I am so very excited to announce…

Girl Talk 2013!

Now in its fifth year, Girl Talk is a critically acclaimed multi-media performance show promoting dialogue about relationships of all kinds between queer transgender women, queer cisgender women, and genderqueer people. Queer cis women, queer trans women, and genderqueer people are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners 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. At Girl Talk, trans and cis women and genderqueer artists create a wide range of artistic work about their relationships of all kinds – sexual and romantic, friendships, and chosen and blood family. Join us for a night of performance and conversation dedicated to building sisterhood and queer community for ALL women.

June 27
Girl Talk
Curated by: Gina de Vries, Elena Rose, & Julia Serano
Show Location: African-American Arts & Culture Complex (762 Fulton Street @ Webster, San Francisco)
Time: 7:30pm
Price: $12 – $20 sliding scale online; $15 – $20 at the door. (A limited number of Nobody Turned Away Tickets are available by writing to Gina at queershoulder[@]gmail[.]com, and a few work-trade for tix positions might also become available.)
Web Home: http://queerculturalcenter.org/NQAF/performance13/girl-talk/
Buy Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/377312
Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/331871970271565
“Like” Girl Talk on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GirlTalkShow
Twitter: @queershoulder (Gina de Vries) and @JuliaSerano (Julia Serano).

ARTISTS’ BIOS

Dominika Bednarska holds a PhD in English and Disability Studies from U.C. Berkeley, and her new book of poetry, Smothered Breath, is forthcoming from Tulip Pulp Press. Her writing has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, Petrichor Machine, Blast Furnace, A Bad Penny Review, B (A Barbie Anthology), Journey to Crone, Avatar Review, Storm Cellar, Palimpsest, Muddy River Poetry Review, Wordgathering, Ghosting the Atom: Reflections After the Bomb, What I Want From You: An Anthology of East Bay Lesbian Poets, Cripping Femme, The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, a Lambda nominee. Her show My Body Love Story kicked off the National Queer Arts Festival in 2012. For more information, go to dominikabednarskaspeaks.blogspot.com or become a fan on Facebook.

Gina de Vries is a genderqueer femme, a queer Paisano, a devout pervert, and a writer, performer, activist, and cultural worker living, writing, and loving in San Francisco. Ze is the founder and co-curator (with Elena Rose and Julia Serano) of Girl Talk, and is thrilled to see the show going strong in its fifth year. Gina has performed, taught, and lectured everywhere from chapels to leatherbar backrooms to the Ivy Leagues to community colleges. Her university appearances include Harvard, Yale, Reed, The Pacific School of Religion, UW-Madison, and Hampshire. Ze is the founder and facilitator of Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop, a writing class for current & former sex workers at San Francisco’s Center for Sex & Culture (where she also serves on the Advisory Board).

Gina’s publications include That’s Revolting!, Bound to Struggle, Baby Remember My Name, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, $pread: illuminating the sex industry, Curve, Coming & Crying, Take Me There: Trans & Genderqueer Erotica, The Revolution Starts at Home, and Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots. Ze is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing at San Francisco State University, where ze is at work on How To Have A Body, a book of experimental prose about, well, how to have a body. Find out more at ginadevries.com, and keep track of hir on the daily at queershoulder.tumblr.com and howtohaveabody.tumblr.com.

DavEnd is a tenderhearted, genderqueer, accordion wielding songwriter, performing artist and designer based in San Francisco.  DavEnd has released two studio albums (How To Hold Your Own Hand, Fruits Commonly Mistaken For Vegetables) and for the past 6 years, has been touring extensively in the U.S., performing at queer teen centers, theatres, festivals, colleges, and backyards. Between tours, Ms. End designs costumes, and most recently has been producing a new musical, costume designing and dancing in production numbers for songwriter Kimya Dawson, appearing in Taylor Mac’s epic 5 hour play “The Lily’s Revenge” and touring the US with Sister Spit. 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 and trans identity. Photo: Photo: Amber Gregory

Tara Hardy is the working-class queer femme poet who writes and teaches in Seattle, Washington. She is the founder and current creative director of Bent, a writing institute for LGBTIQ people based in Seattle. She is the writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and an alumnae of Hedgebrook. In 2002, she was elected by the people and named by the city council as Seattle’s Poet Populist, or poet of the people, and has appeared on seven National Poetry Slam stages. She holds an MFA from Vermont College in fiction writing, and an MSW from the University of Michigan in community organizing. Tara is a daughter of the United Auto Workers, and worked in the Battered Women’s Movement for 15 years. She has toured the United States with Michelle Tea in the Stromboli’s Island show, as well as with Oratrix, an all-girl, all-queer Seattle-based spoken word troupe. She is a member of the Bullhorn Collective, and has performed with the Rolling Thunder Democracy Tour, Vancouver’s Rock for Choice, various Sister Spit shows, the Washington Poet’s Association’s Burning Word festival, Portland’s Youth Pride, San Francisco’s Harvey Milk Institute, and at the Minneapolis Orpheum Theater on the National Poetry Slam team finals stage. Tara’s work appears in Without a Net, Sex and Single Girls, Fusion, Blythe House Quarterly, Brazen, Switched-on-Gutenberg, and her self-published chapbooks Vs and Rant-some. Recordings of her work can be found on Vox Populi Live (the best of the Seattle Poetry Festival), the Seattle Poetry Slam Live CD, and her self-produced CD Dirty River.

