“Femme Means Attack” Call for Submissions

“Femme Means Attack” call for submissions:

“Femme Means Attack” is a collaborative zine of submissions by people who identify as femme and as radical, anarchist, and/or anti-authoritarian. Femmes are often seen as non-radical or counterrevolutionary in many radical communities, despite the fact that we can take to the streets just as well as anyone else, in heels or steel-toed boots, and are FIERCE while doing it. As radical femmes, we often find ourselves alienated from mainstream femme discourse that focuses on standards of femme/femininity which are white, homonormative, aspire to be bourgeoisie, and rely on conspicious consumption. Thus, we radical femmes often find ourselves alienated from both our radical communities and femme communities.

“Femme Means Attack” aims to change that by giving us, radical femmes, a voice. We welcome submissions from femmes of all genders, trans and cis, binary gendered and genderqueer, of all races, socioeconomic backgrounds, both urban and rural, of all dis/ability statuses, etc. While submissions should touch on both femme identity and radical politics/communities, we leave it up to each contributor to determine what that looks like. We welcome all types of submissions – essays, personal accounts, poetry, artwork, etc.

Along with your submissions, we ask that you submit a one hundred word bio. This is merely to let us know who you are and where you are coming from on the femme spectrum. That said, there will be a bio section in the zine, so if you do wish to have your bio included, let us know.

Likewise, if you wish to tell us (the editors) your name, but would not like it published in the finished zine, just let us know. However, we do request that you use a pen name or nom de queer so that half of the zine is not attributed to “anonymous.”

Criteria for submissions are:

Absolutely nothing oppressive.

You may submit as many pieces as you would like.

Submissions must be in an easily accessable computer format.

Additionally, written works must be submitted in a format that will allow for editing. That is- editing of format, not content.

PDF files will not be accepted.

Artwork must be submitted in jpeg format.

If any other issues arise with submissions, they will be handled on an individual basis.

You will receive notice as to whether or not your submission has been accepted. If you wish to challenge our rejection of your submission, we welcome your feedback. We only ask that you are as respectful to us as we will be to you. We both identify as anarchists and do not wish to hold any sort of power over anyone else. Thiszine’s purpose, and our purpose in publishing it, is to bring unity and strength to femmes around the world.

Submissions are due by April 15, 2010

Please send submissions to:

femmemeansattack@gmail.com

Your co-editors,

naydeehn pearl messier and gayge sparkly purple unicorn freyjasbarn

Femme, High Femme, Competition and Solidarity

This could also be “how I learned to talk about high femme without indulging in femme competition and honoring femme solidarity in my life”. Also, it should be said that I really love the ways sublimefemme talks about high femme. I really love how the other fierce femmes in my life talk about how intentional it is for them, how we can talk about femme as this thing we do. I wrote a bit about femme invisibility in May of last year, but have kind of rethought my gender a little since then (still identifying as femme, but am not really using “boi” any more as it didn’t even make sense in my own head (and I kind of realized that as much as I may take and detourne’ cues from gay male culture, they don’t end up readable in a male-ish way (nor do I really intend them to)). I’ve recently grown quite fond of “queen”, as it matches the artificialness, performance, and planning that goes into how I do gender.

And it kind of dawned on me, that while high femme often gets held up as competitive, as “more femme”, as requiring class privilege I don’t have, certain body types I don’t fit, that’s not it at all – like sublimefemme says, high femme is the conscious performance of a stylized femininity. It’s just that our stereotypes of it involve looking like a movie starlet. It was until I accepted that my conscious performance was okay, that I could stop seeing it as a competition, that I must be failing because I’m trying (and I think with how involved femininity gets, most people who are feminine have to try at some of it, at the least), that if I said I was high femme, or even being high femme at a point I wouldn’t be saying to all the other femmes in my life that I was competing with them.

Rather than say, a traveling punk living out of a backpack who yet still manages to have a full complement of makeup and perfectly coordinated outfits, where wrinkles and being threadbare only adds to the aesthetic.

