery easy.

ETA:overall though, it’s more about how white working class butch/femme dykes and USA based Latino artists addressed similar issues, during the whole 80/90’s DIY arts subculture and AID’s crisis backlash era.

persistenceanthology:

Jeanne Córdova has been an open butch for forty-two years, and is the elder Board member of Butch Voices. She served as Conference Chair of Butch Voices.Los Angeles. Her second memoir, When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution in the ’70s, is forthcoming. Her writing can also be found in anthologies such as The Persistent Desire and Dagger: On Butch Women. Jeanne lives and writes beneath the shadows of the Sierra Nevada mountains, northeast of her beloved Los Angeles, with six Mexican pets and one South African femme spouse of twenty years. More about her life and writings can be found at http://jeannecordova.com/.

Jeanne’s contribution to Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme is an essay called “The New Politics of Butch.” In it, she explores what butch means to her today.

What made you want to be part of this anthology?

I was in the classic femme-butch anthology, The Persistent Desire, which was published almost twenty years ago. I wanted to update my thoughts and feelings and talk to today’s new generation of butches.

Who are your butch and/or femme role models and why?

Having grown up in the ’50s and ’60s, when there were no out butch role models, I went with Jeanne d’Arc, the French General and my patron saint, because she was an early gender-bender who led her people’s fight for liberation from the British colonialists. Or Alexander the Great because he was a “pretty butch,” like I was called, and very ambitious to excel and explore the edges of the known universe of his time.

If you could say one thing to future butches and femmes, what would it be?

I would say to butches: never give up faith in yourself that you can be any type of woman you want to be and also live out  your butch dreams to dress, talk, walk, find a girl, be a Dad, be a husband or lover that reflects your original self. I would say, “Hold the butch line!”

via Honoring the words of food justice activist, Rosalinda Guillén

 Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy

“Food Sovereignty is about an end to all forms of violence against women,” says Raj Patel. “La Via Campesina, in its very practical struggle to transform the food system - to bring democracy to the food system - have realized at every level the inequalities of power that accompany gender.” When we think about food sovereignty, we need to think about women’s work because the capitalist patriarchal food system demands enormous subsidies from women as well as the environment. Women’s work is often unpaid yet contributes to more than half of the world’s 17 trillion dollar economy. In developing countries, women produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food, yet own less than two percent of the land.

The Color of Food by the Applied Research Center reports that white women working in the U.S. food industry earned 63 cents to every dollar that a white man made on average. Women of color are further disadvantaged: Asian women made 86 cents, Black women made 53 cents and Latina women made 50 cents. …

In reference to the women’s movement, bell hooks writes, “Before women could change patriarchy we had to change ourselves; we had to raise our consciousness” (7). Similarly, the food justice movement must transform itself in order to be truly transformative. As food activists and as a movement, we must be self-reflexive and push beyond demands for local food and consumer rights to also fight for human rights, women’s rights, and labor rights. This is how we will transform our food systems and end poverty and hunger.

La Via Campesina organizers meeting up with our groups at a regional food security gathering was one of the better events last year.

Awesome! Found as an uncredited pic on someone elses facebook, really, so if you know who created it pls. share.

curate:

lalilster:

chicanainchoos:

mamitadelruby:

pachuquismo por vida

Butch pachuca?  I totally want to know more about this picture and this woman. (mamitadelruby - you have some great posts!)

guerrillamamamedicine:(via loveyourchaos)

Frida portrait remix also = auto reblog.

2007 December « Younity’s Blog

Stacy & the Virgin Mary by Amanda Lopez

loveandzombies:peacenikseekspeacenik:billyjane:museumkunstkabinett:Me and my parrots, Frida Kahlo, 1942

Mariana Romo-Carmona and June Chan, 1988 (via bobster855

“Mariana Romo-Carmona was born and raised in Santiago, Chile. In the late sixties, she emigrated to the U.S. with her parents when she was 14. Her fiction in English and in Spanish reflects the theme of immigration and often its alienating and fragmenting effects. As an emerging writer, Romo-Carmona worked to create spaces for the publication of voices from lesbian, gay, and communities of color. She produced the first lesbian and gay bilingual radio program with a feminist perspective in the late 70s, and as co-founder of Latina lesbian groups in Boston and New York City, she went on to participate in international networks in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico. Among other things, she became one of the early members of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and co-edited the ground-breaking anthology Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, in 1983.”