Dr. Carol Queen is a writer and cultural sexologist with a Ph.D. in human sexuality. She is a noted essayist whose work has appeared in dozens of anthologies. Her essay collection, Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, was published in 1997 and reissued in 2002; it is read in university classes across America. Her erotic stories can be found in several Best American Erotica volumes, among many other anthologies; her erotic novel, The Leather Daddy and the Femme, was published in 1998 and won a Firecracker Alternative Book Award the following year. A “director’s cut” edition with new material came out in 2003. Her first book, Exhibitionism for the Shy, published in 1995, explores issues of erotic self-esteem and enhancement and was reissued with new material in 2009. She is co-editor of the anthologies Best Bisexual Erotica (volumes One and Two), Sex Spoken Here, Switch Hitters, and PoMoSexuals; the latter won a Lambda Literary Award in 1998. She’s also edited Whipped! and two volumes of 5 Minute Erotica, short-short erotic fiction.

Queen is the founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture in San Francisco (www.sexandculture.org) and works as staff sexologist and curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum at Good Vibrations, the women-founded sex toy and bookstore in San Francisco, where she has worked since 1990; she blogs for the Good Vibrations web magazine at www.goodvibes.com. She has addressed numerous scholarly and professional conferences, including the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, the International Condom Conference, the International Conference on Prostitution, and the International Conference on Pornography; she frequently addresses college as well as general and specialized audiences. In February 2009 she debated the question of promiscuity (“Virtue or vice?”) for the Oxford Union at Oxford University, England.

Carol Queen is active on behalf of progressive sex education and sexual minority issues. Perhaps most closely affiliated with the bisexual and sex work communities, she has been speaking publicly about non-mainstream sexualities, from lesbian to leather, for over 35 years. Her perspective in addressing sexual diversity incorporates personal experience, accurate sex information, and informed cultural commentary. For more information (including CV and bibliography) see her website: www.carolqueen.com.

Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans lesbian mestiza, rode stories out of rural Oregon and hasn’t stopped making words since.  Raised as a curandera troublemaker, she writes online as “Little Light,” travels the country as a preacher and poet, and has dedicated herself to the labor of radical love, monster theology, and justice for those who live at the edges.

In her third year as “Girl Talk” co-curator and fifth as a performer, Rose has also sweet-talked bloody microphones with the Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Collective, Seattle’s TumbleMe Productions, the Bay’s own Mangos With Chili, and in sold-out shows up and down the Pacific coast.  Her writing has been featured in Aorta and Make/shift magazines and everywhere from law school classrooms to bathroom mirrors, and her first book, “Mountain of Myrrh,” is forthcoming from Dinah Press.  She lives, works, and attends seminary in the East Bay, and haunts abandoned places on the weekends.”

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer, and co-curator of Girl Talk. She is best known for her 2007 book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, which garnered rave reviews—The Advocate placed it on their list of “Best Non-Fiction Transgender Books,” and readers of Ms. Magazine ranked it #16 on their list of the “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.” Her other writings have appeared in anthologies (including Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation and Word Warriors: 30 Leaders in the Women’s Spoken Word Movement) and in feminist, queer, pop culture and literary magazines and websites such as Bitch Magazine, AlterNet.org, Out, Ms. Magazine blog, Feministing.com, and make/shift.

Julia has gained notoriety in feminist, queer and transgender circles for her unique insights into gender, and her writings have been used as teaching materials in queer and gender studies courses across North America. Her second full-length book, tentatively titled Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, is slated to be published by Seal Press in the Fall of 2013. juliaserano.com

Jos Truitt is a Boston native currently living in the Bay Area. She is an Editor at the popular blog Feministing.com. Jos has worked for the reproductive health, rights and justice movements as a student at Hampshire College and a national organizer in Washington, DC. She 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 and an MA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at San Francisco Art Institute.

So, as many of you reading here know, I’m genderqueer (and also femme), and I’ve become more out & vocal about that in recent years. (If you are a friend who somehow did not know about this and you’ve got questions for me, I’m totally happy to chat with you about it! But let’s please talk one-on-one, as opposed to in a public internet space like tumblr or facebook or whatnot.)

I’ve been publically identifying myself as femme for years, but coming out around my genderqueer stuff has been a complex process for me, in part because the way I do genderqueer & the way I do femme & the fact that I’m female-assigned all in combination tend to mean that I end up reading out in the day-to-day world as a cis lady like 99% the time. I get a ton of cis privilege out in the world; I don’t want to discount or deny that. Plus which I publically identified myself as a cis woman for a long-ass time.

And, all of that said: My internal sense of my gender is actually very slippery & switchy. I’ve been exploring that privately for years, and I’m finally in a place where I’m ready to start exploring in a more public “out in the real world & not just in my head” kind of way, too. I’m not so much feeling like a woman these days, as much as I feel sometimes like a girl & sometimes like a faggot & mostly like a weird genderfucky glamrock androgyne. (See also, our available language for talking about gender is way too limited. I wish we had better & more elegant descriptors, you know?)

Anyway. I’ve been thinking about what pronouns feel good for me recently, and here is where I’m at:

* Pronoun-wise, I like she/her/hers, or ze/hir/hirs. My very favorite thing is when people use a combination of the two. That’s what feels like it most accurately describes how I see myself & move through the world.

* Relatedly: I actually really appreciate “she” because, to me, it is both a girl pronoun & a faggot pronoun. I know that for a lot of people this is NOT the case, so please don’t go universalizing that statement! But it is the case for me. In many ways, I was raised in my queerness by working-class faggots, and “she” was the Pronoun Du Jour in the crowd that brought me up & out. The issue is, most people don’t use “she” in that particular way (and this is a large part of why I want to experiment with using gender-neutral pronouns, too).

Anyway, my point is: If you want to use “she” for me all the time with that particular understanding of how “she” works for me, that is very cool, and very welcome. :)

Thanks, all.