It’s getting over the inferiority complex of “why do I over think every outfit, why am I so intentional when I get ready, why isn’t femme something I just roll out of bed and do the way I want to do it”, and realizing that the massive intentionality is that high femme is definitely a “doing being” gender. One where you’re consciously embodying and performing a queer femininity for whatever ends you’re up to. It doesn’t have to do with being “good” or “bad” at being femme, or being “more” femme than anyone else, or having a certain femme style.

To me, it’s being ridiculously femme in all the best ways – learning to indulge guilt-free in style and personal appearance, and not hiding it, even if the way I indulge that is through freeboxes, the goodwill bins, hand-me-downs, and altering clothing. And femme and high femme are a lot of things for me, but, for me, it’s definitely an insurrection against “woman” because by being so performative, so constructed, so artificial in my femmeness, I feel like it visibly steps me aside (at least to genderqueer eyes) from the supposedly “natural” gender of woman, while showing that woman isn’t any more natural than any other gender.

I was butch once, if I haven’t talked about that before, here – I went from a flamey theatre kid to a an androgynous gender rejecter (who was way too limp wristed to be androgynous) to someone trying to do really traditional blending-in femme lesbian (which didn’t work, not being woman or lesbian ID’d), to acknowledging my genderqueerness and being a faggoty butch, who was really trying really, really hard to be butch, which made me feel like a failure every time my femmeness shown through and people questioned my identity, and back to femme, where I took a long time to settle and even longer to realize that the feeling of constant performance wasn’t going to go away. Because that’s just how I am, gender is a big performance, a theatrical act for me, which I do for various ends (to get things out of the culture around me, to attract partners, to play up the loud, fierce, can’t be ignored card, etc.) I’m not sure if anyone else who identifies with high femme, or with gender being a really intentional performance feels the same way, but high femme has come to mean for me that I’m not femme because femme is natural for me, but because femme is the artificial performance that is most comfortable to me, and the more I over do it, the more comfortable it is.

In the Midst of Yule

Fog hugs The Farm tight, making it hard to see the mountains. It’s cold, but not COLD, and I think my sinuses might explode from the congestion of the damp air and who knows what else. It’s quiet, I’m 3000 miles from where I grew up, nearly everyone I’m tight with here is from here is busy with family obligations. Yule, which should be almost two weeks of constant guests, food, and celebrating that the sun is starting to come back and that it will be warm and plants will grow again and of bracing oneself to make it through the winter, is a lonely time for me, generally.

I did the traditional invitation to spirits, alfs, things that go bump in the night on Mother-Night, hearing a bell ringing as I chanted by the gate, and none of the animals wear bells. Then I kept the Yule Watch, being unemployed and having nothing to do the next day, greeting the sun after the longest night of the year, thinking about my grandmothers, both of whom are no longer living, for Mother-Night is the night to remember our female ancestors, who guard the family. That night always starts my Yuletide-long habit of heavily meditating on family.

Some of my extended family has cast me out, most is exceedingly awkward toward me and really doesn’t like me around. Saying my parents and I have had a rocky relationship is really minimizing it, even if we aren’t fighting right now. And my brother is in prison. In a lot of ways, I’m not part of my family of origin, which is readily apparent whenever I’m in that part of the continent and the family gatherings that need to be split up, or the people who won’t see me, or how awkward seeing them is, and how I’m subtly excluded. And, of course, I’ve visited the majority of my extended family, on another continent, once, so barely know most of them, as warm and welcoming as they may be.

And then I think about my chosen family, scattered across this continent, many of them having incredibly awkward holidays with their families of origin, and how hard it is to see each other, and the work that goes into maintaining those bonds.

Family is a funny thing, and having always been singled out, targeted for shit from people in my extended family, and having been actively written out of the family for years, a big portion of my emotional energy has gone into finding family. And it’s hard watching my chosen family struggling for various degrees of acceptance from their family of origin, and being so far away from many of them.

