Gina

I am pleased as punch to announce this year’s Girl Talk cast. Please spread the word, and come to the show on March 29th!

Girl Talk: A Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
7:00pm - 10:00pm
San Francisco LGBT Community Center - Rainbow Room
1800 Market Street between Octavia & Laguna
Tickets: $12-$20 (no one turned away)
WEB: http://queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/HealthyC/girlTalk12.html
BUY TIX HERE: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/223538 (We strongly recommend that you get tickets in advance — we sold out very fast last year.)
FACEBOOK INVITE: http://www.facebook.com/events/217563091671401/

Curated by Gina de Vries, Elena Rose, and Julia Serano.
Generously supported by the Queer Cultural Center Healthy Communities program.

Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Trans and cis women are allies to each other every day — from activism that includes everything from Take Back the Night to Camp Trans; to supporting each other in having “othered” bodies in a world that is obsessed with idealized body types; to loving, having sex, and building family with each other in a world that wants us to disappear.

Girl Talk is an annual spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships. Trans and cis women will read about their relationships of all kinds – sexual and romantic, chosen and blood family, friendships, support networks, activist alliances. Join us for a night of stories about sex, bodies, feminism, activism, challenging exclusion in masculine-centric dyke spaces, dating and breaking up, finding each other, and finding love and family.

Performer Bios

Charlie Anders hosts and organizes the award-winning Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco, which was namechecked in Armistead Maupin’s latest Tales of the City novel. She’s had stories in Best Lesbian Erotica 2010, Sex For America: Politically Inspired Erotica, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009 and 2011, and Tor.com. She co-founded other magazine: the magazine for people who defy categories, and currently blogs at io9. She won the 2010 Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

Dominika Bednarska is a postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Berkeley, where she completed her PhD in English and Disability Studies.  Her writing has appeared in Wordgathering, The Bellevue Literary Review, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, What I Want From You: An Anthology of East Bay Lesbian Poets, Ghosting Atoms, and Cripping Femme. She is currently working on expanding and revising her solo show, My Body Love Story, that will be performed this spring and summer. For more information, go to dominikabednarskaspeaks.blogspot.com or become a fan on Facebook.

Gina de Vries founded and co-curates “Girl Talk” with Elena Rose and Julia Serano. She’s thrilled that the show is still going strong after 4 years. Gina has taught Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop since 2008, and you can find her work anthologized all over, from the San Francisco Bay Guardian to Coming & Crying. A graduate of Hampshire College, Gina is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing and Master’s in English at San Francisco State University. The Record, her experimental fiction novel about sex, adolescence, music, San Francisco, and growing up queer, should be hitting bookstores in 2013. Find out a whole lot more at ginadevries.com. Twitter: @queershoulder. Tumblr: queershoulder.

DavEnd is a tenderhearted, genderqueer, costume designing, accordion wielding songwriter, performing artist and designer based in San Francisco. Ms. End has released two studio albums (How To Hold Your Own Hand, Fruits Commonly Mistaken For Vegetables) and for the past 5 years, has been touring extensively in the U.S., performing at queer teen centers, festivals, colleges, theatres and backyards. DavEnd’s current project, Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!,brings together the worlds of music and radical performance art in a theatrical extravaganza, exploring the effects of heterosexism and street harassment on the development of queer identity.  

Thea Hillman is a mother, writer, and performer. Her book of poetry and fiction “Depending on the Light,” was published in 2001. Her Lambda award-winning memoir, “Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word” came out in 2008 and is taught at universities around the country.

Nomy Lamm is a writer, musician, performance artist and voice teacher.   Her band, nomy lamm & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, is a flexible platform for collaboration with everyone and everything, including other musicians, artists, poets, puppeteers, spectators, and the moon.  She performs regularly with Sins Invalid, creating musical dreamworld performance art about disability, sexuality and social justice.  She is currently working on her MFA thesis, a collection of short stories called “515 Clues,” and writes an advice column for Make/Shift magazine called “Dear Nomy.”

Emily Manuel is a Greek-Australian becoming-Jewish writer, blogger, editor, sometime academic, musician, partner, mother to four cats, and beekeeper.  She found a bee and she kept it - that’s the first rule of beekeeping.  She is editor-in-chief at Global Comment magazine, and her work has also appeared at Questioning Transphobia, Tiger Beatdown, Billboard magazine, Bitch magazine, and many others.  She has a PhD in English from Murdoch University in Australia gathering dust in the corner.

Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, rode stories out of rural Oregon and hasn’t stopped making words since.  In her second year co-curating “Girl Talk” and fourth as a performer, she writes online as “Little Light,” travels the country as a preacher and poet, and has dedicated herself to the work of radical love, queer theology, and justice for those who live at the edges.  Her work has turned up everywhere from college classrooms to bathroom mirrors to protest marches, in magazines including Aorta and Make/Shift, and on the acclaimed spoken-word album It Is Better to Speak!  Rose is currently finishing her first book, Mountain of Myrrh, forthcoming from Dinah Press, and attends seminary in Northern California, where she resides with her wife and a small but well-loved pomegranate tree.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer and activist. She is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, a collection of personal essays that reveal how misogyny frames popular assumptions about femininity and shapes many of the myths and misconceptions people have about transsexual women. Julia’s other writings have appeared in anthologies (including Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Word Warriors: 30 Leaders in the Women’s Spoken Word Movement and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape), in feminist, queer, pop culture and literary magazines and websites (such as Bitch, AlterNet.org, Out, Feministing.com, and make/shift), and have been used as teaching materials in gender studies, queer studies, psychology and human sexuality courses in colleges across North America.  juliaserano.com.