And, of course, any time I get too lonely, I get some sort of message sent to me by someone in my chosen family. Here’s to hoping that everyone who is celebrating a holiday right now is in good company.

Surviving, Healing, Keeping Going Without Moving On

I could say I haven’t been posting much since I spent two months traveling, a month after returning from three weeks traveling. And that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks getting settled, moving, trying to find work, but that would be a lie.

I haven’t been posting nearly at all because I’ve been dealing with massive amounts of my survivor issues. And a lot of disappointment in big chunks of various communities. I’ve been raped and abused by more than a few people throughout my life, but, I’ve spent the last eight months or so trying to call out and get an actual accountability process going against an abusive former partner that raped me, and has raped and abused several other people that I know of. A person that is in theory committed to queer, trans, and social justice issues and dedicated to radical social change.

I tried the route of trying to get a process started quietly, and when that failed, went more public, contacting all the other organizers for Camp Trans and most people who have personal online contact with me, to get help in getting an accountability process going, and also so the perpetrator couldn’t keep me silenced or control my access to that space. That blew up, there was drama on and off for months, and ze decided to not attend to avoid having to face any sort of accountability.

Hir work still gets cited all over the place, by people who know the call out I’ve made, and when a call out occurred in a feminist space, I got to see rape apologism saying that we shouldn’t judge work based on the author’s actions, when hir has written on consent and against transphobia. This occurred in an online feminist space. And, yes, I did get a bunch of support – some even from people I’ve never personally spoken through any channel – but that someone in a feminist space could go into rape apologism is incredibly disheartening. And then hearing that ze found out, and just wanted the whole situation (i.e. me) to go away.

I get triggered every time I see something ze’s written, see hir cited, and it might not be more than my heart racing and fear of being ostracised because I’ve called out this person who’s done work everyone else loves, that I’m jeopardizing hir ability to get published, that I’m nothing but some vindictive bitch who is trying to ruin everything for hir, that what have I contributed in terms of theory lately.

Inevitably, every night, after I’m exposed to hir work, I have nightmares, flashbacks. It may not be to anything ze did – it may be of other abuse and rape that’s occurred to me throughout my life. But, I know what sets it off. And hell, I’m afraid to touch queer and trans issues most of the time in terms of theory, I’m afraid to write most of the time to this blog, I’m afraid to comment elsewhere a lot of the time. It’s not totally rational, but I know my reputation has been dragged through the mud in a lot of places, and I don’t want to deal with that again.

And all I ever wanted out of an accountability process was for ze to stay out of my personal space, stop attacking the reputations of myself and my close friends, to acknowledge what ze did, and work on the things ze does so ze doesn’t abuse and rape yet another person. I wanted ze to work on being a functional and non-harmful person to be in communities. And support and acknowledgment of what happened from communities I’m a part of, and I’ve gotten some of that, but I definitely feel that that needs to go beyond providing individual emotional support of me, and to actually addressing the issue.

I’m too afraid to name hir this publicly beyond writing this in a way that people who know – and there are a lot of them – know who I’m talking about. Please, when someone cites hir, links to hir, let people know that ze’s a serial perpetrator of abuse, ze is a rapist, that ze has absolutely no interest in being accountable. And don’t cite hir, don’t invite hir in as an authority on things, because every time ze is cited as an authority, and I see it, that does me harm. Every time ze comments somewhere, I just shut down. Every time someone defends hir based on hir work or their interactions with hir, I shut down. I’m sorry, good people aren’t serial abusers, good people aren’t serial rapists. And I feel like every time I say something, I get torn into again and pushed to the side.

I feel like there’s a place I can’t move to, where a lot of my chosen family is or will be, because ze lives in that city, because I know I’m going to have to watch my back in community spaces and I don’t want to show up somewhere with people I don’t even know already hating me.