Jos Truitt is a Boston native and recent transplant to San Francisco. She joined the team at Feministing.com in July 2009 and became an Editor in August 2011. Jos attended Hampshire College where she coordinated the school’s annual national reproductive justice conference. After college she worked in the reproductive health, rights and justice movements in Washington, DC. Jos has spoken and trained at numerous national conferences and college campuses about trans issues, reproductive justice, blogging, feminism, and grassroots organizing. Jos is currently pursuing an MFA in Printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute.

Pidge Vera is a mixed-race queer femme writer, performer and choreographer, living an awesome and strangely grown up life in Oakland, CA. Her interests and activist work include, but are not limited to: self-care, feminism, sexual assault and interpersonal violence prevention and advocacy, storytelling, dance, queers, femmes, fashion, baking killer peanut-butter cookies, and passionate karaoke performances. She is currently adapting her research thesis on eating disorders, narrative construction, and embodied practice into a book, and will talk about it at length if you let her. Pidge resides with her wife and Cleis, the littlest of pomegranate trees.

But mostly this is just really funny.

I have a nice Mac laptop that works great. It was a gift from my Nana when I started grad skool in 2009, so it is “older” now, I guess, but it still feels hella fancy. Previous to this really nice computer, I had an 8 y/o PC w/ no wireless & no battery that was held together by duct tape (yes, really). It freaked out whenever I so much as downloaded a single song b/c songs took up too much memory.

So, even though I have had my nice computer for a few years, I seriously only realized THIS WEEK that I can do things like download entire seasons of tv shows, or albums, or movies, and my computer will NOT die THE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE DETH from it, because it is NOT 8 y/o & held together by duct tape.

I am laughing at myself really hard about this. Also, dude, now my laptop is like Xmas & Easter & my birthday all in one!

Some really wonderful friends will be helping me organize a benefit to help offset the costs of Toothpocalypse (aka, the emergency root canal I had this week). Stay tuned for more info.

And grazie mille, family of friends, for being so, so good to me.

So, I am watching the new BBC Sherlock while recovering from this root canal, and I kinda LOVE it! Especially the Irene Adler character re-written as a queer sex worker genius spy who is complex & tough & bad-ass, not a victim & not a martyr. It would have been really easy to veer into so many stereotypes with her character, but she just keeps kicking ass. (Literally & figuratively, I guess — she is a domme.) But anyway, all in all it is a decent portrayal, and I’m really psyched about her storyline.

I had to have an emergency root canal today. :( I am stressing the hell out about the money aspect, but hey, at least I can keep my tooth, and at least now I am out of pain. I’m also pretty much out of commission over the next couple days while I recover — if you need me for school/work/etc stuff, please be patient. Expect a lot of posts about cats and Sherlock here, I guess.

My birthday is February 3rd. Because some folks have asked…

A wishlist:

* This amazing hot pink tool box.

* This mug. Glam breakfast!

* This gorgeous OCTOPUS COMPASS necklace. (Or another necklace that also doubles as a compass. I dunno why, but I’ve really been wanting a compass lately.)

* This map this map this map OMG!

* This is totally lavish & decadent: A bottle of this perfume. (I rarely wear perfume outside the house, out of respect for friends with MCS. But sometimes I use it in ritual contexts, and the library scent just sounds so cool.)

* Gift certificates to: Sephora, Lush, Lane Bryant, Torrid, Lovejoy’s Tea Room, Kabuki Baths, Rainbow Grocery, & Trader Joe’s are always appreciated. As are gift certificates to local book & music stores in SF (Aardvaark and Dog Eared and Amoeba are favorites).

* Lastly, this is a list of books/music/movies I would like to read/listen to/watch (burns of cds & movies/tv shows are also great, btw).

And I am watching Glee, which is Total Fluff & Often Fucked-Up (like in this next bit), but pretty fun, and good when one is on a lot of pain meds.

As I just IM-ed to The Boyfriend:

Me: okay, so sue is trying to convince brittney to shoot herself out of a cannon for a cheerios routine.
Boyfriend: LOL
Me: and part of how she convinces her is by saying that the cannon has two baby cannons, and a wife cannon back at home
Boyfriend: AMAZING
Me: who will go hungry if the routine does not happen
Boyfriend: WOW
Me: and “the mama cannon has fibromyalgia, so she can’t work.” like… WOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.
Boyfriend: the things they say to brittney
Me: FOR. REALZ.

And some nights, Marlene & Dorian come over, bring you 17 pounds of cheese & 8 pounds of chocolate, and Marlene swears at your broken dishwasher like the South Phillie girl she is. AND FIXES IT.

Also, 3 pounds of CANNOLI CREAM.

Apparently I should share my Class Rage more often? ;)

Full disclosure: This stuff ALWAYS feels really complex for me to write about, both personally and politically. I mean, yes, I come from a working-class background and I’ve been a poor person pretty much my whole adult life… But I also get by okay now, and I get TONS of privilege in other ways. Especially as a white person, as someone who is a female-assigned genderqueer and who can pass for a cis lady, and as someone who is disabled but can pass for able-bodied. See also, I was a scholarship kid at both a very fancy private high school and a very fancy private college, and I’m in graduate school now (at a much less fancy state school). Educational privilege/access really fucking matters and plays into this. I’m very privileged in many ways, no question. And esp. because I wanna be mindful of that, my tendency is usually to step back and let other people talk first about this stuff, you know?

See also: I honestly still have a lot of shame about growing up poor! And my growing up poor is also complicated by the fact that my parents did eventually class up around the time I hit high school (although their class status has changed again, now that they are both unemployed and in their 60s). I grew up knowing poverty AND knowing class privilege; I’ve had it easy in many ways and not-very-easy in many other ways.

And, still. MY HEART HURTS when I see Hipster Queer Trust Fund Babies wearing fucking trucker caps & workshirts. Le Sigh.