And the irony there, this always occurs in groups and spaces dedicated to positive social change, to ending oppression, who are giving someone whose oppressive behavior has caused a lot of harm to a lot of people a free pass. I sadly expect people who are not part of such communities to get a free pass – the entire dominant culture normalizes abuse and rape – but in the communities I’m a part of, it’s disheartening. And I know perpetrators of assault often leave one community, and join another to avoid accountability, at best, often times it’s the survivor that’s forced out, but communities ze is still a part of aren’t stepping up to hold hir anyway accountable.

And I can’t just move on – go on with my life, work just on healing myself, stop bringing it up, try to stop thinking about it, because if I do that, if I stop bringing it up, if other people stop bringing it up, ze gets what ze wants – the “situation” (i.e. me) goes away. And then ze will never have any motivation to be accountable, and ze will keep on abusing and raping people, and this same pattern will keep occurring.

My story isn’t really different in any major way from a lot of other survivors of abuse that has occurred in radical communities, and we can do better. We can do a lot better.

A Birthday Story

So, this past Saturday was my birthday. Part of my birthday celebrations – as I’ve been doing different things when different people have been available – was a picnic in a park on my birthday, which, of course was fabulous – the weather was beautiful, we all brought yummy food, my birthday cake was amazing, and a bunch of friends made it.

One of my younger friends – the young child of one of my other friends – asked where the birthday girl was, and he got the answer of, “there isn’t one. There’s a birthday [anarchafemme].” To which he replied, a little disbelieving at first, “[anarchafemme] is a boy?” This led to a conversation where several people tried to explain that I’m not a boy or a girl, which he had a little trouble with at first, but eventually got. One of my friends, apparently worried that I was getting hella stressed by having my gender discussed, moved in for the reassuring physical contact thing she does when she thinks I (or other people she’s close to) are stressed out. But it really wasn’t stressful.

First of all, I was thrilled that after realizing that his initial assumption that I was a girl wasn’t the case, he was equally able to accept the idea of me, in all my femme glory, being a boy. And, he did get it pretty quickly, with all of us pretty much explaining that not only do people get to decide for themselves if they’re a boy or a girl, some people aren’t either, and that’s fine too.

I’m much better with kids asking questions that way; children are people too, but they are people who see the world differently and communicate differently than adults, and part of learning about the world is asking questions, and a child asks questions differently than an adult. And it was a perfectly comfortable situation, because I knew his mother wants her child to not only know binary gendered trans people, but also genderqueer people, and to have adult friends in his life be honest about who they are. She approached me later, saying she thinks it’s really good that he knows me, because he needs to know all the ways he and other people could end up being in the world, because he certainly gets taught that gender variance is wrong enough by the outside world, and made to feel badly about it.

This is part of what I love about my community, we can be honest and visible in age-appropriate ways to the children in our community about the fact that we don’t all fall in love with the people society says we should, that we decide what our genders are, and that there are options beyond what society tells us exist (and a lot of other things, too). We want children to participate in honestly getting to know the people in our community, and not in a tokenizing way, not in a “you’re not like this” way, but in a way in which we are equally valid, and our differences are seen as a vital part of the community.

So often in the past, being able to interact with the children of friends and family has been predicated on my hiding as much queerness and gender difference as possible. It is wonderful that in the present, that I not only have adults in my life who understand who I am, but also children…there’s one I know who has never, ever messed up my pronouns. Ever. That child just turned three this past summer, and I’ve known that particular child for ten months. There are very few people I can say that about in my life, and that should serve as a good argument against genderqueer pronouns being too hard to use.

Quitting Smoking

Wow, I really haven’t posted much in the last couple of months. I know I was on the road for three weeks around Camp Trans, but that doesn’t really account for it.

Anyway, as the subject indicates, I’m quitting smoking right now. Like a good little herbalist, I have an herbal smoking blend that is intended to be relaxing, open up the lungs, and be an expectorant,* I have tinctures that help with cravings and calming my nervous system down…I’m pretty much as prepped as I can be, without having either nicotine patches or gum or some other nicotine replacement, all of which doctors have told me are worse than smoking for my health conditions. Plus, I’m actually breaking the nicotine addiction right off, so I’m not dealing with it for months and months.

I started smoking when I was 14, and I’ll be 28 on Saturday, and this has to be the worst quitting has ever been. I’ve had a constant migraine for three days (Monday was my quit day, so, at this point, I’m over 60 hours after my last cigarette, as I had that right before I went to bed Sunday night/Monday morning). I can’t focus on anything (which has been a common symptom any time I’ve tried to quit recently). I’m eating everything in sight, especially anything with sugar. I’m grinding my molars to nothing clenching my teeth, and I’m having muscle spasms. Trying to make plans with people over text? Really frustrating for all involved. Being social is kind of a nightmare right now, because I feel like I’m so disorganized and out of it I’m losing hours. I hung out with a friend quite a while Monday, and I don’t remember most of the conversation. Yeah, none of these are unexpected at this point – I’ve tried to quit several times in the past year, and other than two and a half weeks in the Bay last fall, I haven’t made it twenty-four hours until now (so that alone makes this the most successful attempt in eleven months). I actually managed to quit for four and a half months immediately after Hurricane Katrina (I was too depressed to step outside the friend’s house I was staying at, so I forgot to smoke for a week, and didn’t start again until I was driving back to New Orleans). I made it three and a half years once. Never have the first few days been this bad; I tend to get a lot of migraines when I quit, but never the constant, intractable to anything I throw at it migraine. I get frustrated with how little focus I have, and, well, that didn’t get better last fall at all, so I’m wondering if I’ve been self-medicating (rather than that just being withdrawal).

I’ve gone through withdrawal that is worse physically – getting off effexor was worse, cymbalta was way worse (and trying to get off that in only a few weeks nearly killed me), but at least psychologically they were things I didn’t want to be on. This? This is not doing something I want to do for the sake of my health and my pocketbook.

It’s funny how much being a smoker is part of my identity at this point – whether it’s people surprised that I can and prefer to roll my own cigarettes, or taking a drag from someone else’s cigarette and leaving lipstick on it, that’s part of it. The other parts are how much it’s a coping mechanism – having to step outside for a cigarette getting me a breather from awkward social situations, taking a step back from a circle of people talking so attention shifts away from me, even using a cigarette to give me time to compose my thoughts. The excuse of wanting to smoke a cigarette giving me a reason to stop on long road trips and actually eat and use a bathroom reasonably often. As ultimately really harmful coping mechanisms go, it’s really intricate and has a lot of uses.

Hopefully, I’ll be more coherent soon – and hopefully that’ll be from the nicotine withdrawal getting less severe, and not from me falling back off the wagon – because I have a bunch of stuff to talk about, such as Camp Trans, femme and class and subcultural identities, fun driving across the continent travelling stories, my being all emotional that summer is over as much as I am all about having four seasons and them proceeding in their natural order.

*While there are herbs that are far better to smoke than tobacco, if you don’t smoke anything, don’t start – burning plant matter of any sort isn’t good for your lungs.

Four Years

It’s the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failure in New Orleans today. I haven’t been back to New Orleans in over three years, and while this is always a hard anniversary, it doesn’t seem to have hit me so hard this year. Maybe because Hurricane Katrina, as one of the contributing emotional traumas in my life (but not even the main one) has been pretty omnipresent in my mind because I have been focusing on healing from emotional trauma lately. Maybe it’s because I’m surrounded by people, even thousands of miles away from New Orleans, that aren’t following the cultural imperative to forget that it happened. Still, it’s a hard day for me, no matter how much I’ve been working on my healing process from it and other stuff lately.

I wish I had a lot of information about what’s going on in New Orleans to give you, but, lately, I’ve had to maintain a lot of distance from obsessively checking on the situation for my own mental and emotional health. However, Renee from Womanist Musings has an excellent guest post at Feministe about Hurricane Katrina, that cuts right to the core of what happened with Hurricane Katrina – the race and class divide – and touches on how it has been used as an excuse to gentrify all New Orleans at once (read: make it whiter and richer), and draws the very true conclusion that another major disaster like Katrina would have the same exact results because of capitalism and racism.

I would also like to add that the levees were first designed to too low a standard, and then incredibly sub-par construction techniques were used. Add to this the environmental catastrophe of MR-GO not allowing sediment to deposit along it’s length, the dams on the Mississippi cutting down the amount of sediment that reaches the delta by three quarters, greatly contributing to the erosion of Louisiana (an important barrier against storm surges) wetlands, and also global warming causing rising sea levels that also contribute to coastal erosion, that this disaster was a man-made disaster, caused both by those in power’s despising the people who lived in the areas of New Orleans hardest hit (thus causing them to not build adequate levees), and also by our culture’s continuing destruction of the whole world (damming the Mississippi, MR-GO, global climate change, etc).

Denver Anarchist arrested – call for support

UPDATE: She is no longer in jail, but support is still obviously needed.

From Indymedia, and, as it says in the article, DO NOT CALL THE JAIL. Calling could potentially out her and make her situation more dangerous.

Well-known Denver Anarchist arrested, support needed
author: poster
repost from Denver Anarchist Black Cross
Ariel Attack, a Denver-based anarchist, was arrested at 2:27am Tues, 24 here in Denver for allegedly smashing 11 windows of the Democratic Party headquaters at 777 Santa Fe Drive.

Right now we are trying to raise the bail money for her to get out of jail; her bail hearing will be tomorrow (Wednesday) at 10am Denver time. Several lawyers have told us to expect anywhere from between $3,000 to $10,000 in bail, and due to the high publicity of the case here in Denver, we are expecting higher (lead story for most all local news outlets, and being picked up by national news networks).

At this moment, we do not know Ariel’s status within the jail, especially regarding her gender classification. We have been unable to talk with Ariel since she went in. She is listed in the jail records and media under her birth name. We also do not know what plans, if any, she had made for this situation.

As such, Denver BB! and all of her friends and community are calling out hoping to raise the money to at least make bond. Jail is a dangerous place for everyone, but especially trans people, and we make every effort to get our friends and comrades out. We are also asking people to NOT call the jail and potentially out Ariel, which would create a very dangerous situation. Interaction with the jail is being done by people here in Denver in very specific ways to create the maximum amount of safety possible for Ariel.

Below is a link to the paypal account which will deposit money into the FREE ARIEL ATTACK FUND!!! Please do what you can to help get an amazing friend and comrade out of jail and back into her community. Also below are links to some of the corporate media stories about her arrest.

If you have any questions, you can call Ben at 970.623.5629.

THANK YOU!!!

PAYPAL

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7756872

CORPORATE MEDIA

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13199902

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/politics/20548292/detail.html

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Positive Reporting/Interviews on Environmental Activism on Democracy Now!

There’s actually really positive interviews on Democracy Now! about a recent banner drop at Mt. Rushmore and an anti-logging protest here in Cascadia in Elliot Forest. The interviews start about 46 minutes in.

Democracy Now! | Radio and TV News

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Follow-up on Racist activity in NW PDX

For those of you who don’t follow the general Indymedia feed or the PDX Indymedia feed, here’s a follow up on the post about racist activity in the NW district, the full text is at portland indymedia here

Rose City Antifa Expose Nazi Trash

On the night of Tuesday, July 7, members of Rose City Antifa posted 200 flyers along NW 21st and 23rd Avenues in Portland, exposing Julian Lee, a white supremacist who has been plastering that neighborhood—-amongst others—-with racist propaganda for months. Julian Lee lives in the St. Francis apartments at 526 NW 21st Avenue. We encourage neighbors and residents to discourage Lee from further propaganda sprees.

In other anti-fascist/anti-racist news, Rose City Antifa has found out the dates for David Irving’s, Holocaust denialist, speaking tour, and I would echo them in encouraging everyone to take action locally.